New to Tinnitus. Tried with Some Success to Reduce It.

TL;DR: I had some success using a combination of things, but who knows if it will last! Details below.


Hi all,

I'm fairly new to this whole tinnitus thing, and can I just say for the record that it sucks? Here is the lowdown on what I am experiencing and what I have tried to reduce it.

This summer I had a nasty recurring flu that knocked me on my backside multiple times. On the tail end of this I believe I may have had a bit of an ear infection. I was doing a fair amount of swimming at this time including some deep-ish free dives to 40 or so feet. I am an experienced scuba diver and clear my ears whether I am scuba or free diving. A week or so after doing some of these deeper dives I noticed the ringing start. Mine is a consistent 7500Hz in the right ear. I stood at night in a forest full of stars and for the first time did not hear silence and it was awful. It should be said that this also coincided with the end of summer which means increased work stress, less exercise, and less going outside in general. I have also spent a fair amount of time over the past 10 years at music events, so, there are multiple vectors that this could have arisen from.

I finally went to the doc about 3 weeks after the noise started. She took a look in my ears, said everything looked fine, that it was benign, and that there was little that could be done with it and it was poorly understood.

This didn't sit well with me.

After visiting the doctor and becoming annoyed at the prognosis I started research on how tinnitus works. There are a number of progressive medical papers that discuss it's relationship to phantom pain which resonated with me. My understanding (and I am probably way off on this) is that the brain has a "volume knob" mechanism which can turn up or down the inputs from nerves. When we listen really hard for something it can "turn things up", conversely we can become numb to a dull pain after a while because the volume gets turned down since do not need to be as aware of the pain.

The above mechanism is potentially how phantom limb pain occurs. When the signals from that limb suddenly cut out, the brain "volume knob" goes "whoa!, where did the input go??" and so it cranks things up to 11 trying to find the signal. This knob then essentially gets stuck there providing continuous false input of that nerve collection. Similarly, when one of the cilia in your ear experience trauma from loud noises, stress, high blood pressure, infection, or other reasons, the nerve ending can become damaged or unreliable. The volume knob for the nerves connecting to that cilia, let's say the 7.5kHz cilia, gets turned up to 11. Unlike phantom pain, this continuous input is of course interpreted as continuous audio at the tone of the damaged auditory input. This is a gross simplification of things, and I might have totally misunderstood how it works, but it makes sense to me so I ran with it.

So, on the back of that I decided to try a variety of things that could potentially attack both the source of the tinnitus nerve issue and the brain's interpretation of the signal. Here is what I did:

1) Cut out alcohol and caffeine and lowered salt content in cooking.
2) Switched music I was listening to to chill type music. I listen to music most days at work.
3) Started in on high (5,000 IU per day) doses of vitamin D because I read somewhere that it could cause it, and figured it couldn't hurt.
4) Ensured I got a full night's sleep every night. There are a number of ways you can do this including getting rid of devices close to bed time, covering any light sources in your room, having a hot shower or bath right before, etc. When you sleep there are critical hormonal processes at work as well as alpha waves which act to break apart deficient synaptic connections. Getting quality 8-9 hours of sleep seems like a no-brainer but I think most of us do a crap job of it. So, probably a good idea to do this regardless.
5) Used a frequency generator to find my tinnitus pitch. For me it is around 7,500Hz
6) I went on a three day fast for a number of reasons. While a number of beneficial things happen when fasting the items I was interested in was lowered blood pressure, decreased inflammation, and increased neural plasticity. Yes I have been reading Tim Ferriss and his approach to quarterly fasting.
7) Went for long brisk walks in the forest with my dog to help with blood pressure and stress. Lack of exercise is one of the key causes of processes that can contribute to tinnitus, at least I think it could be.
8) Taking small doses of medium-chain triglycerides (aka MCT aka Brain Food from Bulletproof) during the fast
9) Utilize tinnitus notch therapy frequencies. Using headphones I listened to around 5 hours worth over three days while fasting; just while reading or working on email, or meditating. The idea here was to combine the increased neural plasticity of fasting with the notch therapy which is essentially a brain hack.
10) Meditate during the fast for 20-30 minutes while listening to notch therapy. This sounds cheezy but I attempted to visualize the white noise as a waterfall that I could walk away from, or go nearer. Essentially allowing me to adjust the perceived volume of the white noise. Similarly I would turn off the white noise and listen to the tinnitus pitch and imagine it as coming from an object such as an old TV that I could turn down or walk away from. I envisioned other sounds being a wave of sorts that swept up and over to the right over the tinnitus frequency in my right ear and slowly diminished it. I tried letting my breath out while attempting to lower the tinnitus sound. In some ways this seemed to enhance the awareness of the mechanism responsible for paying attention to auditory frequencies. Who knows.

So what was the end result?

After 5 weeks of non-stop loud tinnitus noise I experienced the first disappearance of it after meditating during Day 2 of the fast. The noise went away for an hour before coming back. It was heaven and I heard birds chirping. Joy. Then it came back. Poop, but progress! Yesterday (Day 3) the sound seemed quieter and when I woke up this morning it was completely gone. That said, when I got up and started moving around and getting into work mode it came back but dramatically quieter than before.

I think I am a long way from getting rid of this but the fact that there were moments of silence after over a month of continuous sound gives me hope there are mechanisms that may be able to reduce the affect. Either that or it was coincidental that it diminished during this time. The sound may come back louder than ever by the end of today but at this moment the sound is hardly perceived. I suspect the root source of the tinnitus was damage to the auditory nerve during my ear infection and flu, then exacerbated by excessive stress. By focusing on lowering stress and blood pressure, and using therapies to build up neurological mechanisms to manipulate the perception of sound, I have at this time dramatically lowered, and in some cases removed, the sound. It could also be lowered stress caused by me just trying to do something about the tinnitus as opposed to giving up as directed by the doctor. Even if it is a placebo affect, I'll take it.

Who knows if this will work for you, or even if it will work for me much longer, but it is worth a shot.

Happy to answer any questions.

 

Yes

 

Welcome to the forum. These moments of silence are all good signs for your T. It can only get better with time, especially you keep a positive and calm approach to managing your tinnitus. By doing this you can keep off the anxiety and stress which are often not good for tinnitus. Good luck and take care. God bless.

 

I have had similar experiences with meditation and reduction in the volume. In fact, yesterday, I used a tinnitus MP3 guided meditation which suggests, when you're very relaxed after sitting there for a few minutes, that you picture your tinnitus as coming from an external source in the room such as a speaker, or an imaginary person sitting a distance away, and then it goes "POOF!", and the image and tinnitus disappear. The MP3 also suggests imagining volume and tone controls, and a big on/off switch, to control your tinnitus, which you can mentally play with to change it's sound(s). I don't really know the reason why, but I woke up this morning to silence for the first time in 3 months. I had woken up a couple of timed during the night, and while the noise was there it was, for lack of a better term, transparent and when I woke after 8 hours of being in bed, I was very surprised to hear nothing at all. The silence was eventually replaced, after a couple of hours, with the usual high-pitched hissing, but waking up without the usual white noise/electrical sounds was quite a remarkable thing to have happen, and offered some hope that I'd been looking for.

 

Do you guys have any preferred sources for meditation audio and notch therapy? I've just started having this for less than two weeks. The noise is very challenging for me and I'm hopeful that I can find some techniques to ease into this possibly permanent new state of life.

 

There are a YouTube videos with notch videos for 20Hz-20kHz in 500Hz increments. In terms of meditation tracks, there are some great ones on Spotify.

You can find the YouTube videos here.

Hope this helps!