Second Time Habituating Tips/Support?

Hi all,

Happy New Year and may this year see Neuromod or an alternative solution come our way.

I'm now 14 weeks into my piano spike and I expect my new tinnitus will remain with me now. Best I think I can hope for is it gradually gets a little better.

It's been a rollercoaster ride through Hell these last few months. Insomnia, depression, anxiety, struggling to keep my head above water at work etc.

What's weird is I've lived with tinnitus for 20 years already and I always heard it, I was never a 'night's only' guy... it was literally 24/7.

My new tinnitus is a pitch higher than my old tinnitus and has an edge on it as if someone is rubbing a wine glass.

I've been racking my brains as to what I did 20 years ago, but my life was very different then. I was young and I wanted to achieve things like meet a lifelong partner, buy a house and settle with family etc. 20 years on I now have all that but now what I have is just keeping that afloat.

So, how do you reach that point again, where tinnitus is present but no longer bothers you?

 

I don't think there is a magic recipe or any calibrated process.

Firstly, realize that it may not happen: there is no reason to assume that tinnitus can always end up in a non-bothering state.

Personally, my tinnitus keeps bothering me all the time, so I have to devise ways to live with the bother. Some may call that habituation since I'm not talking about it anymore to anyone, and in some way I'm "habituated to its presence" in the sense that it does not surprise me anymore or cause me constant anxiety. That doesn't mean that it's not a bother, though.

Secondly, I've never seen anything work any better than the simple passing of time. It sucks that this can't be accelerated, but it is what it is. Perhaps there is a way to accelerate it a bit with particular mindful rituals and other mind-related exercises, but I think that at the end of the day, time and experience with it (knowing what to expect, how to manage it, how to manage your life around it, how to do things in spite of it, etc...) is the only thing that "helps".

Good luck!

 

While I do believe that this CAN be the case I'd strongly advise not to take this mindset with you on your path. As long as we don't have a cure, we will have to use workarounds like habituation or TRT or whatever you want to call it.

From my own experience I can say that both my first onset in 1998 and the next really bad exacerbation in 2015 felt unbearable at that point. I overcame both and lived a pretty normal life. Now my tinnitus has become even worse last week (tympanometry + acoustic reflex test done by ENT) and, while I certainly do feel like going mad, I know that I have felt that way twice already and twice managed to get back to a state where I wasn't bothered by it most of the time. I DID hear my tinnitus most of the time, physically speaking, but I actually forgot about it or if I actually noticed it, I would ignore it.

To me it was all about the decision to not let it rule my life.

I am not a fan of this whole psychology talk as it is NOT a psychological condition but until the cure is here, this'll have to do!

 

You just need to wait and ride it out. There is a good chance that you will feel better about it, after about two years...

 

Hello @Allan1967, did you manage to habituate a second time? I am unfortunately in the same process at the moment.

 

@Allan1967 committed suicide.

In Loving Memory of Allan1967

 

@Christian82, although unfortunately @ajc is correct, there are other stories where members have managed to successfully habituate a second time after a relapse.

The Success Stories section has a few such stories and case studies.

One such member that springs to mind is @Michael Leigh, who habituated a second time using TRT... if you'd like to check out some of his posts.