Successfully Turned Tinnitus Off with Sleep Control

Personally when i wake up and i'm still lying on the bed (if i manage to sleep well...which is rare), my T is quieter, but as soon as i get off bed and start to walk and get activated then my orchestra of frequencies will start their usual concert. But yes sleep is crucial.

 

I noticed the same like u some times with me. Basically my t is in my head always and very littlebit in ears. After wake up if I try to sleep again my T is very louder for all d day. And when I don't rest in my bed after the first wake up,i feel better. I can say Mr. T could display more and more different colors then rainbow

 

Using above method I managed to be T free for 16 out of the last 40 days.It is not perfect but it gives me a break

 

As with others, I too have a relationship with how I sleep. It's an interesting combination.

I wonder if anyone has ever been in a coma (with intrusive T) and come out without it? (The artical I've posted below has an interesting story about a stroke patient).

From the studies I've read (I've read a ridiculous amount, like many on here) other parts of the brain are involved way beyond the auditory cortex. It's a complex entanglement, which can be made worse by deep associations to our emotions. Sleep can calm and relax us, so it may be related to calming brain activity that is sparking a reaction in neurons elsewhere.

This article gets to the point of this; I'll paste it below:

It’s not just the auditory cortex that is affected when people get tinnitus. Neuroscientists, using increasingly sophisticated brain scans, are finding that changes ripple out across the entire brain. Winfried Schlee of the University of Konstanz in Germany and his colleagues have been making some of the most detailed studies of tinnitus ever, using a method called magnetoencephalography (MEG, for short). They take advantage of the fact that every time neurons send each other signals, their electric current creates a tiny magnetic field. MEG allows scientists to detect such changing patterns of activity in the brain 100 times per second.


Schlee and his colleagues find widespread differences in the brains of people with tinnitus and those without it. A network of regions in the brains of people with tinnitus tend to fire their neurons in sync. Schlee has determined that his tinnitus-stricken subjects have a more synchronized pattern of signals coming out of regions in the front and the back of the brain. (For brain anatomy junkies, they are the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex in the front; in the back, they are the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex.) Schlee and his colleagues also discovered a more strongly synchronized flow of signals coming into the temporal cortex—a region that includes the auditory cortex—in people with tinnitus.

When Schlee compared people who suffer a lot of distress from tinnitus with those who are not much bothered by it, he found that the more distress people felt, the stronger the flow of signals out of the front and back of the brain and into the temporal cortex. This pattern suggests that the network Schlee discovered is important for the full experience of tinnitus. Tinnitus, in other words, extends beyond the ear, beyond a hearing-specialized part of the brain, beyond even any single piece of neural real estate. It is a disease of networks that span the brain.

Such complexity may explain why so many different tinnitus treatments work, but only modestly: Each attacks just one part of the tinnitus network. Christo Pantev of the University of Münster in Germany and his colleagues, for example, have brought some relief to people with tinnitus by rewiring their tone map. To do so, they edited recordings of music, filtering out the frequencies of the ringing in the ears of their patients, who then listened to the filtered music an average of 12 hours per week. Pantev and his collaborators found that their patients’ tinnitus significantly eased. They also found that the neurons tuned to the tinnitus frequency in the auditory cortex became less active.

The scientists cannot say for sure how the filtered music soothed their patients, but they speculate that the incoming signals encouraged the tone map to change its structure. The overactive, eavesdropping neurons became stifled by their neighbors.

Clearly the auditory cortex is just an early stop on the journey that sound takes from the outside world to our awareness. Some neurons in the auditory cortex extend branches down to the brain stem, where they link to a pair of regions called the caudate nucleus and putamen. Those regions may be important for processing the signals in several ways, such as categorizing sounds. In 2004 Louis Lowry, an ear-nose-and-throat doctor at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, discovered that the caudate and the putamen play an important role in tinnitus by studying an unusual patient—himself.

As a young man, Lowry spent a summer working on a farm with a noisy tractor. The experience left him with partial hearing loss and a high-pitched ringing in his ears that plagued him for 40 years. Then at age 63, Lowry suffered a mild stroke. A CT scan and an MRI revealed that the stroke had damaged his caudate and putamen. But the stroke also brought a pleasant surprise. Lowry was completely cured of his tinnitus, without any further hearing loss.

Steven Cheung and Paul Larson, two doctors at the University of California, San Francisco, set out to reproduce Lowry’s experience. They took advantage of the fact that some people with Parkinson’s disease get electrodes surgically implanted in their brain stem to control their symptoms. The electrodes typically have to pass the caudate and putamen to reach their target. Cheung and Larson engaged five patients preparing to receive an implant who also suffered from tinnitus. The patients agreed to undergo several minutes of deep brain stimulation to these regions during surgery as the electrode was being implanted. Cheung and Larson reported that the tinnitus became much fainter in four of the five patients.

Once signals travel from the ear to the auditory cortex, caudate, and putamen, they eventually make their way to regions of the brain that carry out more sophisticated sound information processing: connecting the sounds with memories, interpreting their meaning, giving them emotional significance. It is precisely these regions that Schlee and his colleagues noted were behaving strangely in people with tinnitus. He argues that it is only when signals reach this large-scale network that we become conscious of sounds, and it is only at this stage that tinnitus starts to cause people real torment. Schlee’s results suggest that the higher regions of the brain send their own feedback to the auditory cortex, amplifying its false signals. Schlee’s model of tinnitus and consciousness could explain some curious observations. Even in bad cases of tinnitus, people can become unaware of the phantom sound if they are distracted. It may be that distractions deprive the errant signals from the auditory cortex of the attention they need to cause real distress. What’s more, some of the most effective treatments for tinnitus appear to work by altering the behavior of the front of the brain. Counseling, for example, can make people better aware of the sounds they experience by explaining the brain process that may underlie the disorder, so they can consciously reduce their distress.

Solving the mystery of tinnitus will probably get even more urgent in years to come. Traffic, iPods, and other features of modern life may cause more hearing damage, hence more tinnitus. But if a real cure ever comes, it will probably not be a single silver bullet. It will instead attack the tinnitus network from top-down and bottom-up. For now, though, you should probably skip the hot bread on the ears.

The rest of the artical can be found here: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/oct/26-ringing-in-the-ears-goes-much-deeper

 

I've been monitoring my sleep to see if there is any relation, and still not sure, but I definitely know if I go to bed by 11:30 with a morning wake up of 8 am, I usually have a quiet day. I usually have to go to the lou in the early hours between 4-6 am., but as long as I was sleeping by midnight, seems to be a good day. I'm going to keep monitoring...try to catch the time I go to the lou..I've been going to the lou in the early morning for so long, I don't think I'm even fully awake...I always forget to look at the clock or if I do, not sure if it was this morning, or the night before..etc...
But if I go to bed past midnight, I dread the next day. and then I think I worry about it, so I don't even have a good sleep, b/c it seems to bother me waaaay more the next day.

I should also mention, that one of the silver linings for me is I actually get better sleep, bc not only do I have my sound machine with crickets, I sleep on a small blue tooth speaker and I have found some sleep drone music on YouTube, ( and other sleep playlists), and I have never slept better! This also helps me when I have stayed up past midnight to at least get some sleep, but t is bad next day b/c of the less sleep.

Conclusion..the more sleep the better.

 

They say an hour of sleep before 12 equals 2 hours of sleep after 12.

 

I am having a half hour of silence these days after waking up.

 

My T was always louder the morning after waking up than the rest of the day. So I decided to tell to myself : "T loud the morning is normal". And then I didn't hear it at all the morning or maybe just a bit

Now T is more present so since one month I try to start sleeping 1 or 2 hours before 12 and I can say that it's really useful.

There is definitly something going on when sleep is better.

 

On the very few occasions that I managed to have continual 8 hours sleep including a couple of hours before midnight my T was not existent.

 

Actually I always sleep continual during 10 hours so it may helps lmao

 

I have just thought of an idea. I will start recording every night the time I went to bed,and the time I actually woke up and whether I was T free or not. If there is a pattern for example after 6 hours continual sleep I was T free, I will set up my alarm clock to wake me up after 6 hours everyday.I know it's a shot in the dark but you never know.And it would solve the mystery of why sometimes I wake up T free and some not.

 

First day results.Went to bed at 11 with high T Woke up 4.15 T almost zero .Total hours of sleep 5.15. It tried to get out of bed but I felt so sleepy I decided to stay in bed but try not to sleep.At the end I slept for may be less than half an hour and T got loud again.
So I still suspect that when I wake up during high sleep T is off,If I wake up during light sleep T is switched on again.
I will carry on recording my sleep time and awake time for quite a few days and see what comes out at the end.

 

Second day results.Success.Went to bed at 11 woke up 6 total continuous sleep 7 hours no T got up straight away T free all day.11 to 6 seems like a good choise but I will carry on recording my sleep time and awake time for quite a few days .

 

When I was young I used to think I would be a happy man if I had a million dollars.To day I changed my tune.I would be extremely happy if I had 2 good feet,2 good hands and especially 2 good ears and 2 good eyes and only 2 dollars in my pocket.

 

I have been recording My T for the last 100 days.I had 70 bad and 32 good days and it always happened on waking up, and got up immediately,i.e not spending any more time in bed.About 30% success rate.Wish I could improve on that.I have just started meditation lessons let's see what happens.

 

My story is similar to that I find during sleep cycle in night if you wake up before sun set tinnitus is zero then if you take few naps it comes back. Duri g day time nap it comes back
It seems the brain wiring is already there from some part which is related to EEG ACTIVITY in certain type of sleep.We can study this by measuring EEG acticity after naps perhaps that can open a door to cure

 

Agree with you 100%.Wish we could notify a specialist to investigate and may be find a solution.For example
fit us with a brain monitor during sleep ,which at the right time activate our waking up alarm

 

Tinnitus Cure With Sleep Control 1

 

I have come to the conclusion that for people like me every time I wake up T switches on or off.The other day I woke up T free,I had a 10 minute nap in the afternoon it came back again.I was angry walked round the room and then said might as well sleep a bit longer.Slept another 10 minutes woke up T off again.
Other days I woke up 5 am T free ,slept again until 7 am T came back on again.I must belong to a special category of crazy tinnitus behaviour. And my ENT says Tinnitus has nothing to do with sleep.

 

My T is loud every morning, even after 6 hours sleep. I normally go to bed at 10-10.30 and wake up at around 5am. If I wake up after a dream (anywhere from 3-4am usually) then my T is really loud. I then try to get back to sleep by concentrating on something in my mind despite the T being louder, I am usually able to get another hour or so. When I get up my T is still loud. 80% of the time a hot shower then reduces T to almost nothing for the rest of the day. However, over the past month I've had fewer quieter days than normal. One good day in the past five this week. I think that overall my daily volume has decreased but I've had less T free days . Having said that, today is a loud day despite having seven hours sleep last night. My t also seems to be more in my head than my ear.

 

Sleep is crucial for tinnitus sufferers. But it must be an optimal amount for that particular person. My tinnitus is generally worse if I sleep less than or more than my optimal of about seven and a half hours. Go figure this motherless beast!

 

Last night I went to bed with high T did not sleep at all, high T in the morning, had a 5 minute nap in the afternoon woke up T free .Can someone explain that to me?.Waking up for me is an on off switch for T.How long
I sleep seems to be irrelevant.

 

Hi @Tony Phylactou
The way your tinnitus behaves is more common than you might think. My tinnitus fluctuates a lot in intensity. From silent, mild, moderate and severe. I can go to bed and the tinnitus is completely silent and wake up during the night and it's loud and intrusive and by the morning upon waking up it is silent. I can also go to bed and it's loud during the night it reduces to mild and by morning it's loud again. During the day it can be silent. Take a rest during the day for instance, and wake up and it's loud and intrusive. I have been unable to find out the reason for this so have given up trying to find an answer and just cope with it.

Michael

 

I didn't read all the posts here, but I wanted to chime in and say the supplement Deep Sleep has been wonderful. I tried melatonin at first, could not sleep more than a couple hours a night, didn't like how I felt on Lorazepam and was afraid to try any other prescription drugs.
My therapist told me about Deep Sleep and I can't believe how much it helped. You have to be patient though. You take one an hour before bed, then another when you lay down for sleep. It doesn't seem to have an effect until you've used it for a few days in a row.
Just thought I'd throw this out there!

 

Michael Have you noticed if your T changes only after waking up ,even during the night or does it change at any time?

 

Thanks for the advice about Deep Sleep I would like to try that but first try to go off xanax gradually.

 

Hi Tony,
My tinnitus will mostly change during the night or on wake-up. Occasionally it has changed during the day. For instance. This morning it was quite severe on wake-up and when it's this way I may need to take my clonazepam. However, I have resisted and after 2hrs it has reduced to intrusive just above moderate which I can cope with.

Hope this helps
Michael

 

With me when I try to fall asleep it switches. If it is Off it switches On,if it is On it switches Off.Just like a light switch.

 

I wish someone will show me a way to sleep continually for 7 hours every night but without heavy drugs but a natural way.Would alcohol be such a method ?I thing some people are lucky falling asleep easily.My brother fall asleep the other day while he was having his eyes tested.

 

Very interesting. Maybe this will help discovering a drug or something that turns the T off. Obviously something is triggered or not by your waking up time. If a way can be found to create those conditions and keep them there, I'd think a true cure/or drug, etc. would be discovered much faster. Anyways, this shows that it can turn off, and surely that'll come in handy.