Tinnitus Recession Theory: Observing a Pattern

I made strong advances towards wellness in December. From what I can tell the early stages of tinnitus improvement can be marked by subtle cues.
How does this compare to your subjective experience?

0. Complete intrusion and absolute domination by the sound, possibly not even able to understand WTF you’re even hearing. Sleep difficulties (falling asleep, staying asleep) peak. Tone is radiant and unrelenting.
1. Tinnitus does not -itself- awaken you from sleep nor precludes you from falling back to sleep once it is observed. The tone has thinned just enough to keep your body from activating the sympathetic nervous system. Your sleep still sucks and is unrestful, and there may be more awakenings throughout the night. (I’m still on a fairly heavy dose of sleep meds FWIW).
2. The tinnitus is lower in the morning, but gradually gets louder as the day goes on. You may hardly notice it for your first few movements of the day (e.g. getting up and going to the bathroom). This period extends somewhat to maybe your first mental activity.
3. Residual inhibition begins to add up slightly more each day. When walking from sound to sound, you may not notice its intrusion upon entering the sound gap where there is “more silence” (paradoxical but w/e). You may be even able to walk into a silent room (very briefly) without tinnitus forcing its way in. This may be where sound therapy becomes very valuable.

This is as far as I’ve gotten. It remains to be seen how much residual inhibition can contribute to the tonic level of tinnitus. Perhaps destruction of the signal at stage 3 is necessary for continued improvement.

I was here at the beginning of December but got set back by a loud noise exposure (guy slammed weights on floor within 20ft. of me on Dec. 27th). I am observing the same pattern again upon the exposure. Add a few days of decent sleep together and you get to step 1. Add another few days of decent sleep and safe noise exposure and you get to step 2. So on and so forth.

I hope to reach back to where I was somewhere between Dec. 20 and Dec. 27th when I could enter a room with no sound for maybe 10 seconds at a time before the hiss would start up. I’m using the Tinnitus Mix from @R. David Case at this stage (albeit through a speaker) during the day as I (somewhat more) hopefully peruse the forum. I’ll eventually try to sleep at night with it. I’ll update on any advancements.

 

I think this is pretty accurate. I am currently at stage 3 and what you said is so uncannily precise - when I go into a quiet room there is a bit of a lag before my brain "spools" up the tinnitus - if I go rapidly in and out I basically don't experience it at all. If I sit in silence for a few moments, every moment seems to ramp up the intensity, and then upon leaving the room, my tinnitus will be noticeably louder, having spooled up, for some time. Maybe this is just my peculiarity but I feel my brain is VERY active in generating/perpetuating the signal.

 

Regarding silent rooms, if I sit in a quiet room or even relatively quiet, there is a way I can make it louder, sort of amplified but not the type of worse you get from somatic modulation. Imagine “enabling” the “muscles” or generally the area around your ears but most importantly the one between your eyes, while closing your eyes. You can also try listening to it while doing that. I swear one night I tried it for 5 minutes because someone said “love your tinnitus, don’t mask it” and that thing became extremely loud and piercing, it wasn’t mild at all.

Truth be told, I start to believe it is in fact a brain thing and the body just fluctuates it. Before I got tinnitus I was stressed as hell because the night I got it, the next morning I was supposed to move out to another city. I also had more and more annoyance from loud sounds and I was more and more in quiet environments. I mean, I get the somatic part and I’m fighting it but honestly... if there is no acoustic trauma or my ET fully clear, then what the hell. It’s gotta be some malfunction in the brain, an irritated nerve perhaps. However, then again, you have people with no hearing loss, with tinnitus, positive, sleeping well, that get worse a year later. Go figure.