Acceptance is the emotional outcome of habituation. When I talk to tinnitus sufferers, people often tell me, “If I could just accept my tinnitus, it wouldn’t be so bad.” I know exactly what they’re trying to say, but it’s not helpful to think about tinnitus in those terms, because severe tinnitus isn’t something you can just magically accept. To be …
Facing the Fear of Making Plans with Tinnitus
When you live with tinnitus, or any other chronic illness, fear can infiltrate every aspect of your day. It’s not irrational fear either. When our tinnitus can spike at any moment, it affects the decisions we make, it keeps us locked in houses, and prevents us from making plans. Part of my philosophy of chronic illness is to fully understand …
Preventative Coping: A Strategy to Prevent Tinnitus Spikes
I talk a lot about habituation because I believe it’s our best option for achieving long term relief from tinnitus. But the habituation process takes time, regardless of how you approach it. And it’s important to have effective coping tools and coping strategies to improve quality of life in the short term. So today, I wanted to talk about a …
CBDistillery Full Spectrum CBD Oil Review for Tinnitus
(DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A DOCTOR or a medical health professional. Always speak with your doctor before trying any new drug, supplement, or treatment.) If you’re a member of any of the Tinnitus Facebook groups, you’ve probably noticed an increase in the number of people talking about CBD products. If not, allow me to give you brief introduction: CBD (short …
A FREE Tool to Help You Build Healthy Habits that Improve Tinnitus
Living with Tinnitus isn’t easy. And it’s not just the sound. The lack of understanding, confusion, and misinformation is enough to make you miserable all on its own. Even just trying to figure out what causes your tinnitus to spike can be completely overwhelming. Tinnitus is a complicated health problem with no cure, not nearly enough awareness, and even fewer effective …
Coping with Tinnitus Using Hearing Aids (Guest Post)
I recently had the chance to connect with a talented writer named Alex Pop at SayWhat Hearing (a wonderful organization dedicated to helping patients with hearing loss). Alex specializes in psychology, advertising, and hearing solution technologies, and focuses on educating readers on the beneficent power of hearing technology. If you have tinnitus, it may make sense to invest in a pair of …
How to Stop Obsessing, Focusing On and Ruminating Over Tinnitus
Have you ever noticed that when you’re in pain, you feel compelled to keep messing with your injury to see how much it hurts? For some reason, we tend to focus on pain with an intensity rarely seen elsewhere in our lives. And it’s not just physical pain. We do this with health problems, like tinnitus, too. In fact, one …
Tinnitus Habituation: Why Spikes and Setbacks are Part of the Process
I talk a lot about habituation because I believe that it’s our best hope to find lasting relief from tinnitus. It’s not a cure, but it’s entirely possible to get to this place where it stops bothering us, a place where your brain can tune it out like it does all other meaningless background noise. I’ve also talked a lot …
The Fear Problem: How Doctors and Google Make Tinnitus Worse
Dr. Google is an utterly terrifying practitioner of diagnostic medicine. Got a headache? You must be dehydrated, or maybe you have a brain tumor. Stomach ache? Could be indigestion or the stomach flu. Or maybe you have an intestinal parasite. Maybe it’s one of the dozen other horrible things that turned up in your search results. Ebola. That’s it for …