Figuring out how you’ll ever get better from tinnitus is a scary thought.  The good news, however, is there is hope. Your path toward recovery is well marked and easy to follow. But, at its end, stand the tens of millions who successfully traveled it before you.

How to get better from tinnitus.

Talk to your doctor. There may be a medical reason for your tinnitus that can be addressed and fixed. If not, a doctor can provide other treatments to help you treat and relieve your symptoms. 

Accept the truth about recovery. 97% of all tinnitus patients recover and lead healthy, active lives. Many of them also benefit from the lifestyle changes made along the way.

Learn several vital coping skills. There are many simple techniques you can use to reduce the volume of your tinnitus and give yourself a break from it. Having some control of your tinnitus for even an hour will strip your tinnitus of its emotional impact on you.

Know what lies ahead of you. In time, you will begin to notice your tinnitus less and less. Your reaction to it will soften. You will no longer dwell on your tinnitus nor spend the day consumed with negative thoughts about it. 

Expect success, and make the most of it. You are already undergoing the process of tinnitus habituation. Habituation is a built-in feature your brain will use to silence the false alarm in your ears eventually. While waiting for that, use some coping techniques to accomplish goals you thought were once impossible.

The path to getting better from tinnitus begins with your doctor.

Let’s begin by realizing you may not even need to go down this path. Many medical conditions cause tinnitus. A doctor may help you discover your specific cause, provide treatment for it, and create an instant exit for you to take. So begin by seeking professional medical help for your tinnitus.

The next critical step is to free yourself of any guilt. Fifty million Americans suffer from tinnitus. Each of them developed tinnitus for one or more of nearly 200 causes. Unfortunately, some of them did nothing more than live long enough. 

Yes, you may have attended too many concerts or exposed yourself to harmful noise at work. But living an active, enjoyable life is not a crime. You are a human being; you can’t sit locked in a safe environment. Real-life comes with hazards. A few bruises and even some scars mark a life lived to its fullest. Your tinnitus? Consider it a consequence of life, not a punishment.

Finally, your tinnitus is more a mirage than a reality. The moment you take a few steps toward it, it shimmers and fades. Like most of us, your fear and dread will dissipate with time. If you become overwhelmed, seek immediate medical help. There are medicines to help ease your emotional reaction. A doctor can get you through a rough patch and help you step back on your path to recovery. Sometimes, asking for help all by itself is even part of your path forward.

You and your tinnitus are not special.

Nearly 97% of tinnitus patients suffer no disability from it. Tinnitus, after some time, no longer causes them stress, anxiety, sleep loss, or adverse emotional reactions.

Why do so many people recover? Because recovery from tinnitus is involuntary. Your brain can determine which sensory input needs a reaction (the heat from a stove) and which doesn’t (the feeling of your socks on your feet). Once it determines a signal is a false alarm, it starts to shut down your central nervous system’s reaction to it.

Oh, and the brain is a master of cutting off useless info. It even made you blind almost the day you were born.

Take a peek at the tip of your nose. Did you know your nose has been visible every minute, of every day, since you were born? So, why don’t you see it all the time? The truth is you do see it; you just don’t notice it. That’s because your brain has determined that particular signal is both worthless and potentially harmful. 

Tinnitus, like your nose, will still be there in the future, but for 97% of us, we never seem to notice it. And we certainly do not have an emotional reaction to it.

Face the facts. Neither you nor your tinnitus is that special. Your tinnitus is doomed to fade to obscurity. You, well, you are average. There isn’t anything that special about you, either. At best, all you have the power to do is slow down the recovery process.

Tinnitus coping techniques that really work

While you travel down the path of full recovery from your tinnitus, it will help to have a few places to stop and rest for awhile. These techniques do not require you to use any special equipment, and there is no religious or spiritual element to them.

The 15 Minute Challenge can help you get better from tinnitus.

The first technique I recommend is something I call the 15 Minute Challenge. You can read my book on Amazon for free if you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber. For now, let’s use the quick-start method.

1. Find a quiet, comfortable spot to sit and relax.
2. Set a timer for 15 minutes.
3. Close your eyes, tense and relax your major muscle groups, and then,
4. Focus your attention solely upon the sound your tinnitus is making. 

Step four will be difficult. As you concentrate on exploring and listening to the ringing in your ears, your mind will drift off-topic. Stray thoughts will captivate your attention. When you realize you are mentally drifting, refocus your attention back on the sound of your tinnitus. Try to seize it. Imagine a volume control on it; now raise and lower the volume. 

For many, the 15 minutes pass quickly—many who try to end up falling asleep. What you may not have realized is that during every mental lapse in concentration, your tinnitus faded or went utterly silent. When you regained your focus, the sound returned, but it was impossible to keep hearing it for more than a few seconds at a time.

You’ve now learned one way to control your tinnitus. These breaks may be short, but they often become just long enough to send you into a deep, relaxing sleep. 

Try the 15 Minute Challenge at least twice a day(at bedtime and upon awakening). Aside from quickly getting to sleep, they will speed up your progress down the path of recovery.

Using distractions to relieve your tinnitus symptoms.

Shorter breaks from the constant irritation of tinnitus are also available to you during the day. To get an hour or two of relief at a time, you will be using a combination of divided attention and distraction.

We will use a DUI checkpoint to describe divided attention. The officer will ask you for your license and registration during the stop. The officer then hits you with two or three questions as you reach for the glove box. For example, “Where are you coming from? Do you know why I stopped you?”

If you have consumed too much alcohol, your brain can’t complete the two tasks (Physical movement and mentally forming an answer). So what you are going to do is play the same trick on your brain, except right in the middle of your DUI stop, you’re going to set off a fireworks display.

Here’s just one example of creating a break using divided attention and distraction.

Pick any simple household chore (the less thought required, the better) and do it while listening to an audiobook. Okay, you have your divided attention requirement fulfilled. Here comes the distraction part. Set the volume of your audiobook just barely above the sound of your tinnitus. 

What happens? You spend some mental effort physically moving (such as gathering, folding, stacking, and storing laundry), some on following the story on the audiobook, and even more, straining just to hear the voice of the narrator. 

Let me tell you from personal experience; this destroys tinnitus for hours at a time. You can clean the house, mow the lawn, shovel the driveway—there’s no limit to how much you can get done and all while enjoying a break from your tinnitus.

The path ahead is not straight, but its final destination can be seen for miles.

The road to recovery will have some ups and downs. However, the downs are often fleeting. Here are two you are likely to encounter:

• Natural moments of doubt. It’s perfectly normal to have periodic intervals of uncertainty and even suspicion about your progress. You will feel a bit depressed when they strike. One way to deal with doubt about far you have come is to look back on your statistics. If you have measured and logged your tinnitus perception and habituation, you’ll recognize one or two days bad days for what they are—temporary. Here’s how to measure your tinnitus.
• Spikes. Spikes are noticeable increases in the intensity of your tinnitus that can last from minutes to several weeks. They suck, but they will go away. Once they are gone, you might notice your routine tinnitus has become less noticeable. Here’s how to handle spikes.

The ups are usually mild improvements that compliment each other and gain strength over time.

• Natural, daily periods of tinnitus silence. Your day job may require more concentration and attention to detail than your tinnitus can handle. Some routine tasks will also provide you with often unnoticed relief. 
• Sleep. Learning how to sleep with tinnitus is one of the first things you should accomplish. A good night’s rest flattens your emotional response to the ringing in your ears. With your batteries fully charged, you feel empowered to take on whatever the day holds in store.

It not hard to recover from tinnitus.

It’s nearly impossible to reach the last stop on your path to recovery: Habituation.

Tinnitus habituation is the natural process wherein the brain gradually reduces how loud you perceive your tinnitus, how often you notice it, how long you dwell on it and dampens any negative emotional responses.

Without any conscious assistance from you, the process takes an average of six to eighteen months.

That said, you can take steps to shorten the time needed by using the steps outlined above.

And while you cannot undo the progress made by habituation, you can delay it. Don’t do that! Here are a few ways to keep your momentum moving forward.

• Identify the moments when your tinnitus is at its worst. Chances are, you’ll find your tinnitus most irritating when you are mentally and physically idle. Watching tv and surfing the internet or social media are two good examples of a tinnitus playground. Stay away from them.
• Don’t sit in your stink. When your tinnitus is roaring, get up and get moving. Utilize the divided attention and distraction techniques above—and create more of your own. Never feed tinnitus its favorite foods—time, attention, and fear.
• Stay out of tinnitus forums. A tinnitus forum is like a castle. Inside are desperate, confused people who have not found any relief from their tinnitus yet. Miracle pill hawkers have conned them. YouTubers and clickbait websites have scammed them. They hide in their online castle, waiting for new people to show up and scale the walls with a ladder. These people will drop a dead, rotting cow on you. Leave them alone. There’s a stinky moat around them for a reason.

Better yourself while you get better from tinnitus.

The first two reactions to discovering you have tinnitus are: Trying to find a cure and then finding a way to reduce your symptoms. During this first phase of tinnitus, we often seek to make lifestyle changes that will do one or both. 

We stop listening to loud music, focus on eating healthier, give up drugs and drinking, and start exercising. As a result, tinnitus often makes people healthier. So the question is, why stop there?

Why not continue to use tinnitus to achieve some personal goals? Let’s face it, the misery of tinnitus is best driven off with both physical activity and mental concentration. But, hey, your tv is dead to you anyway, why not use the extra hours to create a new future for you and your family?

The best way to turn the useless ringing in your ears into a 24 hour a day life coach is to turn your goals into distractions. You can try this by taking one major goal, formatting it into the SMART goal system, and reserving a block of time each day to work on it.

I can tell you from my experience tinnitus quickly fades when you work on a goal and set deadlines to achieve each of its steps. Then, even while writing that novel you’ve dreamed about—you won’t notice your tinnitus.

You will get better from tinnitus, and you may even learn to love it.

Stop thinking about tinnitus as if it were only a disorder. 

Fire refines gold. Heat and pressure turn pure carbon into diamonds. 

Likewise, tinnitus can turn you into the successful person you knew you were meant to be. 

Use your tinnitus before it gets better.