How to Quickly Get to Sleep with Tinnitus

Yes, you can quickly get to sleep with tinnitus without any expensive tools. Furthermore, this surprisingly simple method is effective despite your tinnitus volume or whether you have it in one ear or both. Got 15 minutes? Great! Let’s get you to bed.

The fastest way to sleep with tinnitus.

Use the 15 Minute Challenge. Begin by laying down in bed and flexing and relaxing every muscle from head to toe. Next, spend 15 minutes concentrating only on your tinnitus. Focus on it like you were straining to hear a distant conversation. When a stray thought pops up, refocus on your tinnitus.

What happens? Within minutes your brain determines the sound is not a threat. Suddenly, you find yourself wondering if you have enough dog food or what the forecast is for tomorrow. Distracted, you drift away from the sound of your tinnitus more and more frequently. Each time you do, the sound of your tinnitus lowers in volume and often becomes completely silent.

Try it now, and then come back in the morning to read more.

Why distraction helps relieve your tinnitus.

Tinnitus’ only power over you is its emotional impact. Once you can divorce the emotional reaction from the sound, tinnitus loses its hold over you.

Deliberately concentrating on just the sound of your tinnitus is impossible. Why? Because the human attention span is less than 10 seconds. When you take the 15 Minute Challenge, your brain cannot remain focused on just one thing (the sound) for that long. It needs a break, ninety breaks for most of us. During each interval, the sound fades, and intrusive thoughts enter.

Desperate for something more important to focus on, your mind turns to other critical thoughts. At what age should a horse have its teeth cleaned? How many soup cans would it take to reach the moon?

At some point during the 15 minutes, you catch yourself 1,000 miles away. You are thinking about a distant, future event, and then you realize the noise in your ears is gone. This first fleeting victory fills you with power. The sound will quickly return, however, you now know how to chase it away.

And you will chase it away, many times, right up to the minute you fail the 15 Minute Challenge and fall asleep.

A deeper dive into how to get to to sleep with tinnitus.

Need a more detailed explanation of how to do the 15 Minute Challenge? Here’s how to do it, step-by-step.

Step one: Relax.

Your bedroom should be a quiet, cool, and dark place. A place only to sleep in, not watch tv, or use electronic devices.
Begin by lying down in a comfortable position and just breathing normally. Close your eyes and begin to relax. Working down from your head to your toes, you will give every significant muscle group a quick squeeze and then release it. Feel free to skip over any injured or sore areas.
Starting with your forehead, lift your eyebrows as high as possible, then let them go limp. Tense the muscles in your jaw, then release the tension. Next, pull your shoulders toward your ears, and press your head back. Slowly release the tension and allow your arms, neck, and shoulders to relax. Continue down, giving each set of muscles a quick flex and release. Finally, tightly curl in your toes while flexing your calves. Now, shake off your legs and let them drop.

You may rearrange this process to match your favorite sleeping position in the future.

Step two: Concentrate.

Your sole purpose for the next 15 minutes is to concentrate only on the sound of your tinnitus.

If you have tinnitus in both ears, it may be easier for you to concentrate on one side per session.

Listen intently to the sound of your tinnitus. Explore it for a moment. Take note of its tone and frequency. Imagine there is a control dial for your tinnitus. Now use that dial to lower and raise your tinnitus’ volume. When you find yourself thinking about anything else, instantly refocus your attention back on your tinnitus sound.
It’s usually beneficial to have an internal talk with your tinnitus. So, feel free to chat with the sound (see below).
Remember, this is a challenge. You can’t focus on just your tinnitus for more than 10 seconds. Yes, you could swear that you dwell on it all day, but that’s just you paying attention to it every few minutes and thinking negatively about it. When you deliberately concentrate on it and it alone, it almost seems to try and elude you.

Sleep with tinnitus — Photo credit: IStockPhoto.com/Gorodenkoff

Your brain is an expert at shutting off worthless information.

In reality, your brain quickly tires of the false alarm tinnitus keeps sending. In fact, your brain has a long history of harshly dealing with incorrect or needless information. So it simply isolates this “fake news” and stops delivering it to your doorstep.

Need an example? Did you know your ears pop every time you swallow? Try it. Imagine how annoying that would be to hear 700 times a day. Fortunately, your brain knew this information wasn’t helpful and has effectively deafened you to it.

As for the sound of your tinnitus, whether you try the 15 Minute Challenge or not, your brain is already working on it too. So while you are wrestling with your powers of concentration, your tinnitus is doing two things: reducing your perception of the tinnitus noise and habituating you to it.

We will talk more about this in future blogs. But, for now, understand your tinnitus will not ruin your life. You are already back on track to your future. And for some of you, tinnitus may be the best thing to ever happen to you.

How I get to sleep with tinnitus.

Still a little puzzled about how to take the Challenge? Follow along on one of my sessions.

Lying comfortably in bed with earplugs (I prefer complete silence), I begin with an internal monologue that goes something like this:

“Ah, there you are,” I think, as I notice my tinnitus and mentally begin talking to it. “You’re loud today. Not jackhammer loud, but still way too loud for me to get any sleep.”

For several seconds I can hear my tinnitus clearly, but soon the volume starts to lower. It’s as if the tinnitus was moving farther away from me. I imagine reaching for it and trying to pull it back towards me.

It’s impossible and frustrating to keep my thoughts only on the sound of my tinnitus. I struggle to concentrate. Before I realize it, I’m wondering, “Is there food in the dog’s dishes?”

“Oops! I’ve messed up already,” I tell myself, “Got to get back on target.”

“Where are you, T?” I spend a few seconds searching for it. “There you are. Did your volume go way down?”

The fight goes back and forth many times. I can hear my tinnitus; then, it seems to slip away. At some point, I have to imagine I have it held tightly in both hands.

“I’m not letting you go,” I tell it. “Struggle all you want. You can’t get away from me.”

But it does. Almost instantly, I’m thinking about how old the milk in the fridge is. Has it gone sour? During all of these start thoughts, my tinnitus has gone silent.

I usually can only go for a few minutes before the world goes completely silent, meaningless calm thoughts take over, and I drift away into unconsciousness.

My book, The 15 Minute Challenge, is full of other everyday tips and tricks to help you get a break from the sound of your tinnitus. It is available for free to Amazon Unlimited customers. Reviews are greatly appreciated.

What really happens during the 15 Minute Challenge.

At first, your tinnitus was easy to hear, but you did not have a strong emotional reaction to it in the calm, relaxed setting you were in.

Your brain quickly started to filter out the sound as irrelevant sensory information (like miles of road on a long drive), making it increasingly difficult for you to hear it (perception).

Your mind started wandering off your tinnitus because you were less vigilant about it (habituation).

Without even realizing it was happening, your focus drifted off and latched onto unrelated thoughts for several seconds to minutes at a time. During these wanderings, you were completely unaware of your tinnitus.

Tired, relaxed, and with your tinnitus now nearly silent, you can now finally fall asleep.

Life with tinnitus