Tinnitus Habituation: How to Cope with Ringing in Your Ears

You can learn to cope with the ringing in your ears using Tinnitus Habituation. While normal tinnitus habituation takes 6 to 18 months, there are ways to speed it up. Here’s how to do without buying any equipment or using masking devices.

What is tinnitus habituation?

Tinnitus habituation is a four-stage, natural process that ends your emotional reaction to tinnitus.

Stage One: Constant awareness and fear.

Stage Two: Brief moments of relief when busy.

Stage Three: Noise is a nuisance but not a threat.

Stage Four: No emotional reaction and return to everyday life.

The truth about tinnitus habituation.

Habituation is unavoidable. Your brain knows how and when to turn off useless sensory information. Take the tip of your nose. It is visible from the moment you are born. You cannot open your eyes without seeing it. Yet you seldom notice it. Trust me; your tinnitus sound is just as worthless. It, too, will soon only be a fleeting thought.

Tinnitus habituation isn’t something you have to work for to achieve. As long as you do not willfully interfere, you’ll get there in 6 to 18 months. If you fight it, it just takes longer.

Are you thinking, “18 months! That’s too long!” Don’t worry. The improvements you notice in the early weeks and months will be profound. I dare say you will be pretty pleased by Stage Two.

Now, you’re probably thinking you will never be able to cope with your tinnitus. Your particular sound is too loud. As a result, you will never be able to adapt to it.

But are you sure you are in the less than 3% of people who don’t eventually reach habituation?

Are you willing to bet on that? Because if you are, I’ve got a little challenge for you.

The 15 Minute Challenge.

In my book The 15 Minute Challenge, I describe my method to finally shut my tinnitus off long enough to sleep. The technique quickly became the tool I would use throughout my entire recovery.

Got 15 minutes? Give this a try, and I will see you in the next chapter.

Spend 15 minutes in a relaxed position, with your eyes closed in a quiet room, focusing only on the sound of your tinnitus.
During this period, mentally try to “grab” that sound and hold on to it. Seize it, study it, and attempt to shut out every other thought while you listen to it.
Every time a random, unrelated thought intrudes, immediately refocus your attention back onto the sound of your tinnitus.

Related: If you need a more detailed, step-by-step guide to take the challenge, it’s available here.

Speeding up your tinnitus habituation.

I’ll be shameless here and say, “I think the fastest way to speed up your tinnitus habituation is to take the 15 Minute Challenge at least twice a day.” Once at bedtime, and again whenever the noise is bothering you. Hey, the book is accessible free through Amazon for Kindle Unlimited customers. Feel free to try the challenge for 30 minutes. I never made it that far without falling asleep.

Why does the challenge speed up your tinnitus habituation? First, the challenge helps you because it completely and instantly destroys the worst myth of tinnitus, that you are powerless.

If you paid attention during the challenge, you noticed that your mind drifted off the sound every few seconds. When it did, you were daydreaming about something silly, like tapioca pudding or the size of the moon. Catching yourself, you tried multiple times to refocus and concentrate only on the sound of your tinnitus. And you failed every single time.

Did you also happen to notice that you did not hear your tinnitus while you were daydreaming? It’s incredible but, when you deliberately spend 15 minutes trying to listen to the ringing in your ears, it is impossible.

Exploiting this little oddity is how you will speed up your tinnitus habituation.get little breaks from the ringing in your ears.

Getting little break from the ringing in your ears is just the first step.

Yes, it is a huge step, but still, just the first one. So, before we proceed, let’s review (while it is fresh).

Your tinnitus is not constant. You just shut it off, however temporarily, all by yourself. You accomplished this without any tools or drugs. And, despite what you may think, there will be other periods of silence during the day.

These periods will come when you have other essential things on which to concentrate. They will also occur when you combine physical activity with a task requiring constant awareness (Carpentry or mowing the lawn and listening to a book on tape simultaneously).

What’s the second step to speeding up your tinnitus habituation? Creating more breaks and extending the periods of relief.

Let’s begin by showing you how to get an eight-hour break from your tinnitus.

How sleep and work can speed up your tinnitus habituation.

For most, insomnia is the worst thing about tinnitus. Lack of sleep increases your anxiety about your condition. That anxiety worsens your tinnitus condition. It quickly becomes a cycle that gets more and more vicious every day.

But get just one good night’s worth of sleep, however, and that anxiety loosens its grip. If you can sleep, you realize tinnitus isn’t such a terrible threat; it’s just a bloody nuisance.

So, you need to learn how to shut off your tinnitus just long enough to fall asleep. Since I’ve written a more detailed article on how to sleep with tinnitus, I’ll link it again here. Click the link to open the article in a new browser and read it later.

Work is another area of great concern for you. Tinnitus seems like it might wreck your career. After all, insomnia is sapping your ability to concentrate. The noise depresses and distracts you. How long before the boss realizes your productivity has collapsed as well?

Dispelling this fear should be possible now that you have tried the 15 Minute Challenge. You now know tinnitus’ weakness (it can’t compete with concentration). Now all you have to do is design a workday around what you learned. Then, with a solid plan for how to work with tinnitus, you can enjoy another eight hours of stress-free quiet.

Again, I have written an article on working when you have tinnitus. Sorry, but I will ask you to open another browser and then return here to keep reading.

How to create shorter breaks from the ringing in your ears while at home.

Cheer up! I promise this will be the shortest chapter (because it needs a separate article).

You can also create small breaks from the ringing in your ears by using a technique cops use on DUI suspects. More on this in a second.

As mentioned above, tinnitus hates activity and concentration. Tinnitus needs your undivided attention to thrive. That’s why it roars when you are sitting on the couch watching tv. Unfortunately, many household chores don’t require much attention or skill. So we have to trick your brain a tiny little bit by confusing it—like a cop talking to a DUI suspect.

When a police officer stops you and suspects you may be under the influence, they use the Divided Attention test. It begins when the officer asks you to present your license and registration. Then, as you are turning toward your glove box, they hit you with a question like, “Where are you coming from tonight?”

If you’ve been drinking too much, your brain stalls, and you start giving the officer reasons to have you step out of your vehicle.

Use the Divided Attention method to silence the ringing in your ears.

To kill tinnitus noise for an hour or two at a time, you can modify the divided attention test like this:

Create a list of chores to do around the house.
Work on the mindless chores (mowing, gardening, painting) while listening to a book on tape—with the volume just slightly above the sound of the recording.
With more complicated chores (things that already require a certain amount of concentration), add an element of physical complexity to the tasks. Good examples that work are setting a timer or standing on one leg. The (good) stress of a time limit or the need to remain balanced, coupled with the complexity of the task itself, creates a poor environment for tinnitus to thrive.

Oh, the low-volume book-on-tape trick? It’s my all-time favorite—especially during tinnitus spikes. You have to pay attention to hear and understand the narrator. My tinnitus is all but gone when mowing the lawn or chopping wood and listening to a book-on-tape.

Don’t stall your tinnitus habituation.

If you are not careful, it is easy to slow down your habituation. To avoid this, after you seek medical assistance, be mindful of what you consume (both media and so-called cures).

The first and the best advice is to stay off of tinnitus forums. And here I will tell you a secret: Most people who recover from tinnitus are wary of talking about it. It’s as if announcing your success is begging for trouble.

Whatever the cause, the most prolific commenters on the web are those shrieking in fear and disbelief. They can’t help you. Stay away from them.

You should also ignore any miracle cures or pills you find for sale. If you need medicine, your doctor will recommend it. If you genuinely need something for anxiety or depression, ask your doctor.

You may also be tempted to make significant changes to your diet and lifestyle. So here, and again with medical supervision, have at it. Just don’t go crazy!

Hey, something you try might work. Tinnitus may not have a cure, but it sure cures a lot of bad habits. One can only imagine the number of people who started protecting their hearing, started working on their weight, or gave up drugs or alcohol due to the ringing in their ears.

This brings us to the next chapter.

Take advantage of the ringing in your ears to build some good habits.

If developing a good habit takes three months, you have time to build at least two. Diet and exercise are obvious choices, but could you possibly go further?

What if, while waiting for that glorious tinnitus habituation to take place, you accomplished an important goal?

You know, that one thing you have always wanted to do but never did? Who kept you from accomplishing it? Why, it was you, right? Maybe it was a lack of motivation that kept stalling your dream. Perhaps you just never had a coach or some other constant source of encouragement to propel you forward.

Well, congratulations, you lucky dog. You now have everything you need—all thanks to the gift of tinnitus. We will talk more about this in another article, but for now:

Dust off that dream sheet.
Select one primary goal.
Create a SMART plan to achieve it.
Use concentration and physical activity to distract your tinnitus.
Use the need to keep tinnitus at bay as a motivator to work daily to achieve your goal.

Act soon, your tinnitus will fade fast.

You may have to work fast. At best, you have 18 months of free coaching. Use that time to turn tinnitus habituation into some excellent lifetime habits. The clock is ticking soon tinnitus will be a rarely noticed, minor irritation.

Author’s note: My tinnitus has no emotional effect on me any longer. Unfortunately, it remains loud at times. It still affects my conversations over the phone and makes talking to groups of people frustrating. Fortunately, with the distraction writing involves, I can sit in a quiet room and pen this article without noticing the sound in my ears.

Tinnitus habituation does not happen in a straight line.

Expect good days and bad days. Be prepared to handle tough tinnitus spikes but also to enjoy days of significantly reduced noise.

Over time, your habituation will increase, resulting in more and more days of normalcy and even joy.

For now, use the 15 Minute Challenge to increase your power over tinnitus and to conquer your fear of it. And remember, you are already on your way to a happy, everyday life.

Don’t hesitate to reach back and help someone still dealing with their tinnitus when you get there.

Life with tinnitus