I've had a mental visualization I've used to control tinnitus flares for about 20 years now - i.e., "biofeedback".
I image the entire soundscape (what I'm possible of hearing) as a long, thin line which is warbling a bit, as I'm hearing things right now -- like the line in an oscilloscope. The present tinnitus represents itself as a sharp spike in this visualization, the location dependent upon its texture (sharp pings, or a low muffled warble).
I then imagine a giant hand (my hand) on top of that spike, pushing it down, slowly, and as I push it down, the tinnitus subsides (since I know what that subsiding sensation feels like). Sometimes I have to do this pushing motion a few times before the spike slowly attenuates by itself and it joins the surrounding levels.
The entire process takes about 30 seconds, and doesn't work every time. If after a few attempts it fails, I abandon the visualization exercise (lest my brain somehow learns the pushing motion to be ineffective).
It's not entirely clear to me how / why this works: mapping a physical phenomenon onto an abstract mental visualization / picture, and then manipulating that mental picture and thus the physical phenomenon.
I'm also very musical, so these sorts of visualizations tend to come very naturally to me.
I don't have tinnitus, but I do have this thing where when I'm falling asleep, my eyes (despite being closed and in a dark room) will start to feel like they are looking at a brighter and brighter light. This is very irritating for me.
For that I usually open them really briefly and imagine some kind of equilizer level-set thing happening and that makes it dark behind my eyes again. I wonder if there is a way to do it without opening them
These feedback things are interesting, thank you for sharing
This is actually an experience that people that engage in the tantric practices in Vajrayana Buddhism -- of which Tibetan Buddhism belongs to -- cultivate. I've encountered the instructions as part of the dream yoga practices, to cultivate it so that you actually watch yourself fall asleep and enter the dream state completely lucidly. I've only ever been able to "catch" the dream and become lucid when already in the dream. Maybe you're way ahead of the rest of us! [1][2]
> I don't have tinnitus, but I do have this thing where when I'm falling asleep, my eyes (despite being closed and in a dark room) will start to feel like they are looking at a brighter and brighter light. This is very irritating for me.
Me too, just started happening recently too. Brains are weird.
I have read a few anecdotal experiences of people allowing these kinds of hallucinations to continue and they have reported that they can become quite vivid and even interactive. Maybe try waving your arms around when this happens to see if it goes away? That should indicate if it's sleep-related or not.
Sometimes during my daily meditation practice I use my tinnitus as an object of awareness, like you would with your breath, which, coincidentally, I did this morning. There's so many more frequencies and changes going on when you meditate with it, including tones that definitely only arise when you're practicing with it. I find it helps and I'm definitely going to try it with your visualization.
Interesting, I've done something similar for headaches. I imagine the pain as a sort of toy in a claw machine and then try to extract the pain with the claw. Like you said it doesn't always work but surprised it has ever worked.
From this perspective, techniques such as Reiki are not that surprising, they may be methods of more effectively exploiting this mind-body connection: all of these techniques usually have in common some sort of visualization, and learning to associate certain colors/signs/symbols with desired effects. (Although the fact that it seems to have effects even when the practitioner differs from the recipient means there's probably more to it than just that.)
I let myself focus on pain as just a sensory signal, like pressure or a focused sense of touch.
By completely welcoming the pain signal as information I can often quiet the discomfort component.
I assume that since pain functions by being a signal to avoid, completely reversing the avoidance interferes with its normal function - in a good way. Would love to know how that was actually playing out in my circuits
On a similar note, sometimes I feel my tinnitus as much as hearing it - it does feel like a pressure in my ears/head. It doesn't feel like real air pressure so much as the sound is pressing on the insides of my ears. Maybe a blood pressure thing like yours?
You place the palms of your hands on the sides of your head or over your ears and then drum/tap your fingers on the back of your head. After about 10-15 seconds, it will stop the ringing.
It gives me goosebumps that this method works with others. I thought it to be very idiosyncratic...but it seems not? Either way, I'm glad it could help!
I ended decades of hayfever crises by breathing in deeply and repeating a mantra that I accept the cosmos. Used to get annual steroid shots since childhood, then tried antihistamines tablets for a few more years, but both had nasty side effects.
That's cool if it works for you. You mention a tinnitus "flare".
I was born with "glue ear" (diagnosed at age ~six I think). That's a lot of rubbish medical nonsense I gather. Anyway, regardless of what is the current "Medifacts" I have tinnitus and it was probably exacerbated by all the instruments that were stuffed in my ears.
I had two lots of "gromits" - tiny tubes stuffed into my eustacean tubes under general ana ... oh for fucks sake, why can't medics and doctors n that speak English. Law courts have dispensed with Latin and Greek, why can't medics?
Tinnitus is generally consistent in my experience - the surrounding environment within my body allows it to flow in and out of my conscious experience depending on what I'm up to.
For me the intrusiveness is generally related to my blood pressure and a few other things.
I have had several audiologists begin their speech of “as you may know tinnitus is from damage to the ear due to loud … “, well mine is from Covid.
I read about a study a few years ago that focused on shocking the tongue and its nice someone followed up on it. They described one year of relief post treatment.
Bimodal neuromodulation combining sound and tongue stimulation reduces tinnitus symptoms in a large randomized clinical study. Science Translational Medicine, 2020; 12 (564): eabb2830 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abb2830
Mine is constant and loud. If people speak and pause it gets difficult to orient where we’re at with the fire alarm sound going on in the middle of speech. Soft spoken people I have to fill in the conversation with guesses to what they said.
Hearing aids help but you’re not supposed to sleep with them in. So when you manage to fall asleep then wake up, it can be hard to fall asleep again or impossible.
Mine started after Covid too. The audiologist did some tests and found I have one ear having a section of frequencies with poor response.
His hypothesis is vascular damage due to Covid restricted blood supply to the hairs in that one part of the ear canal. The brain fills in the discontinuity from the resulting "notch filter" audio response (in Electrical Engineering terminology), and that hallucinated sound is the tinnitus.
NHS tinnitus awareness course had a bit about accepting it as background noise (vs just concentrating on it and being annoyed), I rubbished that at first but it helped quite a bit in the end.
That was before Covid after that it's got much louder, it comes back whenever I think about it, so seeing the article brought it back, hopefully I can make it go again.
anecdote for anyone else reading about Covid related tinnitus - I've had hearing damage related tinnitus for a decade. Got Covid in April '22 which caused my existing tinnitus to 2-3x in severity, lasting a couple months before it either reverted to baseline or I got used to the new normal. Very scary experience. The CEO of Texas Roadhouse famously committed suicide due in part to severe post-Covid tinnitus.
For anyone struggling to cope with Tinnitus out there, one thing that has helped me immensely is Zen meditation. Doesn't make it go away, but builds up a control over attention with which you can cope much better.
Hearing damage is the most common cause, but it's far from the only one. It can also be caused by other sorts of physical damage (TMJ, blood pressure, etc.), certain drugs, and some diseases.
> diabetes, thyroid problems, migraines, anemia, and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus have all been associated with tinnitus
"...medicines used to treat other diseases, as well as foods and other ingested materials, can result in unwanted tinnitus. These include alcohol, antineoplastic chemotherapeutic agents and heavy metals, antimetabolites, antitumor agents, antibiotics, caffeine, cocaine, marijuana, nonnarcotic analgesics and antipyretics, ototoxic antibiotics and diuretics, oral contraceptives, quinine and chloroquine, and salicylates. This review, therefore, describes the medications currently used to treat tinnitus, including their mechanisms of action, therapeutic effects, dosages, and side-effects. In addition, this review describes the medications, foods, and other ingested agents that can induce unwanted tinnitus, as well as their mechanisms of action."
Aspirin (and NSAIDs in general) might be one of the most common drugs that can cause it (see section 2.12.7 in the paper). Table 15 lists the drugs that can cause tinnitus. The paper seems like a thorough, recent (2021) review.
I got mine from a diving (snorkeling/free diving) accident. Barotrauma damaged my cochlea. I think Covid played a factor too. I was severely congested recovering from Covid at the time.
I also had it before but the 3rd vaccine shot amplified it maybe 3-5x for a few months, it was like a siren when trying to sleep, thank god it back to its normal level which I forget about most of the time.
Same for me, I think I probably had it since a young age (lots of middle ear infections) but it seemed normal to me so I didn’t realize it was unusual until much later in life. I freaked out about it for a few years but realized it was and will always be there and didn’t bother me before, so I pretty much went back to it not bothering me anymore.
I had a mental health crisis when I first realized I had it (triggered by a really bad audio mix at a concert and some rando chastising "you're gonna fuck up your hearing" when I didn't have earplugs). A few months followed of "oh shit, is my life experience permanently broken now?" and all the bad feelings that connotes. I was in a really bad place.
I've always been someone who can hear electronics - when CRTs are popular, I'd know if one was in the upcoming room while I was still in the hallway. At some point, I realized that I heard all sorts of minor sounds just by existing in my apartment, and that tinnitus isn't much different than that. Helped me chill out about the whole scenario.
My mom taught me "lean into the good, and you'll feel more of the good; lean into the bad, and you'll feel more of the bad." That's certainly been my experience with tinnitus. Letting yourself panic and gloom about it is the worst part of having it. If you don't assign valence to it (don't let it be good or bad, just a thing you experience), it loses its power to drive you mad.
What I was told: salt, caffeine, alcohol, and stress.
(I check sodium on the Nutrition Facts of packaged food (it's usually high), don't touch even decaf, don't touch alcohol, and try to minimize the bad kind of stress that has no constructive solutions.)
Does everyone not have ringing in their ears when they really pay attention? Or like when they are trying to go to sleep? I always thought everyone had it because I had it since childhood. Still have to this day, same intensity. During the day it does not bother me, nor do I notice it. But if I pay attention, it feels pretty loud.
Yep, I've become excellent at ignoring it, only about 2% of the time does it get bad enough to be bothersome or noticeable. I always comment on these "this will make your tinnitus go away" posts with be careful, you may find it makes the times you can't use the device or product even worse because now you have a taste of real silence!
There's absolutely nothing you can do about tinnitus except adjust to it. You really do just have to relax and accept it, and it essentially fades into the background. That's literally the best treatment available.
It's really one of the most true things about tinnitus. It takes a while to put your mind in order to accept it, but once you're done, the problem goes away (but tinnitus never does).
Yeah, similar here. The brain seems to do a pretty good job of 'tuning it out' most of the time after a while. But as soon as you start thinking about it, it's there and louder than ever.
“Silence” really does belong in quotes. I spent some time in an anechoic chamber (a few hours a day over 6 weeks) and could hear the blood flowing through my ears. It was quite strange and convinced me that true silence doesn’t exist unless you’re deaf.
One of the spookiest experiences of my life was activating a pair of noise-canceling headphones in a room that was already quiet and immediately being able to hear my neck vertebrae touching. I snatched them off my head like they were a spider.
Probably similar to the experience of seeing the blood vessels of your retina when a focused light source moves past your eyes. I think that's something we kinda always "see", but the signal is removed by the brain before reaching consciousness, until lighting quickly changes blood vessels' shadows.
My understanding of the underlying cause of tinnitus iirc, is that it's caused by damage to hair cells in your inner ear. Our brains interpret this damage and loss of signal as a signal; thus, we hear a high-pitched tone even when it is silent.
Training your brain to ignore this seems like treating the underlying cause, which is a misinterpretation of auditory signals or the lack thereof.
I have tinnitus but most times I don't notice it. Go to a loud venue for a while and even with earplugs it noticeably comes back for up to a week or two.
It doesn’t sound to me like it would help you in that case, if it is just about attention.
I have tinnitus as well and after months of focusing on it trying to “cure” it, I learned to adapt and now it is better and doesn’t keep me up at night or interfere with anything. This sounds like a shortcut to the acceptance that patients need to achieve in order to move on. But maybe it would make a real difference to very high intensity patients.
Have you tried this trick of overloading your acoustic nerves temporarily? For both ears, close your ears with your index finger and than tap on the index fingers with your middle fingers - to make a loud pounding sound - a few times. As far as I know, these short peaks are not dangerous to the ear, but safely overload hearing sensitivity. You may gain a few (sometimes critical) moments of silent peace this way.
I can make mine go away temporarily (as in a minute or so) by sticking my fingers in my ears and jiggling them around to make a lot of noise for 10 seconds. I suspect it's just the contrast, but it is really nice to have something resembling real silence.
A few years back I got a bad wax buildup in one ear and stopped hearing anything. After they took the wax out, my ear was hypersensitive for a day or so. I heard every little rustle, shifting in my chair, even fabric moving when I moved my arm.
I can also make it go away temporarily (also just a minute or two) with the tapping technique
"Place the palms of your hands over your ears with fingers resting gently on the back of your head. Your middle fingers should point toward one another just above the base of your skull. Place your index fingers on top of your middle fingers and snap them (the index fingers) onto the skull making a loud, drumming noise. Repeat 40-50 times"
Are you implying the underlying cause is never a brain malfunction?
I think of it a little like phantom limb pains If you feel pain in a hand or foot that you no longer have, retraining your brain is one way to fix it. Maybe regrowing a foot would be better, but we don't know how to do that.
I'm not doctor or scientist, but I think of it like the nerves in the ear are signaling off constantly. The brain is operating normally by listening to them, but what you really want is for it to adapt and start to ignore the bad signals. The brain can phase them out, but it can never stop receiving the signal, so you still hear it if you consciously focus on it. It sounds like this person is already there but still looking for a real cure, something to stop the signals.
I accidentally did something similar, but there’s a significant cost.
Got tinnitus at 15 and over time my brain filtered out the sound. Unfortunately one of the tones was in the upper vocal range so I then developed trouble understanding people with higher-pitched voices as some syllables would be entirely filtered out.
Second is that I stopped paying attention to sounds that aggravated it. This caused me to gather more damage and I ended up getting additional frequencies that my brain wasn’t filtering out.
That's the real problem with hearing loss: if you compensate by raising volume across the entire spectrum of sound to compensate for a few frequencies, you slowly make yourself more and more deaf.
And I suffer from a notch in my hearing where speech is generally found, so I hear clinking glasses and shuffling chairs far easier than people. It's aggravating for everyone involved. If you're lucky enough to afford hearing aids, you'll soon discover hearing aid companies know the best fidelity comes from high discretion and narrow band amplification. And they're pricing hearing aids accordingly: the more and narrower the bands, the higher the price. Also aggravating.
Have you tried hearing aids? I went to an audiologist a week ago and found that I have mild hearing loss in higher frequencies and as a result certain letter combinations are hard for me to hear. She told me hearing aids might help. I get a 30 day free trial, so the only thing I have to lose is the time to get them and get them dialed in.
The audiologist also gave me a copy of the audiogram. In the health app I used the camera to scan it and it adjusted the frequency output on my ear buds to compensate for some of my hearing loss.
My case is classic: hearing damage at one particular frequency (from one stupid event). Apparently, the neurons got bored, and decided to create their own input at that frequency.
As others gave said, you get used to it and rarely notice it. I suppose that is more difficult if it's not just constant noise.
I would like to offer a more comical tinnitus anecdote as someone with a moderate hereditary hearing impairment. I have always had tinnitus for as long as I remember. Usually it's a constant ringing that gets more intense until it stops.
When I was very young I described it to the school district audiologist as "hearing trains", or at least that's what I remember of trying to describe the sensation as a five year old.
It never really bothered me to be honest. I was always a little baffled when I read stories about it ruining someone's life. Then two years ago I had just moved into a new house. After returning from a roadtrip I started hearing what I was convinced was a smoke detector beeping due to low battery in mostly my left ear. I looked everywhere for the source of the beep. In the attic, in the crawlspace, in the garage, everywhere. I started to wonder if maybe it was in my head, but from time to time I would hear the beep and once again scour the house for the source of the mystery beep.
Finally, I went on another trip and lo and behold, I heard the beep in the dead of night in my hotel room. After that, I knew it was a new tinnitus symptom. My theory is that possibly having the windows down while I was driving on such a long trip caused new hearing loss and produced new tinnitus symptoms. Luckily, I feel that being able to recognize that it is no different than the tinnitus I have always had, and that it is something outside of my control seems to allow me to remain unbothered once again.
Readit News
I image the entire soundscape (what I'm possible of hearing) as a long, thin line which is warbling a bit, as I'm hearing things right now -- like the line in an oscilloscope. The present tinnitus represents itself as a sharp spike in this visualization, the location dependent upon its texture (sharp pings, or a low muffled warble).
I then imagine a giant hand (my hand) on top of that spike, pushing it down, slowly, and as I push it down, the tinnitus subsides (since I know what that subsiding sensation feels like). Sometimes I have to do this pushing motion a few times before the spike slowly attenuates by itself and it joins the surrounding levels.
The entire process takes about 30 seconds, and doesn't work every time. If after a few attempts it fails, I abandon the visualization exercise (lest my brain somehow learns the pushing motion to be ineffective).
It's not entirely clear to me how / why this works: mapping a physical phenomenon onto an abstract mental visualization / picture, and then manipulating that mental picture and thus the physical phenomenon.
I'm also very musical, so these sorts of visualizations tend to come very naturally to me.
For that I usually open them really briefly and imagine some kind of equilizer level-set thing happening and that makes it dark behind my eyes again. I wonder if there is a way to do it without opening them
These feedback things are interesting, thank you for sharing
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_body
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga
Me too, just started happening recently too. Brains are weird.
I have read a few anecdotal experiences of people allowing these kinds of hallucinations to continue and they have reported that they can become quite vivid and even interactive. Maybe try waving your arms around when this happens to see if it goes away? That should indicate if it's sleep-related or not.
Sometimes during my daily meditation practice I use my tinnitus as an object of awareness, like you would with your breath, which, coincidentally, I did this morning. There's so many more frequencies and changes going on when you meditate with it, including tones that definitely only arise when you're practicing with it. I find it helps and I'm definitely going to try it with your visualization.
By completely welcoming the pain signal as information I can often quiet the discomfort component.
I assume that since pain functions by being a signal to avoid, completely reversing the avoidance interferes with its normal function - in a good way. Would love to know how that was actually playing out in my circuits
If that isn't just a figment of my imagination, a possible mechanism for your technique is that you are relaxing (or so).
You place the palms of your hands on the sides of your head or over your ears and then drum/tap your fingers on the back of your head. After about 10-15 seconds, it will stop the ringing.
I was born with "glue ear" (diagnosed at age ~six I think). That's a lot of rubbish medical nonsense I gather. Anyway, regardless of what is the current "Medifacts" I have tinnitus and it was probably exacerbated by all the instruments that were stuffed in my ears.
I had two lots of "gromits" - tiny tubes stuffed into my eustacean tubes under general ana ... oh for fucks sake, why can't medics and doctors n that speak English. Law courts have dispensed with Latin and Greek, why can't medics?
Tinnitus is generally consistent in my experience - the surrounding environment within my body allows it to flow in and out of my conscious experience depending on what I'm up to.
For me the intrusiveness is generally related to my blood pressure and a few other things.
I read about a study a few years ago that focused on shocking the tongue and its nice someone followed up on it. They described one year of relief post treatment.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201015173126.h...
Bimodal neuromodulation combining sound and tongue stimulation reduces tinnitus symptoms in a large randomized clinical study. Science Translational Medicine, 2020; 12 (564): eabb2830 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abb2830
Mine is constant and loud. If people speak and pause it gets difficult to orient where we’re at with the fire alarm sound going on in the middle of speech. Soft spoken people I have to fill in the conversation with guesses to what they said.
Hearing aids help but you’re not supposed to sleep with them in. So when you manage to fall asleep then wake up, it can be hard to fall asleep again or impossible.
His hypothesis is vascular damage due to Covid restricted blood supply to the hairs in that one part of the ear canal. The brain fills in the discontinuity from the resulting "notch filter" audio response (in Electrical Engineering terminology), and that hallucinated sound is the tinnitus.
NHS tinnitus awareness course had a bit about accepting it as background noise (vs just concentrating on it and being annoyed), I rubbished that at first but it helped quite a bit in the end.
That was before Covid after that it's got much louder, it comes back whenever I think about it, so seeing the article brought it back, hopefully I can make it go again.
For anyone struggling to cope with Tinnitus out there, one thing that has helped me immensely is Zen meditation. Doesn't make it go away, but builds up a control over attention with which you can cope much better.
> diabetes, thyroid problems, migraines, anemia, and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus have all been associated with tinnitus
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tinnitus/symp...
I don't find it the least bit surprising that Covid could also cause it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8235102/
"...medicines used to treat other diseases, as well as foods and other ingested materials, can result in unwanted tinnitus. These include alcohol, antineoplastic chemotherapeutic agents and heavy metals, antimetabolites, antitumor agents, antibiotics, caffeine, cocaine, marijuana, nonnarcotic analgesics and antipyretics, ototoxic antibiotics and diuretics, oral contraceptives, quinine and chloroquine, and salicylates. This review, therefore, describes the medications currently used to treat tinnitus, including their mechanisms of action, therapeutic effects, dosages, and side-effects. In addition, this review describes the medications, foods, and other ingested agents that can induce unwanted tinnitus, as well as their mechanisms of action."
Aspirin (and NSAIDs in general) might be one of the most common drugs that can cause it (see section 2.12.7 in the paper). Table 15 lists the drugs that can cause tinnitus. The paper seems like a thorough, recent (2021) review.
Anyone else speculating whether the shots somehow lowered our overall immune systems?
I've always been someone who can hear electronics - when CRTs are popular, I'd know if one was in the upcoming room while I was still in the hallway. At some point, I realized that I heard all sorts of minor sounds just by existing in my apartment, and that tinnitus isn't much different than that. Helped me chill out about the whole scenario.
My mom taught me "lean into the good, and you'll feel more of the good; lean into the bad, and you'll feel more of the bad." That's certainly been my experience with tinnitus. Letting yourself panic and gloom about it is the worst part of having it. If you don't assign valence to it (don't let it be good or bad, just a thing you experience), it loses its power to drive you mad.
(I check sodium on the Nutrition Facts of packaged food (it's usually high), don't touch even decaf, don't touch alcohol, and try to minimize the bad kind of stress that has no constructive solutions.)
Personally, having tinnitus for so long I don't even notice it anymore; it would be nice to experience complete "silence" again though.
My understanding of the underlying cause of tinnitus iirc, is that it's caused by damage to hair cells in your inner ear. Our brains interpret this damage and loss of signal as a signal; thus, we hear a high-pitched tone even when it is silent.
Training your brain to ignore this seems like treating the underlying cause, which is a misinterpretation of auditory signals or the lack thereof.
I have tinnitus but most times I don't notice it. Go to a loud venue for a while and even with earplugs it noticeably comes back for up to a week or two.
I have tinnitus as well and after months of focusing on it trying to “cure” it, I learned to adapt and now it is better and doesn’t keep me up at night or interfere with anything. This sounds like a shortcut to the acceptance that patients need to achieve in order to move on. But maybe it would make a real difference to very high intensity patients.
A few years back I got a bad wax buildup in one ear and stopped hearing anything. After they took the wax out, my ear was hypersensitive for a day or so. I heard every little rustle, shifting in my chair, even fabric moving when I moved my arm.
"Place the palms of your hands over your ears with fingers resting gently on the back of your head. Your middle fingers should point toward one another just above the base of your skull. Place your index fingers on top of your middle fingers and snap them (the index fingers) onto the skull making a loud, drumming noise. Repeat 40-50 times"
I think of it a little like phantom limb pains If you feel pain in a hand or foot that you no longer have, retraining your brain is one way to fix it. Maybe regrowing a foot would be better, but we don't know how to do that.
Relevant clinical trial: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Relevant Q&A with Susan Shore: https://www.tinnitushub.com/dr-susan-shore-auricle-questions...
Got tinnitus at 15 and over time my brain filtered out the sound. Unfortunately one of the tones was in the upper vocal range so I then developed trouble understanding people with higher-pitched voices as some syllables would be entirely filtered out.
Second is that I stopped paying attention to sounds that aggravated it. This caused me to gather more damage and I ended up getting additional frequencies that my brain wasn’t filtering out.
And I suffer from a notch in my hearing where speech is generally found, so I hear clinking glasses and shuffling chairs far easier than people. It's aggravating for everyone involved. If you're lucky enough to afford hearing aids, you'll soon discover hearing aid companies know the best fidelity comes from high discretion and narrow band amplification. And they're pricing hearing aids accordingly: the more and narrower the bands, the higher the price. Also aggravating.
The audiologist also gave me a copy of the audiogram. In the health app I used the camera to scan it and it adjusted the frequency output on my ear buds to compensate for some of my hearing loss.
As others gave said, you get used to it and rarely notice it. I suppose that is more difficult if it's not just constant noise.
It never really bothered me to be honest. I was always a little baffled when I read stories about it ruining someone's life. Then two years ago I had just moved into a new house. After returning from a roadtrip I started hearing what I was convinced was a smoke detector beeping due to low battery in mostly my left ear. I looked everywhere for the source of the beep. In the attic, in the crawlspace, in the garage, everywhere. I started to wonder if maybe it was in my head, but from time to time I would hear the beep and once again scour the house for the source of the mystery beep.
Finally, I went on another trip and lo and behold, I heard the beep in the dead of night in my hotel room. After that, I knew it was a new tinnitus symptom. My theory is that possibly having the windows down while I was driving on such a long trip caused new hearing loss and produced new tinnitus symptoms. Luckily, I feel that being able to recognize that it is no different than the tinnitus I have always had, and that it is something outside of my control seems to allow me to remain unbothered once again.