Rewiring Tinnitus

Book Review: Mindfulness > Tinnitus

I developed moderate tinnitus (persistent ringing in the ears) out of the blue about a month ago. I had just returned to the city I live from a much-needed vacation at the Black Sea, I was cuddling with my wife in bed shinning my infrared light on my back and I noticed a troubling ringing in my ears. A mediocre night of sleep ensued. To my dismay, it didn't go away...

I tried a number of the manual therapy methods (pulling ear, tapping head, finger in ear, etc) that can be found on YouTube with clickbaity titles like “Cure tinnitus in 60 seconds!" I tried powdered Ginkgo Biloba. I got my hearing checked by a specialist and it was fine. I took the medicine the doctor recommended (Vinpocetine, B-Vitamins, and Ginkgo Biloba extract). I tried EMF mitigation. I took a week off of using the fancy Bluetooth headphones that I love. I tried EFT "tapping" on the issue. I took a week off my liquid Nicotine solution. I tried shining my red light on my ears for 15-20 minutes. I took a break from daily red light therapy to ascertain if the red light might somehow be causing it. And none of this stuff made any difference!

Frustrated, I picked up this book after a week of costly bad sleep. The good news in it is that tinnitus can be rewired with meditation, by spending time focusing your attention on the tinnitus, instead of trying to ignore it, your brain eventually learns that it's not something it needs to worry about.

With tinnitus meditation, you’re able to transform the sound of your tinnitus into something useful right from the start, which can speed up the process of habituation exponentially. (p. 50)

Catching yourself when your mind wanders, and gently bringing your focus back to the sound, is the exercise. (p. 57)

This will train you to focus your attention at will. By switching your focus from the sound of your tinnitus to a different point of awareness, and back again, your brain can learn to tune out the sound of your tinnitus when you aren't focusing on it. (p. 63)

As a veteran meditator, I found this to be great news. I've been doing the tinnitus meditation (focusing just on the sound of the Tinnitus for 15-20 minutes) for a few weeks and there has been, I think, an improvement.

• I've reframed my annoying tinnitus as "I hear the sound of infinity" using Dispenza-style transformative meditation, you'll want to read the book You Are The Placebo which explains this technique.
• I've also been doing my tinnitus meditation with my Heartmath HRV device, if you can afford one of these it will result in a more quantified and consistent mindfulness practice.

Tinnitus is terribly common, from the book...

According to the Center for Disease Control, nearly 50 million people suffer from tinnitus in the United States alone. It’s also the most prevalent disability among our nation’s veterans, even outranking post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Worldwide, the number of sufferers is estimated to be close to 600 million. (p. 4)

Tinnitus is yet another area where institutional science and mainstream medicine is failing the suffering. It's one of those conditions where the doctors will tell you "You're screwed! There's no cure. You'll just have to suffer with it for the rest of your life..." The health agencies and big pharma with their billions of dollars could care less about discovering a cure or even a decent cope for the millions of people who suffer daily from Tinnitus. But the more I learned about Tinnitus, the more I realized that this was a problem that I could solve myself...

Tinnitus is therefore not something dangerous, or threatening, or a sign of internal damage. It's the result of your brain turning up the volume of natural sounds present within the body, sounds that everyone can hear under the right conditions. Typically, this happens as your brain attempts to compensate for changes in your sound environment such as silence, hearing loss, or exposure to sudden noise. It's an overcompensation, but a natural process nonetheless. (p. 28)

The only difference between someone who is tormented by the sound of their tinnitus, and someone who isn’t bothered at all, is that the sufferer’s brain perceives the sound as a threat, an annoyance, or as something dangerous, and develops a negative conditioned response of panic, anxiety, or stress. The good news for the people who are tortured by their tinnitus is that the negative reaction can be reprogrammed, and replaced with a positive one. (p. 30)

When I first started to struggle with tinnitus my wife would say "Jonathan, we need to figure out what's causing it!" But as the book clarifies, it doesn't really matter, Tinnitus is sort of like a "check engine" light on your dashboard, it's really hard to figure out what the cause is. It's better to address the problem than to worry about what the source is.

My tinnitus hasn't gone away but as the book suggests, I'm getting better at ignoring it. It doesn't annoy me during the day as I'm working and I'm back to sleeping great! What also helped a lot with sleep is relaxing music or rain audio tracks at night. EMF mitigation is important to sleep quality, so what you wouldn't want to do is stream Youtube or MP3 audio tracks off the internet, you want to download tracks and hit play before getting in bed. That way you don't get irritated when your WIFI inevitably buffers and cuts off the music just as you're about to go to sleep.

One of the great points the book makes is that by habituating your Tinnitus with mindfulness, you repurpose it into a useful "barometer" of your overall health.

As you habituate, the intensity of your tinnitus can be used as a way to measure the quality of your health. If you find that it’s suddenly much louder, there is likely something going on with your health that needs to be addressed. Julian explains, “Let your tinnitus be a healthometre. If it backs off, you are doing the right things. If it pipes up, then look at what you are experiencing, what you are exposing yourself to, and how you are driving yourself. If you work with your tinnitus, it will guide you back to a healthier life!” (p. 122)

I was tormented by the sound, day and night, for so long. But I no longer think of it as a bad thing. I now use my tinnitus as a tool to help me meditate, relax, and fall asleep. It lets me know when my stress levels are out of whack and when I need to put more effort into managing my health. I’ve successfully befriended my torturer. It’s a much better way to live. (p. 151)

I did return to pondering what might have caused my Tinnitus. A younger me spent way too much time in loud nightclubs, loud music will cause or worsen Tinnitus. So avoid concerts and clubs if you don't want chronic Tinnitus (shouldn't be a big problem in the brave new COVID-19 world!) But other than the occasional night out salsa dancing, I don't have a lot of loudness in my life now. As a Biohacker, I'm very vigilant about my health, so I was surprised to have to suddenly have this problem. Before it started I was relaxing at the beach, loving life with my beautiful wife, and swimming daily in medicinal seawater. Issues like Tinnitus often have emotional causes, our emotional state manifests in our health. I'm pretty good at handling stress, but like many, many people, this year I've indulged in information-aholism, binging the news. 2020 has a been slow-motion trainwreck that's hard to look away from. I would spend 4-10 hours a day, listening to bad news about the COVID-19 Pandemic/Plandemic, the American elections, the riots, the impending medical tyranny - the great decline of civilization that we're living through. That's entirely too much auditory "black-pilling," is it any surprise that my ears developed this problem?

 I should add that this book is a part of the author's "funnel" for the Brainwave Entrainment tracks that he sells, he offers a sleep package where you "pay what you can," as little as $1 and a larger package for $70. I don't have a problem with this because...

• You don't need to buy his Brainwave Entrainment tracks, meditation is free. You can find and download a bunch of different Brainwave Entrainment tracks out there on the internet. You'll probably need to try a number to find some that work great for you.
• Meditation takes time and some discipline, you need to stick with it for weeks or months for it to help. A lot of people struggle with consistency, if you spend $70 on his (not cheap!) audio tracks you're going to be more disciplined about using them. You're a lot less likely to give up on the meditation after a few days.

About Brainwave Entrainment...

By engineering a Brainwave Entrainment audio track to induce the same brainwave frequency patterns observed in the monks, you end up with what is essentially a guided meditation that communicates directly with your brain. As you listen to it, you will automatically experience the same deep level of meditation, and it only takes a few minutes to start working. (pp. 67-68)

you should use Brainwave Entrainment to ease the anxiety and negative emotions caused by your tinnitus, prior to tinnitus meditation, so that you can practice without fear or discomfort. You can also use Brainwave Entrainment to induce a deeper meditative state, allowing you to practice tinnitus meditation effectively, right from the very start. (p. 69)

Brainwave Entrainment is a safe, effective, and easy way to speed up your progress with tinnitus. Listening before you meditate can be extremely helpful (p. 72)

In my research of Tinnitus, I'm saddened that so many people have suffered for years or decades with Tinnitus. As a Biohacker, I know to pay attention when my body does something weird. Instead of stoically putting up with Tinnitus for months or years, I started researching it as soon as the problem arose. After it persisted for a week, I said "Ok, time to start reading the books on Tinnitus." I think this is a pretty good problem-solving approach for when you develop some kind of (health) problem.

• Instead of ignoring the problem or freaking, search for Youtube videos and podcasts on the topic. Listen to those and see what they have to say.
• Before rushing to the doctor or buying some solution marketed, give the problem time to go away. A week typically. 
• The podcasts and videos you watch should give you some things to try. Keep a journal of what you try and note what helps and what doesn't.
• Find online forums or groups devoted to the problem you have. You'll find them on Reddit, Facebook, or Longecity.org.
• If the problem is still there a week later, go search on Amazon and read a book or two on the topic. Often, you will get real credible solutions to your problems from books. In the internet multimedia sphere, there's a tremendous amount of noise to signal, books are consistently a higher-quality source of information than Youtube, podcasts, and Google search results are.

Googling your health problem may give you a really skewed view of it. Google nefariously directs almost all health inquiry related inquiries to their advertising partners' websites; these websites are there to lure you into the pharmaceutical-hospital industrial complex "Is your elbow sore? You may have cancer! Go see your doctor and take some expensive pharmaceutical drugs." Please be skeptical of and critically evaluate what you find on the first page of Google search results along with what people are saying in their Youtube videos and podcasts. A lot of these YouTubers and podcasters are there to sell you something. Books are often the purest source of helpful information.

I give the book 5 stars because it helped me! My tinnitus no longer makes my nights hell. The book is short, you'll get through it in just a few hours. The book is about solutions, so it doesn't spend a lot of the reader's time delving into (unhelpful) scientific speculation on Tinnitus. The author had particularly awful and unrelenting Tinnitus that he overcome with mindfulness. I did read through the reviews of the book and the mindfulness method prescribed has helped a lot of people. So I'd recommend it enthusiastically to anyone struggling with Tinnitus.