Tinnitus is common<\/a>, with a global burden similar to migraines. Fourteen per cent of adults experience tinnitus with 2% experiencing a severe form. It\u2019s often triggered by age-related or noise-induced hearing loss, but I was only 36 and a trip to the audiologist revealed my hearing was perfect \u2013 the Kings Cross nightclubbing of my youth hadn\u2019t come back to haunt me. Another trigger is stress.<\/p>\nThe first few days after the ringing began felt increasingly claustrophobic. The alarm-like sound that no one else could hear followed me everywhere: to my writing desk, to coffee with a friend, into the shower and, worst of all, back into bed.<\/p>\n
Tinnitus can be torturous for anyone, but for someone who worships the first birdcall breaking through a soundless dawn, who owns two dog-eared and underlined copies of Sara Maitland\u2019s A Book of Silence \u2013 an exquisite manifesto of solitude and quiet \u2013 it felt especially cruel.<\/p>\n
My GP thought I might have an ear infection. I cried in her office, tears of relief. \u201cI\u2019ve never been so happy to have an infection,\u201d I told her. She gave me drops, a thick mucousy liquid that blocked both ears and made the ringing significantly louder. My days were a constant battle against steadily rising panic. Meditation was useless, for obvious reasons.<\/p>\n
I drove to the ocean and sat there for hours. The dull roar of whitewater drowned out the sound and, there, I could breathe. I took the sea back to bed with me, a 10-hour playlist of deep-blue bliss. I dreamed about waves, but also about a bright light piercing the fog of sleep.<\/p>\n
\u2018The alarm-like sound that no one else could hear followed me everywhere: to my writing desk, to coffee with a friend, into the shower and, worst of all, back into bed.\u2019 Photograph: Tero Vesalainen\/Getty Images\/iStockphoto<\/p>\n
The drops dried up. If there was an infection it was gone. Weeks passed, but the ringing remained. I fell down the research rabbit hole.<\/p>\n
Like all chronic conditions, you could spend a lot of money on trying to find a fix: supplements, acupuncture, hypnosis, antidepressants (not as a cure but a way to cope). But the most common advice is to just try to ignore it. To learn to live with it.<\/p>\n
Because here\u2019s the most disconcerting thing about tinnitus: the sound doesn\u2019t exist outside your perception of it. It\u2019s a type of false alarm, created by your nervous systems and brain rather than an actual wave of sound in the air, and \u2013 like the way we aren\u2019t bothered by our clothes brushing our skin all day long \u2013 the less you pay attention to it the less you hear it.<\/p>\n
double quotation markI raged, I cried, I begged the universe. I didn\u2019t want to live with this<\/p>\n
Trust me when I say this does not feel helpful, or at all believable, when a semi-trailer\u2019s brakes have been squealing in your ears for two months. I raged, I cried, I begged the universe. I didn\u2019t want to live with this. I couldn\u2019t live with this. There had to be something physical happening to me that a professional could fix.<\/p>\n
It took seven excruciating weeks to get into an ENT. He performed test after test in his office before turning to me with a stern but sympathetic look. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing wrong with you,\u201d he said. And there was something in his voice. It felt like a magic spell, or some kind of blessing. Stop fighting this, it told me, you\u2019re already free.<\/p>\n
Over the following months, slowly but surely, my tinnitus began to soften around the edges. Through both natural habituation and intentionally training my attention, my nervous system learned to focus on more important, beautiful and interesting things. Sometimes, while watching the sun rise or reading a book, I didn\u2019t hear it at all.<\/p>\n
These days, although tinnitus is still my near-constant companion, I\u2019ve stopped wishing things were different. Because when you remove hope and fear, some suffering transforms into a kind of melancholic but peaceful surrender.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t think I could learn to live with tinnitus, but every day is more proof that I can.<\/p>\n
Now when stress causes the ringing to spike, or if I listen too hard for a silence that isn\u2019t there, I refocus my attention on something I love and the sound soon stops bothering me. My new version of tranquility returns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One night two years ago I was lying in bed when I began to hear a high-pitched, electronic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":746604,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-746603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/746604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}