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Dear Brian, dear all, Listening to the tinnitus and analyzing it and the mindfulness approach may have one thing in common: They are not trying to mask the tinnitus, to reduce it, to tune it out or to get rid of it in
any other way, but rather accept its presence. Struggling against the tinnitus, trying to get rid of it at all costs, seems to be a rather effective way of making it worse in many cases, and doing the opposite, listening to it in an unbiased
way (to analyze it as Brian does, or as per instructions of MBCT) and accepting its presence may be an important step towards better habituation and less distress.
There seem to be just a handful of studies on the effect of tinnitus acceptance, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4900501/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21864830/ Maybe tinnitus acceptance might be an interesting avenue for further research? Best wishes, Roland From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Behalf Of Brian Gygi Pierre, Fatima, Dan, all auditory folks: I really greatly appreciate all the responses and I am afraid there is a bit of people talking over each other (I think that's the phrase). Pierre is correct in that I actually listen to the auditory signal, and try to analyze it in terms
of the frequency composition, and this seems to help attenuate the loudness of the tinnitus itself (also, it tends to highly lateralize the tinnitus, which is generally fairly centrally located).
But the others who are likening it to mindfulness-based training are also correct in that it involves focusing on and incorporating the tinnitus into my listening experience. So perhaps my "analytic" approach to listening to tinnitus is
a way of becoming very mindful of my tinnitus, in a way for me that was not achieved by just listening to it as an auditory event.
Does this make sense to folks? And thank you again for all the thoughtful responses.
Brian |