Tinnitus Retraining Therapy and Making White Noise
I have tinnitus. It sucks. It first became a real problem for me in May of this year, going on four months now.
For me, it is a high-pitched squeal/whine/whistle/hiss, usually right in the middle of the head, though occasional I fancy it favors the left ear a bit.
It really sucks. And besides possible supplements and the usual hucksterism, most everything in terms of information boils down to “it’s incurable. Get used to it.”
It is hard to get used to something that makes you want to smash your head with a brick.
Today, after reading a page at this Kevin Hogan site which mentions Tinnitus Retraining Therapy, or RTR, and then finding a link to this RTR site from this Wikipedia entry on sound masking for Tinnitus, I have what feels like the first ray of hope in a while.
I won’t even try to describe a therapy I’ve only just discovered, but there are some crucial differences with masking. With masking, as I am sure is obvious from the name, the object is to completely mask the sound. So lying in bed with headphones (or a speaker pillow) listening to white noise to drown out the sound in order to get some sleep sounded like a good game plan.
Though I’d like to delve into RTR more deeply, perhaps see a trained therapist or get some training myself, I do see one thing in a nutshell: a precept behind RTR is not to completely mask the tinnitus. It can be barely if at all perceptible, but it should be at least identifiable by the brain, because the idea here is to use the therapy to habituate the brain to the sound of the tinnitus, and if it can’t be identified, this can’t happen. Ultimately, the therapy seems to offer hope of, if not a cure, at least a state of existence free of misery from tinnitus; or at least greatly liberated from it.
I’m using white noise, because (by its very nature) it has greater energy at high frequencies than, say, pink noise. If you’d like to know what these are, and the differences between them (and grey, blue, or red/brown noise), you may wish to check out this sight on white (and other) noises. It has handy samples and concise explanations all on one page.
What really made me want to throw up this post, other than the fact that I stumbled across (or at least finally really noticed) RTR today, was a couple of facts about playing a noise for masking or other sound therapy. There are all sorts of downloadable, and otherwise-available, therapy sounds, if you want to go that route (and, of course, machines, etc.). Most of them seem to offer water, especially rain, waterfalls, or surf; and often frogs, crickets, birds, and other nature sounds; one I ran across today blended white noise with a heartbeat. For myself, I have always tended to prefer a simple, solid wash of white (or pink or brown) noise. In the past, I would download a clip (often from Wikipedia) and loop it.
A problem I had with this is that most of the players I used would not loop seamlessly; and the gap, however small, was always annoying. Happily, Audacity will do it; and it is free, and available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and more. Just press shift while you click ‘play’. (There’s also a menu pick.) The website with the heartbeat mentioned that these days iTunes can do it, and if so, most people will probably just use that; but no iTunes on my Ubuntu box.
(I just checked and apparently, iTunes will work on Linux, at least Ubuntu and probably more, using WINE, and I guess has done so for at least over a year now. Haven’t tried it, and probably by the time I do it will be ho-hum, but there is that. Off to excite a friend about it. Be right back.)
This afternoon I was looping a white noise clip I downloaded somewhere in Audacity, and it was fine, until I began noticing very faint, regular artifacts in the background (I suppose it’s not surprising they become quite noticeable after several hours). I had had the notion before that Audacity, or another program on my box, could maybe simply generate a white noise tone, but didn’t really feel like poking through the menus. This time I Googled for it, and straight away learned that there is a ‘Generate’ menu right in front of my eyes, and under that a ‘noise’ choice: white, pink, or brown. Nice.
This is indeed very nice and even and the loop is nice and seamless (well, I think so; I went ahead and generated a sound one hour and one second long, and it has yet to loop… okay, checked, even a one-second tone loops seamlessly, although it then has a sort of swishing phase shift in background. Better to use a longer sound).
So there you have it. Probably more I should have said or meant to say, but I’m tired and looking forward to some sleep. If this is any help to anyone at all, I’m satisfied. For now.
Headwreck
Well, I do own the domain “headwreck.com”, so I might go with that.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s this.
I’m limited to 600 pixels across, unless I drop a small amount of dough on WordPress.com so that I can edit the CSS files. I’m feeling smarter about losing my own website all the time. Anyway, now I know, 600 across, that’s the limit (at least with this theme). Auto-resize is not pretty.
Dates
Whoops. I corrected the date on my first poast and now the “Hello, World” post is actually “after” it. That’s because I didn’t set my date… aw, who cares. Anyway, I like it that way, now my first post can be “post zero”, which it deserves to be. . . .
FWIW, this blog began on August 3rd, not 4th, unless you are in England. Or somewhere . . .
I was gonna go to England. I thought. Heh. Wish I’d never mentioned that to anyone. . . .
Actually there are a whole host of things I wish I’d kept ineffable.
Like the other meaning of dates. I think I won’t talk about that.
Good, except that what’s the point of a blog if I’m not going to talk about things?
I guess I can talk about how I’m not going to talk about things.
In other news, tinnitus really sucks.
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress.com. After you read this, you should delete and write your own post, with a new title above. Or hit Add New on the left (of the admin dashboard) to start a fresh post.
Here are some suggestions for your first post.
- You can find new ideas for what to blog about by reading the Daily Post.
- Add PressThis to your browser. It creates a new blog post for you about any interesting page you read on the web.
- Make some changes to this page, and then hit preview on the right. You can always preview any post or edit it before you share it to the world.
Mah new blog
I’m going to leave the “Hello World” poast that comes with this account, because I’m weird like that.
I usta have my own blog: it was at http://www.headwreck.com/blogs/markus, or something like that. No use looking for it now; I still own the headwreck.com domain (at the moment), but I had to let the site go. The host was ~20 USD a month, and suddenly I couldn’t afford it. It’s not looking to good for renewing my domain in a couple of month, either, but we’ll see.
By the time I got around to cancelling (autocorrect tells me that should be “canceling”, and that “autocorrect” is wrong, too; oh, well) my site, I was so frazzled (for lack of a better word) that i was unable to archive the last version, for whatever that’s worth. I do have older backups of the database and other content somewhere, but I doubt little, if any, will be seen by the Internet again. It doesn’t really matter much, as very few people ever went there, but . . .
The thing is, this makes me rather sad. I am remembering now how much I enjoyed my Web site, and especially the blog once I installed, and got familiar with, WordPress. (And spellcheck doesn’t like “WordPress”, or “spellcheck” either, and now I see that I should have said “spellcheck” and not “autocorrect” before; and I have just remembered that I can right-click and add all such things to the Dictionary, if I should so desire; so, yes, O mighty Dictionary, please accept from me these humble orthographic offerings. (I wondered what the right word might be; I am almost inclined to use “orthographical”. Spellcheck doesn’t like that one. I’ll leave it out of the Dictionary. I wasn’t sure what “orthographic means”, now I have a better idea. I love the Internet, search engines, all of that.)
I chose this blog host because I am (was) familiar with WordPress. It is, as I say, bittersweet, because I miss having my own site where I could install stuff and do, more or less, whatever I wanted. But that became a problem when money became one, too; and I suppose I should have just satisfied myself with a free host in the first place. I can’t remember how long I had the site, but if it was three years (I think it was quite a bit more), then that’s ~360 USD I could have saved. Heh.
I guess I could have used it for something profitable, and I did sign up for Google AdSense fairly early on, but having no real content beyond my occasion babbling, and no real traffic, I naturally made no money. Having always been so unfocused and going in too many directions at once (I deem), it appears to be one more squandered opportunity, if indeed any opportunity was there for me at all.
Very strange, today; with my life falling apart, I installed a new operating system for the first time in many moons (my old one, actually still on board, is showing its age), and now I’ve signed up for a blog. I can’t imagine having done this even a month ago. I don’t know if it’s a good sign, or just a last grab at familiar things that used to bring me pleasure as I continue to circle the drain. I might, in fact, be very close to that drain.
It all sounds gloomy, and I would like to be more positive, but mostly I want to be honest. I don’t know if I’m going to pull it off, what with all I might have to say. I do have a notion that this might be some help for me, some use, some good, some therapy; the fact is I’ve been holding so much in and have really had no place to turn with it all. But I am, frankly, afraid that there may simply be no help for me, that I have been the author and originator of so much (all?) of my miseries, my failures, and the appalling, ridiculous, and shameful circumstances in which I now find myself.
I don’t mean to go overboard with this: As many a counselor might rush to remind me, it isn’t like I’m in Auschwitz. I’m not homeless (yet) or missing any limbs (yet) or blind (yet). But things are pretty scary and have been for some time. What’s needed, I think, is to pull myself up by the scruff of the neck, and simply get a grip; but, and this will sound weak and puzzling, to say the least; I simply don’t know how.
This all seems like a depressing whine, and I would like to punch myself. But I’ll let it stand. I suppose I’ll go into detail with later posts, or at least I will consider it. Then, assuming I don’t lose my Internet connection (and otherwise access to the ‘net), knowing me, I’ll probably delete it all.
The thing is, despite reams of trouble, eighteen months ago, life seemed much more hopeful, and full of possibilities. Now it seems . . . very likely to be grim, at best.
So I’ll do this. At least it can be some sort of–primal scream, or something. Maybe it will prove to be some kind of therapy. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”? Perhaps. I am not ready to concede the light. Not yet. But the flame does gutter so.


