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Why Do We Focus So Much on Tinnitus Noise?

Brain model early 20th century, Berlin; tinnitus noise concept

Blame your brain.

According to an article in AARP, "researchers say people experience tinnitus when their brains pick up on a phantom sound and try to identify it but can’t. So the brain continues to focus on that sound and tries to solve the puzzle."

And, says Grant Searchfield, head of audiology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, "because the brain can’t make sense of it, the sound becomes the forefront of attention. It’s an unfortunate side effect of how the brain works."

It's why sound therapy is such an important approach in treating tinnitus. If you have a sound in your environment that sounds like (or masks) your tinnitus, your brain can stop searching for the source of that phantom sound.

Author and tinnitus coach at Rewiring Tinnitus Glenn Schweitzer says habituation can get you "to a place where your tinnitus stops bothering you entirely, where your brain just stops paying attention to it and it fades from your awareness." Once your brain recognizes the phantom sound as non-threatening, we stop having the automatic fight-or-flight stress response and, in turn, ignore the sound as you do "all other meaningless background noise."

In the video below, audiologists Ben Thompson and Michelle Kennedy explain how to train your brain to forget tinnitus, discussing the psychology and methodology surrounding tinnitus retraining therapy.







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