Free Tinnitus Sound Therapy
Sound can be an effective tool in managing your tinnitus. It helps mask the sound, reduce distress and alter how you perceive it. Furthermore, sound helps retrain your brain to become more tolerant of your condition.
Sound therapy offers a number of options for sound treatment, from white noise and relaxing nature sounds to resounding alarms and energetic beats. In some cases, these sounds may even be tailored specifically to your tinnitus frequencies for added benefit.
Masking: Utilizing sounds to mask your tinnitus and make it less noticeable is a popular approach. Usually, these sounds are low-level and pleasant, encouraging the brain to focus on them instead of on the noise from outside.
Tinnitus-related sounds often take the form of music, filtered with advanced filters to eliminate specific frequencies and produce a more pleasing audioscape. While some of these sounds can be found for free online, others require payment.
Breathing: There are various breathing techniques to help with tinnitus, such as relaxation, deep breathing and focused breathing. Exercising these breathing methods can help you manage tinnitus spikes more effectively, improve your mood and sleep better at night.
Distracting: Distracting therapies are more engaging than simply masking sounds to mask tinnitus, providing something interesting to draw your attention away from it for a while. These can include music, specially-designed patterned frequencies or podcasts and can be an effective way to take your mind off it temporarily.
Habituation: Tinnitus retraining involves listening to sounds similar to your tinnitus for extended periods of time, training your brain to ignore it in much the same way glasses on your nose train your brain to ignore glasses on your nose. While this process may take several months or longer, most people report success with it.
To determine which therapy is ideal for you, speak to a tinnitus specialist. They can offer guidance on which sounds and exercises may be most beneficial for your symptoms.
Typically, you should consult an otolaryngologist and an audiologist to get the most effective management of your tinnitus symptoms. Both these professionals can offer advice and assist in the management of symptoms in a professional and caring manner.
In most cases, your otolaryngologist will recommend tinnitus sound therapy as part of your treatment plan. However, in certain circumstances they may suggest other forms of therapy like cognitive behavioral therapy or psychotherapy instead.
There has been much research conducted on sound therapy as a treatment for tinnitus, yet the evidence shows it to not be the most successful approach. Other methods such as counselling have proven more successful, so consider sound therapy just one tool in your tinnitus management arsenal.
To learn more about tinnitus sound therapy, you can visit the American Tinnitus Association website. Here they offer a wealth of free resources such as their Masking Sound Library – which contains various masking and retraining sounds that can be listened to online free or downloaded as an MP3 file.
