How I Cured My Tinnitus

hi my name is vic veer i'm an ears nurse and throat surgeon working at the royal national ent hospital in central london now many of you know me as someone who talks about snoring and sleep apnea but today i'm going to talk to you about tinnitus because some of you may know that in 2008 i got tinnitus and then after a few months of work i managed to get rid of it so this is my story my experience of how i solved my tinnitus and hopefully i can impart some of that information to you now

i haven't heard my tinnitus for 10 15 years now but that doesn't mean that you watching this video will be completely cured i mean this is just my experience my personal story and if it works be fantastic and if it doesn't work for you look i'm really sorry at the same time what i plan to do in this video is explain to you what i normally tell my patients when i see them in clinic about tinnitus so in effect if you watch this video you don't really need to come and see me about tinnitus anymore

because it's all going to be hopefully in this video you see tinnitus isn't really my special subject i have no professional interest in it at all i normally talk about snoring sleep apnea and sort of ear surgery but if you are interested in seeing someone about tinnitus there's some really good people out there there's people like nish patel dipesh mystery people at the highly street tinnitus clinic also i got to say that the tinnitus clinic at romford queens hospital the royal national ent hospital audiology clinics the tinnitus clinics they are absolutely amazing so if you

see some of those people they can really give you good advice good help with the alternatives i think it's important to say also that i'm not going to tell you some new miracle cure or some new technique it's not that sort of video this is just me explaining tinnitus in the way i normally explain it what i would do is if you have tinnitus go and see your doctor get checked out for all the things that may cause tinnitus and at that point if you have just the sort of normal tendencies a lot of people

get then go and see a tinnitus clinic and they'll be able to help you out okay now that i've said that what i'd like to do is go through a few myths about tinnitus and go through them one by one so this first thing that a lot of people seem to say if you get tinnitus you've got it for life i mean that's just not true a lot of people hear tinnitus all the time even transiently so a lot of people here oh can you hear that and it sounds like a tv left on or

something like that that is tinnitus sometimes people hear a ringing noise or a sort of a drumming noise first thing in the morning or when they get back from a concert they hear their ears sort of making this ringing noise all of these are forms of tinnitus sometimes they last short time or a long time you know happens a lot to a lot of people and most people when they get tenses even after a week or so two weeks it seems to go away after a bit and if you look at the data only 0.5

percent of people have tinnitus that's so bad that it intrudes on their life and it makes their life difficult to cope with there are an awful lot of people who get tinnitus and then it dies down to a point where they can still hear it but it doesn't bother them anymore so even if you do have really bad tinnitus and it's really affecting you i'd see a tennis clinic and it should settle down with time there are things we can do to help you and i hopefully like something like this might help you as well

so you may be looking on the internet seeing really sort of scary and posts about people with tinnitus and it's really ruining their lives and once you've got chances you can never get rid of it that's not true there are lots of people who get rid of their chances i got rid of my tinnitus 13 years ago i've not heard any tinnitus now for 13 years so it can be done and a lot of people out there say the same thing so so have some hope that this could happen for you now a lot of

people think that tinnitus comes from you it's it's actually not true actually there is a really really rare syndrome where you can actually hear if you put your ear to someone else's ear you can sometimes hear their tinnitus like sometimes the clicking noise or something like that um but you know i've never even tried that i've never seen a patient with that problem it's really really rare to get that sort of thing most tinnitus is found within the auditory cortex within your brain it's not from your ear at all one way to prove that is

to look at the studies where people have had their nerve cut or they've removed the cochlear you know remove their ear completely and their tinnitus doesn't get better it actually gets worse so that includes all the people who've had um exposure to loud noise musicians uh people have had an explosion nearby they've taken chemotherapy that's damaged their ear all those people believe that it's their ear that's been damaged and that's true that it has been damaged but the tinnitus doesn't come from the ear it comes from some part of the brain the limbic system auditory

cortex all those sorts of areas so a lot of people hear that last statement and say to me oh well you're saying it's all in my head then and i don't like saying oh it's all in your head because it implies that it's uh that you've gone mad or you've got depression and anxiety and that's why you've got utensils i don't think it's a a symptom of depression or anxiety i think tinnitus or i personally believe chances is more of a sort of bad feedback loop that you get yourself into and when you're in that

sort of loop and you're spiraling away with the noise getting louder and louder depression anxiety can speed up that process or make it worse because when you have depression anxiety it's very hard to extract yourself from that bad feedback loop which i'll explain later on anyway so enough of that what i'd like to do now is explain what tinnitus is now i think this chapter this part of the video is really really important because if you don't understand this bit that the bit where i try and explain how to get rid of the tinnitus won't

make any sense so please watch this bit first and understand it before you move on to the next chapter the first thing to say about why people have chances is that we all have tinnitus everyone can hear tinses all the time and the way to prove this is that if you get a bunch of people and put them into soundproof rooms you can tell them to stay in that room until they hear a noise like a ringing or whatever any noise and come out when they can hear that noise within 15 minutes 90 plus people

percent of people will come out of those rooms and say oh yeah i can hear a ringing noise and what was that or electrical wine or something like that everyone can hear these noises all the time just that we're not aware of them so another way to explain this is that our brains are constantly suppressing information from us so for example when you put on your shoes or your socks in the morning you can feel that your shoes are on your feet and you can walk around but after five minutes or so one minute even

you stop your brain stops telling you oh by the way you're wearing shoes it's not important information your brain will let you focus on things like oh wow i think i'm a bit late for work or the kids are late for breakfast or you know those sorts of things so your brain suppresses the information that isn't that important like you know the the pressure of this jacket around my my collar or as people with earrings or glasses after a you know a bit of time your brain gets used to it and stops telling you about

that information the same thing happens to sound a lot of people realize that if you're on an airplane after a bit you zone out that sort of background noise which is quite loud or if you're working at your office and there's a road by you or lots of other people talking you can zone all that noise out that's your brain allowing you to focus on what you want to focus on and suppressing all the other sound information so another way to describe is that if you pause the video right now and then listen down to

what you can hear you'll hear people talking maybe in another room or road noise or something like that there'll be some sort of sound in the background normally even birds tweeting and if you played the video again and listened to me talking to you you might still be able to hear those birds tweeting or people talking but you realize that your brain previously was suppressing that those sounds away from you you can still hear them because i'm talking to you now and you can still hear them now but the point is that your brain was

suppressing that information so that you could focus on this video i think this all starts when we're babies perhaps so our brains think to ourselves oh look this child is only sort of listening to the parents and that cooing noise that those parents are doing it's not listening to say something like the heartbeat we can all hear these noises all the time so what the brain does is start saying okay i'll because he's reacting to those voices i'll increase those noises but i'll suppress this boom boom noise because it never pays attention to that and

so if you look at people and their hearing tests you'll see that hearing tests are sort of like a straight line but it's not true it's not a straight line our hearing is more of a spike like this and the hearing is best at the top it's not that our hearing is uniform you can hear all sounds the same it's a spike so what our brains do is allow us to focus in on the small number of frequencies just here which is around about two kilohertz and those frequencies are where we can hear speech allowing

us to communicate with each other all the other noises are slowly suppressed out the way because so our brains are focused in on those noises to allow us to understand speech and all the sort of normal noises we hear in everyday human life so only when you go to a completely soundproof room where there's no noise at all does your brain go well there are a bunch of other noises here like this hissing noise or this heartbeat noise and if you watch youtube videos about people going to the quietest room in the world all those

sorts of things you'll see a lot of them will say oh i can after about 10-15 minutes i can hear my heartbeat and some people can actually feel their heartbeat boom boom thumping away in their chest and it's quite common you know a lot of people just suppress that feeling of your heart pumping away in your heart in your chest it you know we got so used to this happening that we don't really feel it but you can actually if you're in a really quiet room you can start feeling the the the arteries pulsing around

your body it's a really amazing you feel like oh my god i have an actual organism not just a head attached to some legs it's amazing what you know body is like but our brains have filtered that information out from most people who don't we're not aware of our heart beating anymore the point is we only hear these noises when it's really really quiet when you've walked into a soundproof or a really quiet room or sometimes when people have an ear infection or and it's dropped their hearing for a short time your brain gets bored

it has no idea that you have an ear infection it's not as clever as we think it is our brain is just a bit of flesh sitting inside a skull just sort of getting all these nerves and stimulations and sort of inputs from the outside world and its job in this sort of bony casing is to try and interpret all these signals and all it will know is that oh i'm not getting as many signals from this here and he doesn't know that either you've got a lot older and there's a bit of wear and

tear you can't hear quite as well or you're a musician and you've lost a few frequencies at about 6k all those sorts of things the brain has no idea it assumes that our hearing is great all it's all it's noticing is there's less coming into it the brain doesn't really realize what's going on it just says well i'm not getting any sort of information from this ear anymore but i am suppressing all these other noises so perhaps if i uh release one of these noises but maybe he's trying to listen to it so that is

the start of you hearing something and you're going oh wonder what that is so what can happen when you start hearing these noises for whatever reason that your brain can fall into this jasper off or jasper off cycle where you can go round and round that sort of loop that i was telling you about earlier it's a very common or a good example of this is that someone young for old doesn't matter gets an ear infection they lose the hearing one ear for say two weeks or something like that because the ear is all clogged

up or maybe wax or something like that eventually the wax gets taken out but during that time when the hearing had been reduced the brain gets a little bit bored like i said before and starts releasing some extra noises so when you've got an infection and then you start hearing this high-pitched wine or something like that a lot of people will think oh god i've got this terrible infection it really hurts and i can't hear anything and now i've got this extra noise on top maybe there's some permanent damage happening here maybe i'm stuck with

tinnitus i don't know what's going on here i really need to see a doctor and that worry that emotional context to an ear infection can start off this cycle i was telling about the jasper of cycle see what happens is that the brain listens to what you're saying and the emotional context to the responses that you're having to things and goes oh wow i've been filting this noise out since he was a child why all of a sudden is he focusing on this it must be really important i'm so silly i shouldn't have filtered this

out since he was a baby maybe i'll get him to focus in on this and so the brain incorrectly assumes that you want to hear it because you've got an emotional reaction to it an emotional reaction is really important to humans so because you want an emotional reaction to a noise the brain incorrectly assumes that you want to hear it and therefore you start being able to focus in on it you start listening to it more and you start becoming more sensitive to that noise you want to hear it more and more this is obviously

the exact opposite of what people want to do they they're in bed trying to sleep and there's a funny noise and they're wondering what is this and some people go further than that they hear this noise and go oh wow this is tinnitus isn't it oh my god i remember my father had to insist and he hated tinnitus it was awful for him i've heard that you get tinnitus for the whole of your life and you can never get rid of it it's terrible what am i going to do is this going to be like

this for the rest of my life is it going to get louder am i going to lose my hearing is it a brain tumor all these sorts of thoughts go through people's minds that it can make that emotional connection to this noise and your brain sees that connection and then therefore makes the noise louder and louder and louder when i got tinnitus back in i think 2008 2009 i i just moved to another part of the country i started a new job moved away from all my friends didn't see my wife as much as because

we were all doing different shifts and it was really difficult and i think that stress and that big change at life event set off my tips and i thought i could see it now at the time i didn't feel stressed or or upset or whatever at the time i just had this horrible noise actually the first thing i noticed was um i thought it was a sort of a i left a tv on or something and i walked around the house for ages looking for this tv or this electrical appliance i had left on that

was making this noise it was ages later i thought oh god i think i've got tinnitus i knew what tinnitus was i was a cnt surgeon um but i obviously i hadn't looked into it as enough so what i did was i went round and round this jasper of cycle where i heard the tinnitus the brain saw that i was getting annoyed by the synthesis the brain thought that the tinnitus was um important so it made the tinses louder and it cycled back to oh my god it's even louder now what's happening and it went

round and round like getting louder and louder and you know people like vincent van gogh get so desperately they cut their ear off and and it's that negative cycle that sort of horrible sort of loop that people go through that i think causes tinnitus and what happens is the more times you go around this cycle the more you're able to lay down those pathways in your brain it's called brain plasticity it's the ability to learn new things people maybe maybe just for me but i felt that i was when i looked back at it i

was laying down pathways or neuronal pathways that allowed me to hear this noise louder and larger i was focusing in on this noise and so that previously very quiet noise was becoming louder and light because i was willing it to do so that's why i think a lot of people get hyper acoustics hyper acoustic means you become really sensitive to noises your hearing has got higher and higher like people who um go blind their hearing can get a bit better and the same sort of thing can happen i think in um in tinnitus your hearing

sensitivity wraps up in that one few spectrum so there's few frequencies that you have you start hearing it really really um easily and so people go oh my god the hairdryer's on or there's so much the road noise is so loud whereas normal people aren't bothered by those sort of noises but if your hearing has been wrapped up because your brain has got into this weird feedback loop it has to go oh god this this let's focus in on this extra noise that's what i think seems to happen in some people and that thing about

vincent van gogh cutting off his ear you know he was very depressed and that sort of brings me back to depression and anxiety if you have depression anxiety if you've got depression it's a lot of people think of it as an inability to cope with things and when you've got this disease or anxiety is that you get really really worried about things so if you hear this noise it's natural for those people with these conditions to find it very hard to pull themselves out of that loop where you constantly worry and the brain sees that

worry and then makes it um worse i hope you understand what i'm trying to say so i'm it doesn't matter if the tinnitus came first or depression came first having depression anxiety can make it very difficult to pull yourself out of that loop so what i found for me was that the key to fixing my tinnitus was reversing this jasper off loop or pulling yourself out of it and sort of reversing so you can go back to where you were before reapplying and suppressing that those noises starting up those filters again so you can't hear

the tinnitus anymore so let's get on to that bit of the video so a lot of people will say to me look there is no cure to tinctures what you're talking about but i guess you're right there is no cure for your heartbeat nobody wants to be cured of their heartbeat what i'm saying is that not being able to hear your tinnitus or not being aware of your tinnitus to me is as good as a cure because as i said in the previous section all these noises we've had for the whole of our lives and

i should say actually if you've skipped ahead to this point please go back to the chapter before because what i want you to do is understand this there because this section will make a lot more sense if you understand the the chapter before this oh sorry i'll get on with this now anyway like i was saying before the the definition of cure in tunisia is slightly vague but what i'm trying to say is if you remember that soundproof room experiment i was telling you about before the idea is to reverse that jasper off cycle to

reapply those filters to suppress those noises that our brains think that you want to hear but what you're trying to do is suppress the noises so you don't hear them anymore because correcting the assumptions that your brain was making now a lot of people what they do is they listen to white noise or you know the noise between radio channels on the old analog chat radios that shh actually i'll put a proper noise up here somewhere yeah so that noise that shh noise if you hear that that's what we call masking what you're doing is

using that noise so loud that you can't hear your own tinnitus and if that's working for you fantastic you should carry on with that whenever you hear your team just listen to that and there's no need to watch this video anymore because with time your tennis will slowly get better for me that didn't really work because i was sort of replacing one annoying noise in my head with another annoying noise from my radio and it just annoyed me particularly when i was trying to sleep because i quite like silence when i'm trying to sleep and

what i didn't what i noticed also is that as my tinsels got louder i ended up putting the radio louder and they're sort of competing against two different noises i just it just didn't work for me if it works for you like i said just go for it but if it's not working for you well i'll tell you what i did what i soon realized when i did a bit more reading that the masking is not there to overcome the noise so that you can't hear tinsel it doesn't really make any sense to me what

it's meant to do is distract you from the noise inside your head what you're trying to do is let your brain listen to real noises rather than the noise that's been generated in your head or the heartbeat or whatever the idea is that what you're trying to do is distract your brain from these abnormal noises in your head and therefore you're sort of reapplying that filter so what i started doing is listening to things like when i got in from work i'd normally hear it because the house was quiet without my wife around and i'd

turn on the tv or the radio one as soon as i walked through the door because i knew i'd start listening to tinnitus if i didn't do that it became a habit and when i was trying to sleep at night instead of listening to the shh noise i used to turn on the radio maybe radio 4 or whatever the equivalent is in around the world or like the shipping news at night i don't know if you've ever heard the shipping news but um in england the shipping news is rather it sounds really boring it's like

the shipping news if you don't know what it is is little points out at sea and they tell you the weather at different points and it's said in such a monotone sort of robotic way that i spent my time when i listened to it it was quite late about 11 12 o'clock at night um i remember listening to go where did they where does bbc find these people that can speak like this and i remember talking to myself about like ranting to myself oh my god where where are these people how do they learn to

talk like this and how could they just not do this without bursting out into laughter and because i was having that little internal dialogue and thinking about the shipping news and not thinking about my tinnitus that i was distracting myself away from that noise it's a bit like um a lot of people when they have mild tinnitus they don't notice that they've got to insist when they're out with their friends when they're having fun enjoying themselves or if they're at work in a difficult task and it's only when they get home more than when they

try and go to sleep and it's quiet then they start hearing their tinnitus again i think the real reason why i like this sort of distraction technique is that the shh noise sort of still reminded me that i had tinnitus whereas distracting myself and sort of making me forget that i have tinnitus seemed to work better for me but it doesn't really matter how you do it as long as you forget or you can't hear your tinnitus and focus on something else the more you do that incrementally you'll notice that your tinnitus gets quieter and

quieter and quieter i mean they're tiny increments at the start and at the start it's really quite bad but the more you don't listen to your tinnitus the quieter it'll get and it sounds a bit weird to say but that's how it seems to work because what you're doing is you're reapplying that filter you're telling your brain that you're not interested in this noise you when you hear this noise you distract yourself away from it and when you do that you're telling your brain i have no emotional impulse to this noise i've distracted myself away

from it i'm not interested in it please start reducing that neuronal pathway that you're laying down filter it out i'm not interested and that's the sort of control that you're trying to exert over your uh your own brain's sort of incorrect assumptions about thinking oh god this is important you're trying to say no it's not important i don't want to hear it anymore move on and although you only get tiny little improvements every day and sometimes hardly any improvement but when you do notice a tiny little improvement you go my god i actually have control

over this i have some sort of weird little mastery of this and that gives you a whole lot of more reassurance makes you feel like actually i can influence this i can change it and when you have that feeling of control it gives you hope and you can keep going and you keep working on it and noticing even these tiny little improvements every day gave me some hope gave you some comfort and it really helped me carry on unfortunately the shipping news didn't really work for very long because after a few nights or maybe a

week or so of me ranting at the radio internally in my head i thought to myself actually i've sort of ranted enough i can't think of anything else to rant about and i started remembering that i was doing this for the tinnitus rather than me getting annoyed by the shipping news so and also being annoyed is not a great idea when you have chances you try and find something that's fun for you so what i did was um and because also it was making noise as well and that noise was annoying me when i was

trying to sleep so what i did was i tried something else i knew it was more about distraction at this point so what i did was i turned on the small tv in our bedroom the old crts back then um and i left on uh re-runs of old tv series and you know this may show you what sort of person i am but i used to watch star wars reruns of star wars uh the black adder series red dwarf all those sorts of things and i didn't turn on the volume i left it on mute

but i turned on the um the subtitles and because i have uh you know a stumpy small y chromosome that doesn't allow me to multitask i i even though i know all the words i had to read the subtitles because i can't male brain um and so i sat there staring at the subtitles and i knew the storyline i knew all the words and although it was nice for me to watch and i'd carry on watching it it wasn't so entertaining that i couldn't fall asleep and it was quiet it was for me it was

better than the the noise of the shipping news or the shh noise so that worked better for me and because i've only got a tiny male brain those subtitles were enough to for me to focus in on that and allow me to distract myself away from the noise in my head and that as i said worked for me and it meant that the tinnitus with time got quieter and quieter and quieter there were times however where actually that the tv subtitle muted trick doesn't work for me either and the tint was so loud screaming your

ear it generally happened when i was sort of tired hungry stressed all you know all three um which happens quite a lot when you're a doctor um so yeah if you're hungry just eat that's an obvious thing when you've got one of these things it puts a barrier in you allowing you to sort of focus away from the tinnitus so eat and try and rest or try and calm yourself down all those things are really helpful so what i did was when i was in these situations when it was really loud and screw in my

ear i'd have to distract myself even more aggressively than just watching subtitles on an old star wars empire strikes back which is great by the way watch it if you haven't seen it but what i did was i distracted myself more aggressively than that so what i did was i got little computer games on my phone or on a laptop and i played those games now i wouldn't say something like candy crush or you know chess or something like that because it's not it's not a fast-paced game you can have time to think between each

move and what you need is something that doesn't require thought as such you need to do something which is really fascinating just working on instinct like you know sonic the hedgehog all that but weird um there's a program i'm showing my age now where you run run run you going left and right jumping over things and something chase temple run something like that i'll try and put a you know it's very boring sorry but games like that where you're using all your attention to to pass and you have to use instinct and swiping whatever something

that where it engrosses you so you know buy yourself a playstation 5 or something like that a fast-paced game where you have to use reactions or a more modern thing would be like getting oculus 2 and playing vader immortal or something but i wouldn't get world of warcraft or something because it makes you think you need something fast-paced enough about computer games i'll move on so what happened was with these very fast computer games that um it took the edge off my tinnitus so after about 20 minutes of playing game and me not remembering that

i've got tinnitus and i've noticed it's got a bit quieter i thought to myself right now it's quite enough for me to watch my tv and fall asleep listening to um or watching tv and looking the subtitles and then fall asleep so i'm not saying that you have to play computer games you have to play vader immortal three or you know you or you have to watch red dwarf what i'm saying is that you need to find something that will distract your brain some people will want to go looking through the internet looking at handbags

and shoes or or talking to their friends or something like that that will distract their brain away from their tinnitus do something that will interest you you've got to choose something that's fun something that's calming if you can or something that completely distracts you because those are things that are going to help you the best i think when it comes to trying to ease the tinnitus noise and the more you ease it the more you don't hear it the more you don't remember that you have tinnitus the slower the quieter the tinnitus will get and

talking about that fun and that happy calm place if you do have anxiety and you do have depression it's important that you go and see your doctor and try and get that treated now a lot of people said no no the tinses came first and that's why i'm depressed which is that may be true that's fine but the point is you even if you have depression or even if you have low mood because of your tinnitus it'll be very hard for you to pull yourself out of that loop without fixing the depression anxiety first so

do your very best to get rid of that side it'll really help you pull yourself out of this negative loop that some people get into so it doesn't matter it's not a chicken and egg scenario if you have worries or anxieties or depression or low mood go and see your gp get that sort of tell them that you've got tinses and he will refer you also to attendances clinic but it's really important that you sort out both issues it doesn't matter which came first just just get them both sorted because it'll really help you recover

from this problem now i was quite lucky i didn't have any hearing loss and i know easy for me to check i went to the audiologist and got them to do a hearing test but my hearing was sort of normal i say this so it's not really it's like this but you know what i mean it was a normal flat line good hearing all the way through there are some people who have reduced hearing and as i said before musicians and their hearing are dropped in one area and when that happens it makes it much

harder for those people to fix their tinnitus because they're not getting the stimulation their brain is craving for what you need to do is try and improve your hearing if you can so an awful lot of people say to me look i've got no problems with my hearing i can hear you just fine my hearing's not that bad but when i look at the hearing chest it has dropped in a few frequencies it may not be enough for them to influence their daily life maybe not enough to for them to even notice that they've got

hearing loss but if they do have hearing loss it's typically the hearing loss the hearing loss is where they can hear their tinnitus i say to people well actually it may be worth getting a hearing aid just to improve the hearing in those frequencies even if you don't have hearing or you don't feel like you need one all you're doing is wearing the hearing aids to help you get rid of the tinnitus because what you're doing is you're allowing your brain to be stimulated in those frequencies that you've lost and therefore your brain's going oh

there's other things to listen to now more interesting things like birds tweeting or leaves rustling or whatever you're listening to those noises now whereas previously you couldn't because you had hearing loss there augmenting that area that you've lost will allow your brain to be stimulated so therefore the tumors will slowly get slowly go away because you're stimulating your brain you're giving it something to listen to and that really helps some people and some people go well okay i've got rid of my chances with a hearing aid do i have to keep wearing the hearing aid

not really i guess not if it's not helping you hearing why bother if it well sometimes you give people hearing aids just to help them get over the tinnitus so that's an important distinction a lot of people go why am i got this hearing aid what's the point i got tinnitus i don't have a hearing problem that's the reason why a lot of people give you a hearing aid and and if you understand the context behind it it should make a little bit more sense anyway the um the subtitles the shipping news the um computer

games i used that sort of distraction technique to slowly reduce my tinnitus and it took me about it was really loud at one point so it took me about six weeks to get to the point where i should i can hear it but it doesn't really bother me anymore i can probably live like this forever now with this sort of noise in my head but because i'm a personality type entj and i just want to fix everything i thought to myself right just to prove it to myself i'm going to keep going and see if

i can get rid of it completely and to be honest it took me ages because i kept forgetting but um it took me about three or four months after that to to get rid of it completely and it started off with me going oh i haven't noticed it for a bit and and then it came back because i thought about it and sometimes days would go past and i go oh i haven't noticed it and then it would come back and silly me i used to think at the start i wonder if it's gone away

and i'd listen out for it and obviously knowing what you know now watching this video that's the wrong thing to do to try and resist the temptation just to check if you still have genesis just keep going the the days where you don't have tinnitus or the time when you don't have tenses will get longer and longer and longer to the point where you've got less you've got uh more time away from some more time with and eventually you sort of months later you go oh actually an activities and it doesn't come back at that

point and it takes a really long time and i'm not sure if it was three or four months because it sort of you forget so the way i did it was i continued distracting myself for months and months it was quite hard to think of things to distract myself with but the more i did it the times when i didn't get tinnitus became longer and longer and longer to the point where i i forgot that i ever had tinses and it's only when i think back now that oh yeah i had genesis so that's the

idea what i hope i think i did i i created that filter that i think we all have that filters out these noises and i've reapplied that filter suppress those noises so i can't hear it anymore even you know when i'm trying to sleep at night i can't hear my tennis and that happens to lots of people it's not just me it happens to loads of people um just look at the results from tunisia's clinics so a lot of people go away oh right yeah you're right and then if you call these people back you

know a year later no i don't have chances and they they forget to mention it it's not something you want to remember it's not something you want to go back to so the voices on the internet will be saying oh no jesus is terrible there are lots of people who say oh yeah timothy was fine i got rid of it there are an awful lot of people out there so have hope have some reassurance that can happen for you so don't get too stressed about it if you can now all i've been doing is waffling

on about these sort of mind tricks that i've been doing on myself there are some medical therapies out there which can help people with symptoms and i'll go through those one by one so at times i did use something called 180 phase reduction or 180 phase shift now what that is is that you're applying an equal and opposite sound to your tinnitus to cancel out the two noises that's quite hard to do and at the time it was sort of relatively easy what i did was i got an app on my phone i think it

was called sound frequency generator or something similar to that and what you need to do is com as closely as precise as you possibly can recreate your tinnitus noise uh that you can hear in your ear on your phone so that you play the sound and it sounds exactly the same as the autism and the the more precise you get the better so just make it just perfect now it's quite hard because a lot of these noises are slightly broadband in character but once you get the dominant frequency or if you can do a slight

broadband feature on your app that can make it slightly sort of quite noisy in that one or two frequencies but once you've got it and it sounds exactly the same what you need to do is say 180 phase reduction so you you're creating an equal and opposite sound to that noise at the time what i need to do is find another app transfer that noise to this app and then do that 180 phase reduction and then play that back to myself and that worked quite well because when it was sort of really loud in my

ear and to be honest i'm sort of almost playing around with it but when when that noise was really loud in my ear when i played this the noise came down a little bit i thought wow this is actually is sort of suppressing it to be honest i've noticed that after you know some time my tennis would change and it would change ever so slightly so you have to go oh god i have to make a new noise for myself and recalibrate you re-titrate it and and sort of apply the new noise it was a

bit of a pain moving from app to app and then listening to it and sometimes it only lasts 10 minutes but what i liked about it was that it gave me some comfort it gave me a feeling of control or mastery over my chances and that to me was really important it gave me hope that i can influence it if i feel like i have control over it i felt like i could sort it out i could deal with it as i said sometimes it it only lasted a short time sometimes it only just took

the edge off because i didn't get the tone exactly right so it sort of helped i don't think it's particularly useful uh in the end i couldn't be bothered with the apt app thing and and i ended up playing lots of computer games but um if you want to try this now please go ahead unfortunately the app that does a 180 phase rule i can't find that anymore i can only find a noise generator so i can't leave a link to it but i mean i'm sure there's a noise generator out there i did at

one point try and make an app my own app that would connect these two things together but i couldn't find anyone to help me do it and as you've seen me trying to put together a snoring app it's taken me years to do that this tinnitus app unfortunately you can't make any more because the rules have changed all about this now to make an app that was specifically designed to help you reduce utilities is now a medical device it's not an app anymore so you have to go through a million loop hoops and things too

to get to that point where you're allowed to publish an app which is meant to help people with tinnitus so it's you know it's not worth it and trying to find someone who will do make an app for you for free so you can give it away for free with no sort of income back from it you know no one no no one will do that what i want you to do is try and work this out for yourself so you do you know i got rid of it myself so um hopefully you can as

well but if any of you decide to make this app and create it let me know in the comments and i'll link it to the description and that way i can sort of promote your app in some way i did have a patient with a genius idea where he could use the sound generation uh device to make the noise exactly the same as ear and then what he had is that he saw he put on active noise cancellation um headphones now he wouldn't connect the phone to the earphones what he did was he just played

it on the outside and left this on um just playing and actively cancelling the noise around him so it works almost the same way that noise was actively cancelled going into your ear now um unfortunately he couldn't uh check if it worked because a he found the calibration quite differently trying to get the same noise as his ear and b his tinnitus was slowly going away anyway so it wasn't worth the effort for him so but it might be an idea if you uh have active noise cancellation headphones and really good ones and you can

make the same tinnitus noise you could try that out and let me know if it works for you there are some other therapies and i'll go through them now there's rtms or repetitive trans cranial magnetic stimulator something like that basically you get these enormous magnets and you focus this magnetic power on your brain it's used for helping people with depression and some other problems but what it does is sort of influences your neuronal chemistry or something like that and i guess if it's affecting your brain and changing the way your brain works it might work

and there are trials out there that say that in some people it really does work some people get six months of recovery some people you know six minutes or something um and it seems to only work in a certain population not other people so i i don't know if it work if it's going to work and there are published papers out there that say it does work and if you want to go and sort of look at that there is i think a place on harley street or i'm sure there are places anywhere with uh

rtms um and go and try it out if that's what you really want to do there is a local anesthetic drug called lidocaine or lignicain as we used to call it lidocaine uh if you inject it through the vein has this amazing quality of getting rid of people's tinnitus it just sort of suddenly disappears so uh it's it's amazing oh my god my chest is gone but the problem is when you inject lidocaine it also has the rather nasty side effect of causing your heart to stop and give you a heart attack is not something

that we would like to use but again someone had quite a good idea is to get lignochain not as an injection straight into your vein but as a patch or you can put it anywhere i guess but a lot of people put it behind their ear and that lignicain patch in a trial that i saw seemed to over about three months or so seemed to reduce tinnitus in some people again some people it worked for some people it didn't um and i think people are hoping that lignicaine those 12-hour patches were slowly reducing their tinnitus

it's quite hard to tell because maybe their chances would have got better over three months i'm not sure and normally lignite works straight away i'm a bit fearful of using liquid cane i don't i don't like it just in case it affects the heart but you and i have not seen any further trials about lidocaine but um if you're interested speak to your doctor about it or speak to one of these guys i was telling you about like the tinnitus clinic or other places and they might be able to point you in the right direction

there's an awful lot of evidence to say that relaxing techniques meditation self-awareness all those sorts of things do help people with tinnitus if it works for you you should definitely do it it seems to work for an awful lot of people so learning how to calm your mind down not get so riled up by this tinnitus can help an awful lot of people i think it's worthwhile doing if that's uh if that you think is your problem uh so meditation and things like that can help i don't know anything about it but again see these

tinnitus people they may be able to help you there are a variety of other pills and sort of lotions and sort of things that you can do to yourself to try and help you with your tinnitus i've seen people who are flicking the back of their head or doing different massages or using different devices on the ear now i haven't seen any conclusive sort of evidence to say that any of these things work um but if it works for you and you know a placebo effect is 20 effectiveness so it improves your most people will

say 20 i'll take 20 reduction in my tinnitus well then it'll be worth going ahead and doing it there's nothing saying that oh doing this or using a laser pointed to your eardrum you know all those things if they feel like they're working for you then do it i mean who cares if it's a placebo effect or not i don't know anything about tinnitus and or does anyone else as far as i can understand if it works for you and it's helping you even by just 20 then just do it in my mind don't um

don't worry if the evidence is out there or whatever just try it and if it works great fantastic i hope you found this video useful if you know someone who you think it might help please show them this video or tell them what i've told you and if you want a freebie sort of tinnitus white noise masker i can send you one for free just sign up to my my newsletter and respond to my letter when i send it out to you my email sorry and i'll give you i'll send one out to you if

you pull your name out of the hat and i'll leave a link to it in the description if you want thank you very much for watching i hope you found this useful do take care and i hope um if you have got tinnitus as it gets better quickly bye