Does Silence Make Tinnitus Worse?
3:59 · Read the full article
Chapters
- 0:00The quiet room
- 0:20Why does quiet make it louder?
- 0:39Your brain turns itself up
- 1:03Three things at once
- 1:17So why does chasing quiet backfire?
- 1:53So what goes in the room instead?
- 2:33How loud should it be?
- 2:54Four things, today
- 3:11When is it more than the quiet?
- 3:34Silence is not neutral
Transcript
0:00The quiet room
You finally get somewhere quiet. No traffic. No television. Nobody talking. And the ringing walks straight to the front of the room. It did not. Something else changed, and it was not your ears. Stay with this and you will know why quiet rooms do that, what to put in one instead, and the volume setting almost everybody gets wrong.
0:20Why does quiet make it louder?
Tinnitus is never heard on its own. It is heard against whatever else is in the room. And an ordinary room is never actually silent. A fridge next door. Air in a vent. Traffic two streets away. None of it is loud enough to notice. All of it is covering part of the sound.
0:39Your brain turns itself up
Your hearing has a volume control of its own, and you do not operate it. With less coming in from outside, it turns its own sensitivity up to go looking for faint sound. Researchers call that auditory gain. But it does not only amplify the room. It amplifies the background activity the ringing is made of.
1:03Three things at once
First, the gain we just talked about. Second, the covering sound is gone, so there is nothing left to blend into. And third, with nothing else asking for your attention, your attention goes inward.
1:17So why does chasing quiet backfire?
Which makes the obvious move the wrong one. If it is worse when it is quiet, the instinct is to make it quieter still. There is a laboratory version of that. A room built to have no echo in it at all, where people with completely normal hearing start hearing their own body within minutes. So earplugs make it stand out more. A soundproofed room does the same. So does sitting still and waiting. Low, steady sound in the room is the only one that goes the other way. Silence is not the goal. It is the condition the sound is loudest in.
1:53So what goes in the room instead?
Something steady that your attention slides off. A fan. An air purifier. Rain. White noise, or brown noise if hiss irritates you. And here is the comparison that matters. Take a completely silent room. The ringing has nothing to blend into. Your hearing turns its own gain up. Your attention has nowhere else to go. Now compare that with a room with a low sound in it. The edges of the ringing blur. There is something else to listen to. And your attention has somewhere to sit. Notice what is not in that second column. The tinnitus is still there. Sound in a room does not treat it. It changes how much of the room it takes up.
2:33How loud should it be?
The instinct is to turn it up until the ringing disappears completely. Do not make that mistake. Set it just below your tinnitus. Quiet enough that you can still faintly hear the ringing underneath it. Just underneath is where the contrast is smallest, and contrast was the whole problem.
2:54Four things, today
Four things, and they take a minute to set up. Stop treating quiet as the target. Put one steady, wordless sound in the room. Set it just below the ringing, not over it. And leave it running before you notice the ringing, not after.
3:11When is it more than the quiet?
Sound in the room changes the contrast. It does not tell you where the ringing came from. If it is new, or getting louder, or only in one ear, or pulsing along with your heartbeat, or arrives with dizziness or a drop in hearing - that is a reason to see an audiologist or an ear specialist. Not to panic. To get the cause named.
3:34Silence is not neutral
You were never in a fight with a loud sound. You were sitting in the one condition that makes a quiet one impossible to ignore. So stop chasing the quiet. Give the room one small thing to say, and keep it underneath. Silence is not neutral. It is the loudest room you own. If that was useful, subscribe for more videos like this one.
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