Comment by guilamu
Comment by guilamu 8 hours ago
A message of hope.
I got mine in my 30's too. The first week I thought I was going crazy, and this was the end of my life. I was shocked, I couldn't go to work for a whole week.
I then saw a doctor who said to me: "Man, I've got tinnitus since 20 years and I barely hear it anymore. The more you accept it, the more it'll fade."
A decade later, my own experience is exactly this. I accepted it as one of the body malfunctions that comes with age for everybody. I barely hear it anymore except in extremely low noise situations and it doesn't bother me at all.
I wish you well.
I've always been someone who hears high pitched noises that "normal" people don't. I'm also in my 30s, and I'm sure those "teenage alarms" in Japan would work on me. I was the one who would walk up to a CRT and turn it off when everyone else thought it already was.
What helped me accept (and ignore) tinnitus was realizing that I had already grown accustomed to tolerating that sound indoors. When's it's something you have no agency over (like "it's an old house and the wires just make that sound sometimes"), you learn it's part of the environment.
Accepting it as part of the environment gets you past the "OMG my body is ruined forever" anxieties and back to normal life.