Are You Suffering From Any of These Symptoms as a Result of Tinnitus? Call Today for a Consultation.
■ Mild to severe anxiety
■ Depression
■ Insomnia
■ Negative thinking
■ Triggered fight or flight
■ Crying spells
■ Hopelessness
■ Ringing in the ears
■ Suicidal thoughts
Are you growing more isolated? Do you feel like life will never be the same? Are you refraining from activities that you enjoy? Are you fearful of losing your job? Do you find that your thoughts tend to be negative?
If you answered yes to 3 or more of these questions or symptoms, then we can help. You may be a candidate for Tinnitus Cognitive Retraining Therapy, or TCRT.
With over 20 years of clinical experience, Stephen Geller Katz, LCSW-R developed Tinnitus Cognitive Retraining Therapy and founded the Tinnitus Cognitive Center™ in response to the growing number of Tinnitus sufferers coming to his private practice.
He discovered that by helping people to retrain and reinterpret the thoughts around their Tinnitus, anxiety and depression symptoms began to improve. But even more important so did the Tinnitus.
What are the different types of tinnitus sound therapy? Tinnitus is a common hearing problem that affects at least 50 million people in the US alone. While the hearing condition can affect people of all ages, it is most common among older adults. Studies reveal that more than half of these adults suffer from chronic tinnitus, affecting them for over five years.
Chronic tinnitus usually affects adults, with the main reason being aging. Adults tend to have hardened arteries and other conditions that can pressure the ear and cause tinnitus.
However, almost all people from different age groups can experience short-term tinnitus after exposure to loud sounds. For example, you might suffer from tinnitus for a few days after attending a musical concert.
But treatment is necessary if tinnitus prevails for longer than a few days. In such cases, it can be an indication of underlying health conditions. And if not, it can become annoying and affect your quality of life.
What is Tinnitus Sound Therapy?
Tinnitus is a health condition where people think they hear sounds that are not there. This means that your ears perceive sounds that do not exist. Intense tinnitus can be debilitating and painful.
Not to mention, it can interfere with your ability to focus and affect your productivity and overall mood and wellness. So, it is only natural that you want to look for ways to get rid of this hearing condition.
Although tinnitus refers to non-auditory and internal sounds, patients can use external sound to tune their perception of tinnitus. While some sound therapy options can cover tinnitus, others can provide more robust relief.
According to the American Tinnitus Association, sound therapy uses external noise to alter perception and reaction. The ATA suggests that sound therapy, in no way, is a ‘cure’ to tinnitus. Rather, it is just a way to ease the intensity and relieve the burden on the affected patient.
Your clinician, clinical setting, and the specific product used for therapy can make it easier for you to ignore the disturbing ringing or buzzing sounds in your ear. Or, they may also control the condition causing tinnitus in the first place.
Sound therapy works on four general mechanisms, emphasizing a specific aspect. The four categories are as follows:
Masking
Masking sound-based therapy uses masking devices called sound maskers that expose the patients to loud external noise. The white noise volume is so high that it covers up or ‘masks’ your tinnitus sounds. While it does provide short-term benefits, these are only temporary.
As the name suggests, this type of sound therapy distracts the patient. It uses pleasant external sounds like nature or fractal tones to divert attention from tinnitus sounds.
Habituation
Habituation sound therapy allows the patient to regard tinnitus as an unimportant sound that does not require attention. This practice trains the brain to ignore tinnitus sounds and block them altogether. This way, tinnitus becomes less bothersome.
Neuromodulation
Neuromodulation is a sound therapy mechanism that uses specialized sounds to rewire your brain. It seeks to minimize neural hyperactivity that may be causing the tinnitus to begin with.
Types of Tinnitus Sound Therapy: Conclusion
The different types of tinnitus sound therapy use various treatment options, including masking, distraction, habituation, and neuromodulation. While they all have the same underlying goal, each mechanism works best for different people.
What is tinnitus and what are the best tinnitus therapies? People who suffer from tinnitus hear sounds for which there is no external source. If you hear those sounds, you would most likely describe them as buzzing, ringing, or hissing. The most common of all the different sounds is the ringing sound.
This is why most people refer to tinnitus experience as a ringing in the ear. The brain perceives these sounds inside the ear due to multiple reasons. It is not a condition within itself; instead, it is a symptom of another existing condition.
Tinnitus
Many people who suffer from tinnitus feel as if they have a disease that is making them perceive sounds that have no source. However, keep in mind that this is not a disease, except it is a symptom of another disease that you may have.
Tinnitus affects about 10 to 20 percent of Americans in their daily lives as a secondary symptom of another condition. Moreover, this demographic largely consists of people that are above the age of fifty; however, people of all ages can suffer from tinnitus.
You can experience the sound in either one ear or both ears. Patients also describe the sound as “head noise,” meaning that they can hear it ringing in their mind.
Some of the impacts of tinnitus cause distress in the lives of people. Moreover, it can cause or amplify the already existing depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, sleep disorder, poor concentration, frustration, and the avoidance of social settings.
The depression and anxiety are more likely a result of the confusion of the patients as to why they are experiencing tinnitus. A huge boulder comes in between routines and destroys the quality of life. Furthermore, it tends to give way to sleeplessness.
Types
There are two types of tinnitus that you will normally hear about, the subjective and the objective tinnitus.
Subjective Tinnitus
It is the most common form of tinnitus. This is when only the patient can hear the tinnitus and no one else. The frequency and loudness of this tinnitus also vary greatly from time to time.
Objective Tinnitus
This type of tinnitus is much less common. Unlike subjective tinnitus, the sounds that a person hears are not perceptions, and the doctor can detect them with the help of a stethoscope. It is most commonly a constant sound.
What can You Do?
Firstly, a patient who is suffering from tinnitus needs to have reliable information so that they can make a better judgment regarding their treatment. The problem with this is an overload of knowledge, which can be harmful to the patient in terms of decision-making.
Counseling and education are, however, emphatically important to mitigate the symptoms of tinnitus. This involves explaining to the patient about the symptom and what they have to do to counter it.
Best Tinnitus Therapies: Tinnitus Retraining Therapy
This is a very common therapy for tinnitus patients. It is a combination of counseling and sound therapy, which are both different types of cognitive-behavioral therapies. In this therapy, patients may have to interact with support groups and therapists.
It involves all the steps that reduce anxiety and teaches patients how to manage stress. Activities such as yoga, exercise, and other meditative movements are also big parts of it. TRT or Tinnitus Retraining Therapy was a program that started in 1990.
The basic framework of this therapy aims to break the natural cycle of tinnitus by habituating you to the sound. You cannot treat the perception of the tinnitus; however, you can change the negative reactions to those sounds and break the cycle.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, like TRT, implies exempt the negative association that a patient has with the annoying tinnitus sounds. It tries to train the brain to have a different response to the irritable buzzing or ringing sound by controlling the limbic system of our brain to hijack our body.
Combining CBT with tinnitus retraining therapy and sound therapy, along with other stress-reducing activities, is the best hope for tinnitus patients to have a chance at a good quality of life. Sound therapy exposes patients to different sounds so that they can mask different sounds to the ones that annoy them.
By adding another sound to the room, the brain diversifies its focus and does not zero in on the ringing sound. As a result, the person experiencing the sound can soothe and reduce the impacts of the tinnitus by introducing a contrast of attention.
Best Tinnitus Therapies: Conclusion
Tinnitus is more common than you think; for most people, it comes with the deteriorating symptoms of getting old. In others, it is a result of ear damage due to loud music. Regardless of what the reason is, there is no denying that it makes your life miserable. Fortunately, cognitive behavioral therapies help eradicate most of the problems that patients face.
Schedule a tele-appointment from anywhere in the wold with Dr. Stephen Katz at the Tinnitus Cognitive Center™ for expert treatment and consultancy services in New York. Call today at 646-213-2321.
Can you Benefit from tinnitus retraining therapy? Tinnitus is a result of the brain’s perception of sound when there is no existence of sound. It mostly emerges naturally due to aging or is a result of over-exposure to loud volumes over the course of a lifetime. Patients with Tinnitus may also experience low tolerance to sounds or hypersensitivity to high frequency sound, which is a condition known as Hyperacusis. Auditory conditions like these have no cure or proper treatment. People with conditions like this resort to therapeutic solutions that help them habituate to the problems that emerge after Tinnitus noise interruptions.
TRT: Habituation
Habituation is a process that our brain undergoes everyday in our lives. Our brain’s neuroplasticity enables us to adapt to new information and change thought processes. Each time a new situation arises in our lives, we try to adopt new habits in order to better tolerate those situations. People who live near train stations habituate to the noisy trains passing by and carry on with their lives. The brain plays an important role in habituating to loud noise by examining the sound and evaluating whether it is life threatening or ordinary. Our brain convinces us in recognizing certain sounds as safe, normal and usual.
Tinnitus retraining therapy implies the habituation model to treating people Tinnitus. It attempts to enable people to learn to live with it. It implies that there is a non-auditory component in the problems of Tinnitus, which involves the limbic system and autonomic nervous system inside the brain. This part of the brain is responsible for the link between memory and emotion, along with the fight or flight response. These systems inside the brain are responsible for the severity of Tinnitus and the stress and anxiety that is associated with It.
Tinnitus retraining therapy aims to make slightly better improvements of the reactions made because of the links between the autonomic nervous system and limbic system. Its goal is to make the person suffering from Tinnitus habituate to the sounds and perceptions its brain is making. The Tinnitus retraining therapy involves several techniques that can achieve this.
One-on-one counseling with a professional can be helpful is numerous ways. It can serve the purpose to habituate to the noise. The therapist provides the individual with tinnitus with extensive information about the condition and information specific to his condition in order to normalize the situation of irritability. It also helps in desensitizing the person from any kind of trauma and negative thoughts that are hiding in the subconscious. Psychoanalysis is a recognized and proven Freudian technique when it comes to healing the sub-conscious mind.
Counseling not only provides information about the condition but also helps you in reactions to the occurring sounds and explains ways to live life in order to get the possible results. It incorporates other methods like sound therapy in order to get the best possible outcomes. Its ultimate goal is to train your brain to ignore and not pay attention to the Tinnitus sounds.
TRT: Sound therapy
In this method, the noises and sounds of Tinnitus are interfered with certain other noise. Noises that used to interfere to Tinnitus signals can be white noise, music or environmental sounds. You can do that by wearing sound producing device in your ear, which is going to help hide the Tinnitus signals and encourage you to habituate to it.
Takeaways from TR Therapy
Tinnitus retraining therapy or TRT takes a significant amount of time and effort by the person. It can take approximately about one or two years of tinnitus retraining therapy to start showing results. This is because the process of habituation takes time, especially when you have to habituate to unpleasant and displeasing stimuli. It has shown to display better results when incorporated with other therapeutic methods. It involves educational counseling and the use of sound therapy. It strives to improve or reduce the perception of the brain to the Tinnitus signals so the brain no longer perceives the noises as dangerous and continues to ignore them.
Tinnitus is a very common condition known to affect the lives of millions of Americans. Its treatments lack adequate research but many trials prove that Tinnitus retraining therapy is better than standard self-care. It is also a relatively safe therapy with no negative drawbacks. Only negative aspect about this therapy that may concern you is that it is time consuming. Changing the neural pathways in the brain takes time; however, it can be wondrous and impactful for someone suffering from Tinnitus. Our facility provides the most proper step-by-step Tinnitus retraining program that we have tailored to each individual’s unique requirements.
If you or anyone you know suffers from Tinnitus and seeks help from a professional, visit us at Tinnitus Cognitive Center.
Tinnitus is a noise only you can hear, it can extremely pestering and can become unbearable at times. However, if it is not an indication of an underlying problem (which you can determine by visiting an LCSW-R provider), then you can train your brain to ignore it.
Loud music/ noise higher than 100 dB can be the cause of tinnitus if heard continuously for 15 minutes. However, older individuals may be experience it as a result of old age. It is quite common and is experienced by 1 in every 5 individuals.
There are hardly any cases that have shown adverse problems in tinnitus sufferers, but a few cases of insomnia, anxiety, and depression have come to light in the past few years. The best way to relieve yourself of the symptoms is to get an immediate consultation with an LCSW-R in your city. As tinnitus is pretty normal, visit the physicians if the situation persists for more than 24 hours.
In any case, before training your brain to ignore the “phantom noise”, make sure that this is not objective- tinnitus nor is it the result of a medical condition. That being established, here are a few things you can do to ignore the bothersome sound.
1. Get a tinnitus treatment/consultation
Booking an appointment at the best tinnitus treatment in New York is definitely a smart idea. They will not only offer you treatment but also provide you with recommendations to ignore the noise perception. A professional consultation can be very effective in calming the symptoms of any disease and this applies to tinnitus as well.
2. Use relaxation techniques
Some might argue that trying to relax can increase the attention on the specific “noise”. But this does not hold true, trying to relax and calming your mind can be very effective in reducing the anxiety and depression that surrounds tinnitus. Meditation with soft music or an audiobook can be very useful in driving the brain’s attention away from the uncomfortable noise. Calming teas, diffusing relaxation oils and tai chi can help you get through this troubling health condition.
3. Stay active
Being busy and concentrating on other activities can diffuse the uncomfortable ringing in your ears. A vacation, more work or even shopping can definitely help your brain ignore the tinnitus. Spending time with your children or pets can be very effective in shifting the focus from your symptoms.
4. Exercise
Exercise definitely increases the body’s stamina to cope with problems like tinnitus. The movement will help your brain pay more attention to the sore muscles rather than the nagging noise in your ear. This is also effective in reducing any insomnia symptoms that you may be experiencing as a result of tinnitus. The exercise will tire your body and help you sleep better.
Recommendation
Our first and foremost recommendation is to visit a tinnitus treatment center in New York. Once it is determined that your body is in perfect health you can proceed by following the above recommendations to dampen the symptoms.
Call today for a free 15 min phone consultation 646-213-2321
Tinnitus Cognitive Center™
Stephen Geller Katz, LCSW-R 19 West 34th Street Penthouse Floor New York, NY 10001
