How Long Does it Take to Habituate to Tinnitus
How Long Does it Take to Habituate to Tinnitus? How long habituation takes varies by the individual. To fully habituate to tinnitus it can take sometime. Habituation describes a mental process by which your brain is able to ignore and filter out repetitive sensory information, and we do this with sound. This is how most people can go to a restaurant and and not just be drowned out by people talking around them.
They can have a conversation with their family and friends and actually hear what they’re, saying in a very real sense. Your brain can turn the volume down on. Sounds that don’t matter, so you can focus on the ones that do so.
We use sound there’s a there’s, a tendency to use our sound environment as a way to monitor our surroundings. For danger, and – and you know, evolution has wired us to always be looking for danger and like we evolved more towards paranoia than like calm relaxation right like it’s, it’s better to be wrong and safe than to ignore danger And and die right, we evolved use sound as a way to monitor the environment for danger and when the sound of something when we hear the sound of something dangerous, we evolved to have this fight-or-flight stress response for a short period of time.
Parasympathetic nervous system
We can run faster hit harder, you know deal with whatever dangerous thing is happening and normally, when the danger resolves, our parasympathetic nervous system turns on and kind of, flushes out the stress hormones and over like 10 or 20 minutes.
We return to homeostasis and calm down, but in the case of tinnitus it never actually goes away, and so you can kind of get stuck in this state of fight-or-flight. And so, when you’re suffering from tinnitus, you are reacting to the sound of your tinnitus of it as if it was the sound of something dangerous and experiencing a very real fight-or-flight stress response.
But the good news is that, thanks to this mental process of a bitumen, you can change that reaction and when you do, when you remove these obstacles that are preventing you from processing the sound like you would SNe.
You know people talking in a restaurant or the sound of a refrigerator running your brain can start to ignore it more and more of the time if you found this clip of episode. One of the hear me out podcast helpful educational or useful in any way.