The Brain Charity

I got tinnitus in January 2021. I was 20, I had covid, and I had been listening to music through earphones while I was ill. When I got better, the ringing stayed. It has been there ever since.

The days were manageable. The nights were not.

If you have tinnitus, you probably know the pattern. You get through the day without thinking about it much. Then the television goes off, the house settles, and there it is. Not louder exactly, but suddenly the only thing there. You lie in the dark listening to it and start doing sums about how many hours are left before the alarm.

For a long time I assumed my tinnitus was getting worse at bedtime. It took me a while to understand that something else was going on.

The sound has not changed, the room has

Tinnitus is not a sound coming from outside you, so there is no volume control on it. What changes at night is everything else.

During the day you are surrounded by noise you never notice. Traffic, a fridge humming, other people, your own footsteps. All of it sits in the background and gives your hearing plenty to do. Tinnitus is competing with all of that, and it often loses.

Then you go to bed. The room goes quiet. The competition disappears, and the one sound that never stops is the only one left.

This is sometimes described as a contrast effect. It is not that the tinnitus has grown. It is that the gap between the tinnitus and the silence around it has widened, and your attention falls straight into that gap.

Understanding this did not make my tinnitus quieter. But it did change how I felt about bedtime, and that turned out to matter more than I expected.

Why the worry makes it worse

There is a second thing that happens at night, and it is worth naming.

Tinnitus makes people anxious, and anxiety makes tinnitus harder to ignore. Once you start dreading bedtime, you go to bed listening for it. And when you listen for something, you find it.

I spent months getting into bed already braced. That anticipation became part of the problem. Not the cause of it, but part of it.

Nobody can talk themselves out of that overnight. But it helps to know that the dread is a normal response to a genuinely difficult thing, rather than a sign that something is going wrong with you.

Giving your hearing something else to do

The most useful thing I found was not silence, and it was not blocking the sound out either.

It was putting something gentle in the room.

The general idea is called sound enrichment. Rather than trying to cover the tinnitus or drown it out, you add a soft, uninteresting background sound so the contrast is smaller. Rain, a fan, waves, low static, a radio turned down further than feels sensible. The aim is not to stop hearing the tinnitus. It is to stop it being the only thing there.

A few things I learned by getting them wrong.

Quieter is better than louder. If the background sound is loud enough to mask the tinnitus completely, your hearing tends to work harder to find it again the moment the sound stops. Sitting just underneath the tinnitus works better than sitting on top of it.

Boring is better than interesting. Music with words, or a podcast, gives your attention something to follow. That can help you drop off, but it can also keep part of your brain awake.

Consistency matters more than perfection. The same unremarkable sound every night beats a different clever solution each week.

Habituation, and why it is slow

The word that gets used for what happens next is habituation. It is the process by which something stops registering as important, and your brain gradually filters it out. It is the same reason you stop noticing a clock ticking, or the sound of your own house.

Two honest things about it.

It is slow. Not days. Usually weeks or months, and it is different for everybody.

And it is not a straight line. There will be days when you barely notice it and days when it is all you can hear, and those bad days are not evidence that you are going backwards. That was the part I found hardest to believe, and the part that turned out to be truest.

Habituation is also not the same as the tinnitus going away. Mine has not gone anywhere. What changed is how much of my attention it takes, and how much of my evening I spend thinking about it.

What I would tell myself in 2021

Get a background sound going before you get into bed, not after you have been lying there for an hour.

Stop reading forums at one in the morning. The loudest voices online are the people having the hardest time, and they are not the whole picture.

Talk to someone. A GP, an audiologist, or anyone who has it. I spent far too long treating it as something to get on with quietly.

And expect it to take longer than you want it to.

Five years on, I still have tinnitus every day. I also sleep. Both of those things are true, and for a long time I did not believe the second one could be.

Jack Bridge has had tinnitus since 2021. He runs Sonovo, a UK company making sound enrichment devices for people living with tinnitus.