While there is no cure for tinnitus, there are ways of managing it. While it’s experienced by millions of people, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to tinnitus management, especially because it’s a subjective phenomenon. So let’s discuss the options available.
Counseling
With counseling, you meet with a licensed mental health professional or psychologist. The most common type of counseling for managing tinnitus is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which has been endorsed by the American Academy of Audiology and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association as an effective, evidence-based management approach.
CBT cannot and will not make tinnitus go away; rather, it emphasizes controlling your emotional reactions and learning coping techniques with the aim of making tinnitus less bothersome and your reaction to it less extreme.
Acoustic Therapy
Acoustic therapy is the more official term for “sound masking,” or using another sound to mask tinnitus. Acoustic therapy is not about drowning out the sound of tinnitus with something loud. You can use any quiet, gentle sound for sound therapy, from soft music to the hum of a fan to white noise from a sound masking library.
Tinnitus Retraining Therapy
Tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) is actually a combination of counseling and acoustic therapy. By using sound masking and focusing on taming your emotional reactions, the goal of TRT is to teach your brain to treat tinnitus as background noise and ignore it. This might sound impossible, but our brains do this all the time, tuning out sounds it deems irrelevant.
Hearing Aids
Because 90% of tinnitus cases occur with hearing loss, many tinnitus patients already wear hearing aids, and many people with hearing aids also have tinnitus. Modern hearing aids can help with tinnitus as an extra sound therapy tool: many of them come with tinnitus sound masking libraries, and you can fiddle with the background noise suppression features to get the same effect.
So, What Actually Works?
The good news is that all of these options can be incredibly effective. As we said above, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to tinnitus management, so you may get more out of one option, but that doesn’t render the others ineffective.
CBT is great for people who have extreme emotional reactions to tinnitus or who experience anxiety or depression because of their tinnitus. Acoustic therapy and TRT are helpful in minimizing the overall perception of tinnitus. And hearing aids are a great option for those who have both hearing loss and tinnitus. It all depends on you, your tinnitus and your needs.
To learn more about tinnitus management and how we can help you get started, call Aspen Audiology today to make an appointment for a tinnitus evaluation.