In this age of fantastic innovation man can fly to the moon or explore the depths of the oceans. Man can travel at supersonic speed, can scan the innermost recesses of his own body or look out into the depths of the universe, seeing through time itself. He can quite literally take the stopped heart out of one man and install it and restart it in another. He routinely takes kidneys and eye parts from the deceased and transplants them into the living. It seems almost inconceivable then that the battle with tinnitus rages on.
The time will surely come when tinnitus is banished with a pill or a potion. Tinnitus will eventually be dealt with in much the same way as the common cold. But until then, the absolute truth for most people is that they must learn to live with it. That is not what we want to hear, but many, if not most of us, will have been told by our doctors and physicians that at this point in time there is no certain cure available to us for tinnitus.
So, how do we learn to live with what is an extremely invasive assault on our most private of places, the very centre of our being, on our mind itself.
The human mind is undoubtedly the greatest wonder of our world. It has abilities at which we can only wonder. Its adaptability goes beyond understanding. Its inventiveness seems unlimited. It is what makes us who we are. As the centuries pass even greater wonders will come from the mind of man as he continues to drive the cause of mankind ever onwards.
Yet, this thing called tinnitus lives on to invade this space. Its sounds distract, dismay and disrupt our lives. It will not go away. It will not be silenced.
But we can deal with it. At least, we can push it aside even if we cannot send it away. Our minds are capable of ignoring the sounds of tinnitus if instructed to do so. We are capable of deciding that this noise is neither a threat to us nor that it has any great significance to us. We can cease to listen to tinnitus sounds and favour those sounds to which we attach a real importance. We can learn to habituate to them.
We do this all the time. Those that live next to a busy railway line or under the flight path at an airport hardly notice the very same sounds that their visitors find intolerable. Live with a dripping tap long enough and it becomes unnoticed. Accept that those tinnitus sounds are there to stay. Understand that they will not cause any physical harm. Turn attention towards that which is positive. Those sounds will then move to the back of consciousness. They are going to be here but we do have the option to not hear.
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