You don’t have to ‘learn to live with it’. Hypnotherapy for tinnitus could help you to forget all about it.
I’m truly sorry to hear that you’re having problems with tinnitus. I really am. I have seen lots of clients with this condition and fully understand how it can wreck lives if left untreated. If you’ve recently been diagnosed with the condition and are finding it difficult to cope then please do get in touch as soon as you can. The stress response to tinnitus becomes a vicious circle very quickly because stress itself will frequently increase the volume of the noise.
Don’t leave it until you’re mired in a bleak swamp of depression. Hypnotherapy could help you and the sooner we get started the better.
Hypnotherapy really could help you get rid of that buzzing / ringing /grinding (etc) sound in your ears. I have worked with it for ten years and have a good number of former clients from Reading, Wallingford, London, Thame, Didcot and Oxford who could tell you the same thing, if only I were permitted by my professional body to use testimonials.
If you don’t live anywhere near my geographical bases in Reading or Oxford then never fear, I also offer hypnotherapy for tinnitus online, using vsee, zoom or whatsap. I have also designed an online package of therapeutic interventions which are are available at www.thehypnotherapystore.com. Face to face hypnotherapy for tinnitus is always best. However, when this is impossible I’m pleased to be able to be flexible in offering alternatives.
You don’t just have to ‘learn to live with it’
Click here to read Google reviews which stand as testimony to my work with tinnitus and other 
conditions. The most recent review, at the time of writing this page, is for tinnitus.
There are plenty of people out there who have gone from abject depression and anxiety in the face of tinnitus to being happy in the knowledge that it no longer has to wreck their quality of life. I have worked with them, they have left me reviews and they have invited me to speak to other tinnitus sufferers in Oxford and other places.
Tinnitus can be helped. Change is possible. Careless doctors have sometimes told their patients that they’d have to “learn to live with it”. This is a terrifying prospect because if you can’t learn to live with it, you have only one alternative and nobody wants to consider that.
You don’t have to. Here’s why!
You don’t have to learn to live with it. You can beat it. You can learn to become so unaware of it that it may as well not exist.
You can learn to be so comfortable with it that even when you do notice it, it simply doesn’t bother you. When you have achieved this goal you can be said to have ‘habituated’ to the sound. Your brain no longer sees the sound as being a threat to your well-being and so screens it out and stops bringing your attention back to focus upon it.
Of course, I can offer no guarantees and no promises. I do my best, on this site, to explain that hypnotherapy does not provide miracles. Nevertheless, I have worked with a good many people who have come to realise that tinnitus does not have to be a life-destroying condition. Read on for more details!
Recommended by local audiology departments
“Hi Paul. I’d like to come and see you for tinnitus. The nurse at the audiology department recommended you”.
I’m fortunate to be in the position where medical specialists in Oxford are recommending that their patients come to see me for help. I’m grateful for their confidence in me and I return the favour. White noise generators and other medical interventions can help you. The expertise of doctors with regard to tinnitus is increasing year by year.
White noise can take months to help you. Happy to wait? Why not consider Tinnitus Retraining HYPNOtherapy?
White noise generators are very helpful but on their own can take months to take their full effect. I could offer help right here and now.
I won’t tell you to bin the advice you’ve been given, I’m not so arrogant or irresponsible, but I could teach you other techniques and approaches which will render the use of medical interventions more likely to succeed. You needn’t suffer or wait any longer. Call me for a chat and I’ll explain, in more detail, how I could help.
To summarise what I offer, I take the TRT (Tinnitus Retraining Therapy) approach and add mindfulness, hypnotherapeutic and counselling/psychotherapeutic techniques to the mix.
I teach people to see their tinnitus differently. I teach them to change their perspective so that tinnitus is no longer seen as a threat.
Once the brain stops perceiving tinnitus as a danger, it begins to learn to simply edit the noise out of awareness. You may not totally get rid of tinnitus but you can stop hearing it so much. You can learn to relax around it. You can, therefore, just stop being bothered by it.
Wouldn’t that be a relief!?
This process is called ‘habituation’. In actual fact there are two strands to this process. The first is habituation to the response, that’s to say your emotional response to tinnitus. This is key and when this is achieved you will then begin the second process of habituating to the sound of the tinnitus itself.
It’s the same process which stops people hearing the sound of the nearby motorway after a few weeks or months of living in their new home. It’s that same process which led me to stop hearing the sound of the chiming clock which my grandparents gave to us, long ago, before they moved away to South Africa. At first it kept me awake at night or woke me from slumber. After a while I was only aware of it because my girlfriends used to complain that it had kept them awake. I had habituated. Over time they generally did too.
You could learn to habituate to the sound of ringing, grinding, chirruping or whatever that sound might be. The sound is still there. You just stop hearing it anymore. It might as well simply not exist.
I could also help you to resolve underlying anxieties
Please don’t take this as a criticism but it’s true to say that 75% of people with tinnitus learn to cope with it without a problem. The people who do have a problem in habituating themselves to tinnitus are often those who are generally stressed, anxious or both. Tinnitus is something else about which an already anxious person can learn to fret, worry and catastrophise.
Sometimes it can prevent you from worrying about the truly serious things which are going on in your life and, in this way, can be unconsciously seized upon by the brain as being the preferable focus of anxiety.
Learn to deal with whatever that other thing might be and the need to focus upon tinnitus, instead, is removed.
Salviati and Bersani et al (2014) found that half of their tinnitus afflicted subjects suffered anxiety, depression and other conditions prior to the onset of tinnitus. There will have been more of them who worried too much, over-thought things but whose reported levels of anxiety were beneath the radar.
Resolving this will often prove to be the key to helping you habituate to tinnitus. Tinnitus, in this respect, can merely be a sign that other issues are in need of resolution. It may seem impossible to believe right now but many people come to be grateful for having had tinnitus, it causes them to sort out their approach to life and to themselves in general.
Sometimes, unconsciously, people become worried about their tinnitus because it distracts them from whatever else would otherwise bother them.
I work with anxiety and depression every day. I’m a fully qualified psychotherapist and would be more than glad to help you to deal with tinnitus and all other associated problems.
Why does tinnitus bother you and not the next guy?
You’d be surprised how people can become habituated to stress and only realise how anxious they’ve become in the long term when they begin – often for the first time – to look at their emotional selves.
Why is this important? People who are anxious or depressed are more likely to fixate upon the sound of tinnitus and to judge it as being a threat. They will also see it as being a greater threat than those who aren’t already anxious or depressed.
You’ve already trained your brain. I can help re-train it
When we fix our attention on something ‘dangerous’ and perceive it as being negative we can unwittingly train our brains to amplify our awareness of them (Salviati and Bersani et al (2014))
This is why arachnophobes see house spiders as being so ‘HUGE’. They’ll scream that ‘it was massive!’ when, in fact, it was an inch or two from toe to toe. So, if you’re amplifying the sound of your tinnitus you’re going to make it still worse and then you’ll react by becoming more anxious and depressed, fixating upon it all the more. Vicious circle time.
Hypnotherapy could help you to cut this vicious circle and end the never-ending loop of feedback. If you live in or near Reading, Holborn, Oxford, Wallingford or Thame then hypnotherapy could help you.
You can do it. I’m here to help you!
I work, therefore, to help people find a way to resolve underlying anxieties / stress whilst helping them to habituate (become used to) to the noise of the tinnitus. You can reverse the amplification process. If you live in or near Reading, London, Oxford, Thame or Wallingford I could help you to do it.
‘I’m grateful to have had tinnitus. It has made me sort the rest of my life out!’
I never thought I’d hear such a thing but it’s true. Tinnitus, being linked to stress, can help people to face up to things they’d refused to deal with for years, even decades.
I think you’ll find it an unexpectedly enjoyable process and, whilst I can’t officially quote success rates, I can tell you that my tinnitus clients, to date, have all gone away, happily habituated – not to mention generally happier and calmer.
Many have done so within a handful of sessions.
Others have taken longer. If you’re extremely depressed or highly anxious at the time of our starting work then this is a complicating factor and may mean that our work requires more time. If you have a particularly difficult past or present day life then, again, this complicates things and may mean that you’ll need to invest more time and patience into the process.
It remain s true, however, that habituation is possible. I know that there are some people who have tried to habituate in the past and who have failed. I have read some of their stories on fora devoted to tinnitus. Their sad testimonies are not, however, proof that habituation is a dud. After all, the fact that some people die of cancer or heart attacks does not discredit medicine. Nothing will work for everyone at any one point in time.
I can’t offer a guarantee, of course, because everybody is different. However, I simply give you these facts in order to reassure you that it can be done, that habituation to tinnitus through hypnotherapy can be achieved..
A word on tinnitus fora
Sufferers of tinnitus will sometimes look for relief and answers online. Some will join the fora available on this subject and will engage with the other users of those sites. That’s understandable but it’s not something I’d necessarily recommend.
People will often join fora specifically created for sufferers of a certain condition and as they progress to a solution they’ll stop visiting. Perhaps some will linger a while in order to encourage others but generally speaking they’ll just drop away in time.
However, there are some who will frequent these fora in a state of constant rage at the condition they are experiencing and who will rage with equal vehemence at those who suggest that there might just be a solution. After all, nothing has worked for them (yet) and so why would it work for anybody else?
With regard to tinnitus I have experienced the rage of those who claim that habituation is a fraud. Dr Nagler, who espouses habituation and tinnitus retraining therapy, is a frequent target of these really quite militant people. I’m by no means as prominent in this field as he is but I’ve had the occasional message proclaiming that habituation to tinnitus is a fraudulent promise and that I am a charlatan for suggesting otherwise.
I would urge you to put these people to one side. Habituation as a means of dealing with tinnitus has a sound body of research behind it. The fact that some people haven’t yet found it helpful doesn’t negate the fact that others have, as the following google review testifies:
‘Paul helped me to come to terms with Tinnitus. I went to him feeling very stressed and completely at my wits end with the noise in my ears. Very quickly, he was able to convince me to forget all about it for most of the time and to get back to my usual happy self, feeling confident that I could resume a normal life with this condition. His approach was kind and caring and he used Mindfulness techniques
of meditation which have been really effective – especially as he recorded these sessions and emailed them to me so that I could listen at home. I feel so much better! He was brilliant.’
There are others who have found the approach equally helpful. Perhaps you could be the next.
Be the next one to set his or herself free
Be the next person to habituate to tinnitus! You can do it! People from Wallingford, Oxford, London, Thame and Reading have done so already and there’s nothing different or special about them. They simply learned that tinnitus could be seen differently and when this happened the noise just began to drift into the background, ever more distant until it simply was of no importance to their lives anymore. You could be next.
Research and tinnitus
Berit Scott, Per Lindberg, Leif Lyttkens, and Lennart Melin (1985) found that the group of tinnitus patients treated with hypnosis experienced a significantly greater rate of improvement in symptoms over the control group. ( Scandinavian Audiology, 1985, Vol. 14, No. 4 : Pages 223-230).
Attias J, Shemesh Z, Shoham C, Shahar A, Sohmer H (1990) found that 73% of subjects using self-hypnosis saw their tinnitus disappear. The control group made minimal progress. ( Scandinavian Audiology 1990; 19, 245-249)
I’m trained to help and ready to begin
David Collingwood-Bell is the national expert on how to use hypnotherapy in the treatment of tinnitus. He suffered it himself and trains people to use those same approaches which help him. He trained me to use his approach and I have adapted it to improve it further. I didn’t choose to specialise in this area. People began to call me with regard to tinnitus before I’d said a word about it on my website.
I’m glad they did, I really enjoy helping people to reclaim their lives, their sleep, their mental health and their futures. You could too. If you would like some hypnotherapy for tinnitus in London, Thame, Oxford, Wallingford, Reading or Didcot then consider giving me a call. Leave no stone unturned, there is help for you out there. Perhaps I’m the person who will provide it.
Another alternative to face to face hypnotherapy for tinnitus
As I explained above, face to face therapy will always be superior. Online therapy through Zoom is also perfectly effective. There are many people, however, who can’t afford several sessions of therapy or who can’t yet face the idea of working with a therapist for a whole bunch of reasons. It’s for these people that I designed and built www.thehypnotherapystore.com. With videos, ten hypnotherapy recordings, a carefully structured strategy for using the recordings and other resources besides, the Tinnitus Package the closest thing to working with me in person and costs less than a single person to person session. Visit the store to read more about it or jump straight to the package itself by clicking here.
Resolved! Hypnotherapy Reading operates in Reading, Wallingford and Oxford, also seeing clients from Didcot, Cholsey, Moulsford, Abingdon, Thame, Haddenham, Long Crendon, Henley, Benson, Nettlebed, Crowmarsh Gifford, Watlington, Wallingfordand other areas of Oxfordshire and Berkshire. Hypnotherapy, in the hands of a skilled and ethical hypnotherapist, can help you make big and long-lasting changes to your life.