I had an interesting weekend where beginning on Friday I went three days barely noticing my tinnitus. I don’t really allow myself to believe that the ringing is going away anymore.  I did that a lot in the beginning and when the ringing was loud again the next day I would become very depressed.  I know that the ringing is not gone, but my brain is perhaps growing stronger and learning to re-wire itself.  I am able to ignore the sound fairly easily most of the time.  I have been in a pretty good mood the past few days as well.  It feels like a fog of hopelessness started to lift last week that has been there for about 3 months since my tinnitus started.

I woke up at 2am last night and my left ear was ringing, but I did some deep breathing and relaxed, read a few pages of a book and went back to sleep fairly quickly.  Today there is very minor ringing which is barely enough to be annoying.  It seems like these “bad” days are becoming less frequent and less severe.  The ringing rarely seems “loud” anymore during the day and sounds more like a hissing sound much of the time.  At night with my ear to the pillow is the exception – the ringing can get loud at times.  It has not been affecting my sleep very much either, and I tend to wake up the next morning with low to no ringing.

Right now I am refusing to listen to the ringing.  In my mind I picture it this way – the reason I have poor control it is because I’ve never needed to use this part of my brain before and it is “weak” as it were.  Just as you have to strengthen your muscles, I have to strengthen my mind to focus (or divert focus).