Welcome to The Buzz
A space for real stories, honest reflections, and small victories from life with tinnitus and hearing loss.
Here you’ll find comfort, perspective, and maybe even a laugh or two as we learn to live a little more peacefully with that damn noise.
What Tinnitus Taught Me About Staying Sane
By Marie
If you’d told me years ago that tinnitus — the stubborn, uninvited twaty houseguest in my head — would teach me how to handle life, I would’ve laughed. Or cried. Or both. Yeah, probably both.
But hey, here we are.
Somewhere along the way, what started as a source of panic slowly became something else:
- a teacher, a training ground, and occasionally… a joke, a sick joke at that!
Thinking about it now, living with tinnitus has prepared me for life’s chaos better than any self-help book ever has.
1. Tinnitus Trains You for Real-World Nonsense
Tinnitus is the ultimate life coach. The tough-love kind who doesn’t smile much and definitely doesn’t offer refunds.
When you’ve spent months or years learning to live with a high-pitched (or whatever sound you experience) companion vibrating inside your skull, the rest of life’s annoyances look… well, somewhat adorable.
⇨ Annoying coworker? Ah, what a sweetie. I host a one-person orchestra 24/7.
⇨ Loud chewer at break-time? Amateur-level annoyance.
⇨ Friend ranting about politics (again)? My brain enters “Do Not Disturb” mode without even asking me.
It’s not that life gets quieter. It’s that you learn tolerance on the inside. You learn to anchor yourself whilst everything else does whatever it wants.
2. Chaos Happens. But You Choose What You Tune Into
Before tinnitus, it never occurred to me to think about controlling noise. Why would it?
After tinnitus, I realised I could control the dial inside my own mind.
When I think about noise I notice that:
- Tinnitus doesn’t ask for permission to be an arse and have a party in my head.
- The world doesn’t ask for permission.
- People definitely don’t ask for permission.
So you learn this magical skill:
To decide what you actually give your attention to.
And once you develop that with tinnitus, it seeps into the rest of life almost magically.
⇨ Drama at work? Grey noise.
⇨ Someone trying to wind you up? Background hum.
⇨ Your mates arguing about whether or not skinny jeans are indeed still in fashion? Tuned out before sentence two.
Honestly, learning to live with tinnitus is basically Jedi training for emotional boundaries.
3. Your Brain Loves Patterns. Even Annoying Ones
Humans adapt. It’s what we do.
We get used to the weirdest things.
Your tinnitus might not go away, but your brain slowly, stubbornly, categorises it:
“Not dangerous. Safe to ignore.”
And that’s when it becomes like:
• The fridge hum.
• That neighbour who insists on informing you of irrelevant gossip about Jane across the road.
• That coworker who never stops talking but, to be fair, is consistent.
Consistency becomes this strange little comfort.
There’s something grounding about knowing exactly what to expect inside your own head. And once your brain can adapt to that, adapting to everyday chaos becomes child’s play.
4. The High Annoyance Threshold Superpower
Living with tinnitus gives you a level of annoyance tolerance that should honestly qualify as a superpower.
Things that bother other people barely register anymore.
⇨ A barking dog? “I sleep next to a jet engine every night. Try me.”
⇨ The thunderstorm of the century as I'm trying to get to sleep? Isn’t nature amazing?
Plus, I’m deaf in one ear, so I just sleep with the other one to the pillow and hey presto, what storm?
Queue complaints, loud phones, rustling wrappers, people being people…
Your brain has trained for the Olympics of irritation, and it shows. You don’t crumble at the first sign of noise. You don’t snap at every little thing like you might have at the beginning of your tinnitus journey.
You’re built different now, in the best possible way.
5. Philosophical Twist: Noise Is Inevitable — Peace Is Internal
Life will never be quiet
There will always be noise — literal and emotional.
People, problems, thoughts, memories, pressure, chaos, and yes… you. But tinnitus teaches you the strangest and most liberating truth:
⇨ Silence isn’t the absence of noise.
⇨ It’s the absence of panic.
It’s learning to breathe while life crashes and bangs around you. It’s realising you can have internal peace even in a not-so-peaceful world. It’s discovering that acceptance isn’t giving up, it’s having power and control over how you react to the world around you.
Tinnitus didn’t make life quieter (well done Sherlock!). Not at all. At first it drove me totally insane, the bastard. Then I learnt to deal with it. I know I’m probably never going to experience real silence again. And I’m OK with that, because living with tinnitus has made me mentally and emotionally more resilient in a genuinely good way.
Closing Thoughts
If tinnitus has taught me anything, it’s this:
I can’t control the noise around me, or the noise inside me, but I can absolutely control my response to it.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped wishing for perfect silence and started appreciating the messy, buzzing, beautifully chaotic soundtrack of life.
Turns out, tinnitus wasn’t always the enemy.
Sometimes, it was the lesson.
Take care
Marie
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