The Injury
My tinnitus started in 2005. I was at the gym doing a routine set of leg presses when my right hip suddenly seized. The pain was excruciating, leaving me laid up in bed and unable to move for three days. When I could finally stand, my entire right side was stiff. A week later, the ringing started.
I hear my tinnitus on the left side of my head—sharing the same neurological pathways as my right leg. I’ve managed chronic pain in that leg ever since, with the tinnitus serving as a constant companion.
The Search for Relief
I struggled for years to find something that helped. Hot yoga quieted the noise for a while, but the physical toll of the heat eventually forced me to stop. Desperate for a solution, I shelled out $1,000 for a dedicated bimodal stimulation wristband.
The app's matching tools were rough, but using the band twice a day for ten minutes actually worked. After a few weeks, I noticed my tinnitus far less. The sound was still there, but my brain was finally ignoring it.
The Hardware Problem
I quickly learned that I needed to do bimodal training regularly to keep my tinnitus below my conscious threshold. But the $1,000 wristband had a severe battery drain flaw. It was always dead unless I left it permanently plugged into the wall. When I reached out for support, the company was unresponsive.
Building a Better Way
I was already tinkering with code, initially trying to use spatial audio to blend with and cover my tinnitus. When that didn't pan out—and when the wearable company eventually went defunct—I pivoted. I realized I didn't need to rely on a poorly supported, expensive, dedicated gadget. I could build my own bimodal stimulation tools using the high-quality hardware I already wore every day: my iPhone and my Apple Watch.
That's how Tinnitus Sync was born.
How I Perceive My Tinnitus
I hear my tinnitus primarily off my left ear, a few inches out. It is a hiss, with a tone in the middle of it around 8600 Hz. You might have guessed this given the defaults on the Match view. Occasionally when I get up in the morning, I can hear my tinnitus across both ears. This is what motivated different match profiles. Some mornings I train with my left ear noise. Some mornings I train with both if I'm hearing it across both ears.
Tinnitus, the kind I hear, reminds me a lot of working with my stereo when I was a teenager. If the speaker wire connection to the amplifier was loose or damaged, there would be static and noise. In electrical engineering, when a signal hits a degraded junction or a sudden change in a circuit's properties, it creates what is known as an impedance mismatch. Instead of flowing smoothly, the electrical signal hits a bottleneck and reflects, distorts, or scatters as it passes through that junction.
That is what originally got me thinking about spatial audio. It's my belief that what I hear internally is the scattering of electrical signals in my nervous system, originating in my right hip. Over the years, my experience in resolving my childhood trauma has shifted my body tension and caused changes in how I perceive my tinnitus.
Things Related To My Tinnitus
I'm close to publishing a memoir about my journey healing from this trauma. My childhood trauma had a severe impact on my right leg (details I won't go into here), so it was not surprising to me that it was more prone to injury and did not heal like my other body parts. The problems with my right leg, stretching back to childhood, defied any healing even before the gym accident and the tinnitus started.
I've had to learn to have compassion for myself when dealing with my chronic body pain and the tinnitus. I'm certain it all stems from the same underlying cause: the lifelong damage of carrying around unresolved childhood trauma. The self-compassion has been a massive help in my ability to live with tinnitus. Frankly, it's even more effective for me than the tinnitus retraining. Still, some days I can't generate that compassion for myself, so at least I have my helpful app.