Week 10/2026: Hearing things
Week of 2 March 2026
This was week 2 of my second year uni course. I wrote about it on Substack, but in a nutshell, I volunteered to do a presentation (which is worth 20% of my mark) in week 2, so I spent most of last week putting that together. I finished it off this week, uploaded it, and spend the rest of this week monitoring the discussion board chat about the ideas I’d talked about in my presentation.
So that’s out of the way and I can catch up on the things I didn’t do while I was working on the assignment.
This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
Hearing things
You might remember in the middle of last year I trialed some hearing devices for a while to see if this would help me with my tinnitus.
It didn’t.
However, the audiologist referred me to her colleague in Melbourne, who is an authority on tinnitus, to see if they could help. But by the time I got my shit together to make an appointment they had retired from clinical practice.
Not to worry. The tinnitus expert has a colleague, P, who they have mentored and who has taken over their clinical work, and I was eventually able to get in to see them this week.
So.
The consultation
It was a long and intense online consultation where I got asked a lot of questions and got given a lot of information about the neurophysiology of tinnitus, hyperacusis (sensitivity to loud sounds), and a thing I’d never heard of called Tensor Tympani Syndrome, or TTS, which sounds very scary.
What it is, is there are two small muscles in our ears, one of which is the tensor tympani, which is attached to the malleus bone in our ear. Its job is to protect the middle ear from loud noises by pulling on the malleus bone and tightening the eardrum.
So if I’m perceiving sounds as very loud and threatening, this little muscle is working overtime and can result in my eardrum being tight, reduced airflow in my ear, and symptoms like increased tinnitus, dizziness, muffled sounds and pain in the ear.
TTS can also be triggered by jaw clenching, tooth grinding and TMJ (temporomandibular joint dysfunction), which I don’t actually think I have.
It’s all about safety
Audiologist P said whatever is going on, I need to know that my ear is not being damaged by the sounds that trigger me, and it’s all part of a spiral of anxiety and fear. I’m on hyper-alert a lot of the time, so when I encounter a loud sound, it triggers certain responses in my brain, which causes further anxiety and stress, and makes me even more hypervigilant and reactive to sound.
Something like that.
It’s a whole mess of things, which probably flow through to a range of other physical symptoms, and they all come from a subconscious feeling of being unsafe.
It was all very interesting and made a lot of sense. What I’m experiencing is because my brain is trying to protect me from a world that is too loud and too bright for me.
So many options
Obviously we spoke about a lot more than this in two hours! And I have a smorgasbord of options to choose from to manage this, so I’m working through all the material P sent me to decide what to do next.
The very first thing is to set myself up with a little ‘toolkit’ for helping myself habituate to my tinnitus. Habituation is something I’d heard of but I didn’t really know what it was. I thought the idea was to mask it with white noise or something so you couldn’t hear the tinnitus sound, but this is not the case. You pick a neutral sound that you like (white noise is not that sound, nor is anything that sounds like waves or rain or light autumn breeze) and you stream it at a volume that is just audible so you can still hear the tinnitus. And what is supposed to happen is, because you don’t hate that sound, your brain won’t pay it any attention and it will learn to associate the tinnitus sound with something that isn’t a threat and eventually learn to ignore that too.
In environments where I don’t feel unsafe I can walk around with this safe sound using open ear/bone conduction headphones so I can still hear everything around me. When I’m somewhere that’s starting to get too loud, I can use filtered ear plugs as well so I can still hear the safe sound as well as being able to hear everything around me but those sounds are damped down. Then in places I feel really unsafe (walking in traffic, the open plan office, the bus), it’s time to bring out the noise cancelling headphones and really ramp up the sound to protect myself. If it’s really bad, I can add the ear plugs. It’s like different layers of protection for different situations. And places that might feel safe one day might not the next, so I can change what I do if I have to.
P gave me a lot of other suggestions as well, including different types of therapy that might help. But it’s a lot to take in all at once so for now I’m focusing having the right tools in the right places. And the great thing is, I have all of these things already so I don’t have to go out and purchase more equipment.
Amazing!
Habit tracker
- Go outside first thing (7 days): 5/7
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 7/7
- Hip exercises (5 days): 0/5
- Walk (7 days): 5/7
- Carry a notebook with me when I walk (7 days): 5/5
- Thinking time (4 days): 3/4
- Morning planning routine (4 days): 3/4
- Mid-day journalling (7 days): 3/7
- Work shutdown (4 days): 0/4
- 9.30 shutdown & dim lights (6 days): 1/6
- Evening routine (7 days): 7/7
Summary of the week
Some things I’m proud of
Researching and writing a 1500+ word presentation, preparing slides, recording it, editing it and uploading it in a little over a week. That is a shit tonne of work, and I did a good job of it.
Leaving the office when it got too overwhelming one afternoon instead of making myself suffer through the noise.
This week I learned
- I learned a lot about tinnitus and hyperacusis. Way too much to put here.
- How to move the position of the camera on a PowerPoint recording.
- I learned (well, I knew the first bit) that the term ‘Middle East’ is a product of 19th century Europe, where it was used to describe a region east of Europe but west of the ‘Far East’. It’s a term based on a European frame of reference, rather than the geography, cultures or languages of the places, or how the people who live there see the places.
- The ‘Near East’ was the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire
- The ‘Far East’ was East Asia
- The ‘Middle East’ was everything in between.
- What I didn’t know until this week is that there is a move to use the term SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) instead of ‘Middle East’.
This week I noticed
In the bookshop
Customer in a bookshop talking about the Scrabble dictionary
- Bookseller: They seem to have made these shorter and fatter.
- Customer: That might describe the people who use them.
- Bookseller: ……………………….
- Customer: I’m including most of my family in that.
On Youtube
A video called “I Tried the World’s Simplest Productivity Trick (it worked)”, which is over 29 minutes long.
If it’s that simple, why do you need 29 minutes to explain it? (I didn’t watch it to find out.)
Ordinary magic
Last week, I got the wonderful Ordinary Magic oracle cards from Kylie Dunn, one of my favourite creators.
This week I was contemplating some news we got at work, and I wondered what the cards might tell me.
For context, I struggle to read and understand cards. I need them to tell them what they mean.
I think this one did.
One website I looked at said star anise, which is on this card, represents “protection in a chaotic time”, which I think is rather timely.
What’s making me think?
Elizabeth—ThisWomanLifts on Instagram—shared her perspective, as a person with Iranian heritage, about the US assault on Iran. I think nuance is something that is missing in a lot of places at the moment. She said:
In a world which tries to make everything black and white, and ignores nuance, as a half-Iranian I want to explain that you can actually feel lots of things at once.
You can be happy that a madman dictator has been killed. You can be joyous that IRGC commanders are being eliminated. You can be regretful that Khamenei and his cronies will never be held accountable for their crimes. You can be fearful for the future. You can be grateful to the countries that went in and took him out. You can be skeptical about the intentions of the countries who went in and took him out. You can be devastated about civilians being killed in this war. You can be anxious about how many more will die. You can be uncertain about how things will pan out. You can be hopeful for positive change.
From Plague Poems—@plaguepoems on Bluesky
Quoting something
he saw online
my work friend noted:
that being anti-Al
is like being
one of the only
people actually trying
not to get bitten
in a zombie movie, and as I adjusted
the straps on my mask
and looked at his
unmasked face, I said:
I know how that feels.
Reading
- Let Them by Mel Robbins
- She’s All I Need by Jen Morris
Watching
- Resident Alien
- Doctor Who ‘The Evil of the Daleks’
Listening
- Dreamworld by Pet Shop Boys
About The Author
