While participants with chronic tinnitus reported more difficulties hearing in noisy environments than controls in some studies, participants with chronic tinnitus also more frequently reported symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. It is interesting to note that participants in one study with chronic tinnitus did not report more noise exposure than controls, despite this finding in other studies. This latter finding is not surprising given that participant recall limits the accuracy of self-reports of noise exposure and that exposure episodes’ frequency and repetition affect the participant’s recall.

Due to its potential connection to aging, many people believe that tinnitus is only a problem for adults. However, research in publications has indicated otherwise. Tinnitus affects between 4.7% and 46% of children in the general pediatric population and among children whose hearing is good. It also affects between 23.5% and 62.2% of children who have hearing loss. However, these estimates may not relate to real-world situations.

Some experts say that the numbers for children’s tinnitus prevalence are too low because of problems with communication. On the other hand, it could be said that kids lie about having tinnitus when they are asked to please the person asking. A subjective experience, tinnitus in children may be very difficult to know its extent in the population. In adults, its assessment may be quite different.

Often, chronic tinnitus-related distress (TRD) happens along with or instead of psychological or psychosomatic symptoms like depression, anxiety, or other somatization symptoms that may or may not happen in the context of clear medical factors like vertigo, sweating, blurred vision, headaches, periods of weakness, pain, nausea, or shortness of breath.

People who said they had chronic tinnitus were more likely to have weaker middle-ear muscle reactions, fewer cochlear nerve responses, and more activity in the central auditory pathways.

Reports indicate hearing loss linked to getting older before age 65 is more common in men, especially in people who have been around noise a lot. Also, in line with what has been written, people with chronic tinnitus were more likely to have had a concussion and show signs of anxiety and/or depression.

People who say they have tinnitus are often given the wrong diagnosis and think that their doctors do not understand or appreciate their condition. This feeling that their doctors do not understand can make their condition worse by making them depressed, stressed, tired, unable to cope, losing the ability to do daily tasks, having poor cognitive functioning, or even committing suicide. It is a very serious condition when we consider its far-reaching effects on someone’s life and their psychological difficulties.

There is a lot of agreement around the world that specialized cognitive-behavioral therapy should be used to help people with tinnitus. This is because there is more evidence that this type of therapy works to reduce patients’ distress and impairment. However, it has been suggested that CBT could also change how people experience tinnitus, but this has not yet been tested across studies.

Numerous options are available in addition to those that doctors provide, both online and elsewhere. When searching online, it is important to be wary of any claims that they can “cure,” “reduce,” or “eliminate” tinnitus. You can download many sound-therapy apps for free or very little money and use them on your phone.

One new app is receiving favorable attention. The MindEar app uses chatbots to help people with tinnitus use a virtual cognitive-behavioral therapist. The app also uses sound therapy, mindfulness, and meditation techniques to help people tune out the effects of their tinnitus in their minds.

For anyone with tinnitus, the thing to remember is that there are ways to learn to cope with it and to utilize various means at their disposal in a self-help mode. All is not lost, and the future will bring even better resolution to those affected by tinnitus.

The post Do You Hear What I Hear? The Bane of Tinnitus appeared first on Medika Life.

Have you ever thought that sound might have colors like white, pink, or brown? The naming may be something new, with the possible exception of white noise used in some therapeutic environments to protect confidentiality.

But the concept of specific sounds and how they may be helpful therapeutically has been receiving renewed attention since a non-scientist, Irv Teibel, began recording nature’s sounds in 1969. The true benefit of these aspects of nature and other sounds in the human aural spectrum would take time to be realized as having broad utility in healthcare or activities that require freedom from distraction.

Noise, or should we refer to it as sound differences according to the wavelength or frequency it comes across, is delineated in several different “colors.“ The colors currently identified include white, green, brown, pink, violet, blue, and gray noise. There’s even red noise, a form of brown noise by another name.

If all of this is confusing, it is understandable. Still, it is an interesting aspect of how sound, a.k.a. noise, might help treat psychological disorders, reduce stress, or assist us in our everyday activities.

Clinicians use white noise machines to mask discussions in their offices. Many small machines producing this audio signal are readily available to anyone. The frequency is 40 Hz to 60 Hz and may vary according to its use. Each noise, except white noise, may have a specific service and produce different effects on anyone listening to it.

Of course, black noise is the absence of sound (silence), as it would usually be called. The intricacies of these noise productions or the physics involved will not be discussed here but only offered as potential research for anyone interested in sound production and how sound may be manipulated for best use in, for example, music in therapeutic settings, work, academic efforts, writing, etc. And sound has found a home in assisting those with ADHD.

Empirically, white noise therapy has been able to improve specific tasks affected by ADHD symptoms, including speech recognition and reading and writing speed. Educational performance is one of the prime areas where any intervention, such as sound utility, might be effective. Without early intervention, this disorder has a negative effect on their lives, their educational efforts, their career opportunities, and also the social interactions they may pursue in the future.

White noise has been used in a variety of settings with several patient populations. It has been found helpful in intensive care to decrease the arousal of patients and help with sleep onset. White noise has also been found to have shown some behavioral and psychological improvements in elderly patients with dementia and schizophrenia.

It is also helpful in word and visual-spatial tasks in young and elderly adults. Students have shown improvement in new word recall compared to periods of silence. In addition to these benefits, white noise has also been proven to have some ability to diminish impulsivity in children with ADHD and working memory.

How might we use sound in our daily lives at home and work? Many will choose to listen to certain types of music to energize them, others another style to create a quiet background against which they want to work. I suppose that’s why an album of recordings of Gregorian chants made the hit list of popular music charts. The album sold four million copies worldwide. The artist Ravi Shankar released his “Chants of India” when a music company wanted to continue their “chants” success.

One experiment tested several sounds to identify which might promote concentration and verbal reasoning in an office environment. The six different sounds were classified into the music group, including running water sound (RW), pure classic music (PM), classic music with lyrics (ML), and noise group, including intelligible speech (IS), mechanical noise of keyboard and printer (MN), and telephone ring (TR).

The varying results were attributed to the task, and the type of sound played. On the one hand, different activities and tasks consumed different mental workload resources, and on the other hand, different types of background sounds might have different effects on each kind of mental workload resource, so that the effects of one background sound might vary when subjects engaged in different jobs.

Summing it all up would indicate that sound and how we utilize it can benefit us in all of our environments. Sound downloads and videos are available for free download (some have fees) at the following:

https://www.freesoundeffects.com/free-sounds/ambience-10005/https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/nature/

Other sites are available, but carefully read the terms of use. YouTube has many videos with sound.

The post The “Colors” of Sounds Have an Effect on All of Us appeared first on Medika Life.