As many tinnitus sufferers like myself know, the never-ending ringing in your ears can become unbearable at times. Sometimes white noise can help by making it harder to distinguish the ringing from other sounds. I know I’ve run fans in my bedroom while falling asleep to help distract me, for example.
You can use the iPhone’s Background Sounds feature to generate this noise for you. And with Airpods Pro, you can deliver the sound directly to a single ear and let external sounds in so you can still hear what’s going on around you.
Here’s how you do it.
- On your iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds
- Turn on Background Sounds
- Select the sound you want to hear. I like balanced noise for tinnitus relief.
- Insert your Airpods Pro to get them to connect to your phone.
- Activate transparency mode on the Airpods Pro to let environmental sounds through.
The background sounds will play continuously, but will be suspended for announcements from Siri and phone calls. Interestingly, background sounds are just reduced in volume by about 90% when you start playing Apple Music. There’s a setting in the Background Sounds pane that will disable the background noise while media is playing. Otherwise it will continue playing but will be reduced in volume. Background sounds resume normally after stopping any of those activities.
While they’re nice tones, I wouldn’t buy them just for masking tinnitus.
Hearing aids are expensive yes, but I’d only buy them to be hearing aids. The masking is a nice bonus feature.
Most research has found almost any sound can be an effective tinnitus masker. A lot of people that are bothered by tinnitus also have anxiety disorders and the calming tones are likely helping in other ways, like helping those people relax.
I fit hearing aids all day. Very rarely use the masker settings.
Of course it varies by tinitus sufferer.
I absolutely would not recommend dropping $7000 on a pair of hearing aides just for masking. That said, I’ve found that the fractal tones and nature sounds (not from the hearing aides) with various levels of sounds help me where simple white noise wouldn’t.
My T can be masked by white noise but in the 85-90dBm range. It’s also complicated with the fact that it’s only in one ear.
Until I discovered the right nature sounds track to help me sleep, I was barely getting 3-4 hours of sleep a night.
For sure, I tell my patients there’s no right or wrong when it comes to the type of sound.
If a certain sounds works for you, use that sound!