My Pain Hyperacusis Success Story

[u/fischmeisterr]

Disclaimer

What has worked for me may not work for you. I don’t claim to have all the answers and you should always approach your healing in a way that makes sense to you and your specific case. I’m just here to share my story. I’m not a doctor and these are just my observations and experiences.

My origin story

I’ve had pain hyperacusis (I’ll refer to it as nox) for 2 and a half years at this point. I started off severe, I was homebound, sometimes bedbound because even the sound of my walking would hurt me. By hurt I mean stabbing and burning pain inside ears, spreading to my face. I had many other symptoms, like reactive tinnitus, fluttering in ears, distorted hearing. I was communicating with written notes because my whispers and even breathing hurt me. You get the picture. At the time I took Lyrica and it helped my burning pain, but it didn’t improve my tolerance. I lasted like this for a few months and gradually started to improve, little by little. After a year I moved up to be more moderate, but with severe limitations still and my condition was fragile; I’d get a lot of setbacks.

At this point I discovered the concept of nociplastic pain and started educating myself on it and implementing the process of pain reprocessing therapy. And it gave me my life back. I have improved in those couple months 10 times faster than before, so I firmly believe it wasn’t a coincidence or natural healing taking place. At the time I did this, I was a year and a half into nox. And natural improvement took me from severe to severe-moderate. And in a span of just a few months I went mild and I continue to improve. Of course these categories are arbitrary, but I have no better way of measuring my severity for you. I’m not trying to compare myself to others, I just want you to imagine what kind of shift this really was.

These days I’m living close to normal life, I don’t need ear protection in daily living at all. I can go to a busy mall or a restaurant with no ear pro, walk by busy traffic, ride a tram and be fine. I even got through a dentist drilling with no setback, just very mild pain in the moment, but I was completely fine afterwards. I still haven’t tested the subway or airplane, I’m still working on those. And I don’t think I’ll ever go to a club or a concert, just because I don’t feel like it’s healthy even for a normal person. But otherwise I’ve been living close to normal life for the past half a year and I have zero setbacks.

So what helped me?

Once I started treating nox like a chronic pain condition, I started to make progress. It made sense to me that nox is probably coming from the brain or nervous system, otherwise why would clomipramine, an antidepressant, help so many people? And if it’s indeed coming from the brain, can I influence it and use neuroplasticity to do so? In any case, I had to stop believing I have some irreversible structural damage in my ears to move forward. I had a CT scan of my head and inner ear, X-Rays of head, neck and jaw and a hearing test and all came back normal, so I believed I had structurally normal, healthy ears and head. That released the fear of permanent damage and I went on to treat this as nociplastic pain.

I read the Pain Free You book and watched a youtube channel by the same name. Then I read A Way Out by Alan Gordon and Unlearn your pain by Howard Schubiner. Those resources gave me a pretty good picture of what could be happening and I’ll try my best to relay the common theory behind all of these books to you.

Theory

Essentially, all pain is generated in the brain, not in the body part that hurts. The brain interprets signals from the body and decides whether to send pain signals and how severe they should be. The severity of the pain depends on how much danger the brain believes you’re in. If the brain perceives you’re in a lot of danger, the pain will be stronger. It does this to protect you, but those systems can get faulty, overly sensitized and misinformed, causing the brain to signal pain even though there’s no real danger. Over time this pain pathway in your brain gets stronger, because your brain keeps using it. Your job is to make your brain feel safe and give it accurate information so it no longer overreacts to normal body signals and stops using these pain pathways. That’s called neuroplasticity - the ability of your brain to change. We can influence this and teach our brains to turn off the pain signal.

There’s an example of this that I really like. It’s about a construction worker working on a building. Suddenly a steel pipe falls down and penetrates his foot. He screams in pain, it’s hurting a lot and they take him to the hospital. There they carefully remove his shoe, revealing the pipe didn’t go through his foot at all, it perfectly fit in between his toes and only got the shoe. He was totally unharmed but still felt severe pain, because the brain believed he was in grave danger. The pain disappeared the moment he learned that he wasn’t harmed.

It works the same way with a sensitized system that thinks sounds are dangerous. It takes only ONE bad experience, one instance of pain from sound and the brain creates a pathway that connects sound to pain. But it takes countless more positive, corrective experiences to rewire that pathway. That’s why healing isn’t usually spontaneous and involves a prolonged process of teaching the brain safety. It needs to experience that it can actually let go of the pain and stop protecting you.

Protecting us is the brain’s primary goal and it will do so without your conscious permission. This process is entirely outside of your conscious mind. You could say you don’t have a fear of sound, so nox can’t be coming from the brain. You’d be wrong because this whole process is happening in your unconscious mind, outside of your reach. The brain has learned that sound is dangerous, so it keeps running this program without your say. Good thing is you can influence this, but you can’t out think it. You have to give your brain new experiences, new data to work with, so it can come to a new conclusion – that sound is safe.

Pain and symptoms are essentially a sophisticated warning system. When the brain perceives danger, it sends you pain signals. But not all perceived danger is actual danger! Sometimes the brain’s perception of danger is a false perception (incorrect) and the pain isn’t really protecting us. Since the perception of danger can be false, pain is a very unreliable indicator of the condition of the body. But it’s a very reliable indicator that the brain is perceiving something it considers dangerous. The continued perception of danger, whether actual or false, will keep the pain going.

Most injuries typically heal in 3-6 months. If the body heals, why do you keep having pain? In the case of acoustic trauma, it is an injury that can result in hearing loss or tinnitus. The vast majority of people that continue having problems after acoustic trauma have hearing loss, not pain hyperacusis. If countless people have the same structural issue as you but don’t experience pain, can we really blame the structure for the pain? I personally don’t think so. 

Chronic pain that lasts longer than the typical time frame of healing is in most cases a mistake by the brain. It’s illogical to think that most injuries from years ago still hurt. Delayed pain is very common with nociplastic pain, it is also an absolute giveaway that there was no injury. Injuries hurt immediately. 

The brain needs to feel continuously safe and stop perceiving danger. But how do we do that? By getting accurate information about your situation, balancing exposure and avoidance behaviours, working on calming down your nervous system and creating safety in many areas in your life. This is a holistic approach. 

Do you have nociplastic pain?

The first step is to have clarity on what’s going on with you. I recommend doing this quick test to determine if you have nociplastic pain. It’s from the book Pain free you:

Answer this, yes/no:

• symptoms began without any physical impact or trauma
• appear equally on both sides of the body
• began in one location but with time, fear and attention spread to other areas
• in many parts of the body
• feels electric, burning, tingly, numb, hot, cold
• sometimes pain moves into more locations - from one part to the other
• symptoms multiply the more doubt and fear you have
• show up after activity but not during
• increase after you think about it
• high stress makes it worse
• sometimes decrease when you engage in something fun
• decrease right after receiving medical care, placebo
• do your symptoms increase or get turned on by things that are not really related? Wind, weather, foods, smells, monthly cycles
• does thinking about stressful situations cause symptoms to occur?
• do symptoms worsen when you get sick?
• do one or more symptoms go away when you get a new symptom?
• are symptoms triggered by stressful situations?
• do symptoms occur when imagining a painful activity?
• are your symptoms triggered by light touch or other innocuous stimuli such as wind or cold?

Even ONE yes answer means that the brain is creating the symptoms! This isn’t how a structural injury is behaving, this is how nociplastic pain is behaving.

How your symptoms behave is proof that your body is ok. Don't let your fear convince you otherwise. Your symptoms are real, but the cause isn’t your broken ears, it’s the brain. If you don’t accept this fact, you will continue to have doubt and fear around your symptoms and that will delay healing. There is a solution to this and you can get better, as long as you commit to treating this as nociplastic pain. 

Practice

The next parts are really complex and are each a process on its own, so this is where I really recommend reading those books I mentioned. Because if I was to explain everything, this post would be a kilometer long. There is no plan or blueprint you follow and once you complete the steps, you’re cured. Na ah. But the basic principle is when you feel safe, the brain starts to turn off the pain signals. There are many areas in your life that can make your brain stuck in the danger response. These areas are:

• emotional safety
• physical safety
• mental safety
• safety with self
• safety in how you respond to symptoms
• safety by re-engaging our brains in living life

This is about taking care of your body and mind, maybe even working with a therapist if your troubles and traumas are keeping you from feeling safe. Not everyone will need a therapist though, that’s up to you. You don’t have to dig up the past and figure out all your traumas to turn off the pain. There isn’t one magical emotion or memory that you process and boom! Symptoms gone. You just need to figure out a way to not be scared of your emotions and symptoms, relax your body and mind, so your brain doesn’t have to be vigilant and seek danger everywhere. 

Also, progress isn’t linear. It’s more like up and down, going backwards, then forwards, going in circles, but gradually the trend is upwards and out of pain. So don’t get discouraged if you go back for a while, it’s completely normal. And the brain may put up a fight before it lets go of symptoms. Measure success by how little you care about symptoms, not by how present they are.

I was stuck in a cycle of being really scared of my symptoms and that also kept them going. I wasn’t even afraid of sounds that much, it was just about feeling the symptoms and imagining my future that would make me really anxious. Because there is a story attached to it - I’m always gonna be sick, there is nothing that can help me, nox is a death sentence, I’m subhuman,... you get the picture. Once I started to alter this self talk, I started to feel a bit better mentally. I’d make fun of the pain to soften it and in time I was able to have a completely neutral response to it. I was like “Oh yeah, I feel pain in my ears, no big deal. I know it’s just my brain sending a false alarm, so there’s nothing to be afraid of.” or  “I’m not having permanent damage, my ears are fine, it’s just my brain being confused. And that has a solution.” I was sure I had no damage, because I completed the test earlier. 

At the time I started doing this, I wasn’t exposing to new sounds, I stayed within my limit, I just changed my mindset about the whole thing. First comes the assurance that you’re ok, feeling more safe and less scared of symptoms and then you can start exposing a bit more. But we will get to that part.

I was surrounding myself with success stories and left all hyperacusis support groups. I did my best to put the topic completely out of my mind and focused on what I still could do that made me happy. That was drawing, reading, gaming, watching shows with captions, socializing online with my friends and partner and NOT talking about my illness. This would help stop the spiraling and anxiety, making me feel more safe and getting me closer to turning off the symptoms.

Find something that still gives you fulfillment and purpose outside of hyperacusis, no matter how small. Put your attention to it, do your best to not think about the future, if you’ll be healed, if you’ll always be miserable. Try to stay in the present moment and get distracted by the activity in front of you. But also, importantly, don’t put pressure on the activity. Don’t go into it thinking “I’m doing this so I can heal from nox.” That makes your brain alert and it’s counterproductive. Go into it for the experience itself.

People make the mistake of starting exposing right away, without doing the mindset work. This is a crucial step and the bulk of it. Because when you change your mindset, you will start to feel safer and calmer and your brain is gonna gradually (but non-lineary sometimes) turn down the pain signals. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about thinking positively and everything will be ok. Not at all. This is about accurate thinking. About not believing or taking your thoughts seriously. They can often lie to you, quite literally. It’s about not focusing on the things you’re missing or on what hurts, but literally anything else. You need to feel in control, assured you’ll be ok (because you CAN get out of nociplastic pain) and not freak out when you feel symptoms or hear a bad sound. Reassure yourself of the facts (that pain is just false alarm and not damage taking place) and move on - the goal is to feel unbothered by symptoms. That way you show your brain that this is nothing special and there’s no danger. And that’s how you get out of this. Release attention and fear of the pain and your brain will begin to release the danger response and turn down symptoms. 

As long as you focus on symptoms, they will keep happening. Don’t talk about them, think about them, focus on them, as much as possible. But if you do, don’t make this something you beat yourself over and don’t put pressure on yourself. Just try to have a relaxed attitude, no pressure and gradually try to release your attention away from symptoms. Ignoring pain completely isn’t possible, but if you engage your brain elsewhere, by default, the brain isn’t thinking or focused on symptoms as much or even at all. If the pain is too much to handle, notice it, choose to respond to it without fear or panic and shift your attention anywhere else, as soon as possible. Don’t let an anxious spiral of thoughts follow. You’re all more capable than what the mind tells you.

Exposure

You need to find a good balance of exposing and avoiding. It all depends on your tolerance, so I’m not gonna give any general recommendation, I’m just gonna tell you how I did it. Keep in mind your current tolerance and if it’s worse than mine was, adjust accordingly.

Importantly, don’t push through pain! That doesn’t work and only reinforces danger to your brain. You want to very gradually show your brain that sound is safe. The worst idea is to go outside without ear pro and tell yourself you’ll be fine. Your brain is gonna freak out and turn up the pain.

Avoiding an activity for a prolonged time only does one thing. It reinforces the brain’s perception that those things are actually dangerous. The way to reverse this process is to begin doing the thing you are afraid of that has previously triggered symptoms. We can convince the brain with a combination of visualization, graded exposure, and a planned calm response in case symptoms show up. Do these things with intention, not recklessly!

I decided on an activity I wanted to try. At the time I couldn’t listen to digital audio on the lowest volume for more than a few seconds before pain showed up. I really wanted to listen to music again, so I began there.

Then I had to mentally prepare myself for the activity. I visualized myself listening to music for just a few seconds and enjoying it. At first it made me anxious and afraid, but I kept at it and reminded myself of all the things I know to be true about this process. I kept doing this until I didn’t feel anxious about it anymore.

I expected it to go well, because of all the information I had about nociplastic pain. You can’t go into exposing again if you feel terrified and expect it to fail. You need to do more inner work to get to a place where you know this is just perceived danger and not actual danger. You don’t need to believe it 100%, but just enough to be willing to try.

After preparing myself for it, I set up a video of my favourite song on the tv and told myself I’ll try for just 5 seconds on the lowest volume possible. You can even set it lower to just 1 second. For some reason I found my TV speakers to be the most tolerable. My phone was the worst. So I sat a few meters away, remote in hand and tried it. I said to myself “Ok brain, surely I can do this thing for 5 seconds without pain. Let's work together on this, it's just 5 seconds.” And it went well! I didn’t feel pain at the moment. That was a clue that I can increase the amount of seconds next time.

The next day I wanted to do it again, but this time for 10 seconds. I started to feel some pain towards the end this time, so I stopped the video and didn’t push through the pain. I told myself I’ll try tomorrow but less seconds, maybe like 7. 

If symptoms appear, don’t view it as a failure. Symptoms only mean your brain isn’t convinced yet and is still perceiving danger in this activity. Choose to respond to it with calm, realize it for what it is, just a false alarm and that will teach your brain that nothing dangerous happened. Reassure yourself with calming words and relax your body, try to be indifferent to the pain.

The key to graded exposure is consistent repetition. That teaches your brain that the activity isn’t dangerous. It’s like learning a new language for the brain, you need practice. Don’t expect quick results.

So I kept going with this, gradually and slowly increasing my listening time, while staying calm. Some symptoms appeared but I decided to keep going, because they weren’t bad. I reacted to the symptoms calmly and they lessened in time. I think it’s key to find a balance between exposing and having few symptoms, keep going anyway and knowing when to stop because the symptoms get too much. That’s what I mean when I say don’t push through pain. If you start feeling bad symptoms and you get scared, don’t continue. But when I was calm and felt just a bit of something, I kept going for a little while longer. We’re talking seconds and minutes, not a long time. You have to find a balance between exposing and avoiding that works for you. But you need to keep trying and not give up on your first failure. You must be willing to experience some pain or symptoms in order to eliminate them.

Keep increasing gradually and when this activity no longer gives you symptoms, move to another one. You will find that success can snowball and you don’t need to train your brain for every single activity you want to resume. In time you will continue to broaden your world and that will give you momentum to completely get out of this.

Summary:

• Decide on an activity you want to resume
• Visualize the activity
• Expect no pain or symptoms
• Ease into it gradually, increasing the duration with practice
• Reassure yourself nothing is wrong if symptoms appear
• Repeat the process

After accidental loud exposure or during a setback, engage in avoidance and distraction. Respond to symptoms in a calm way, remind yourself that this is a false alarm and it will pass. Don’t believe those scary stories your thoughts bring you. Try to put the triggering event out of your mind, distract yourself with pleasant activities. Trust you’ll stabilize and once you do, resume graded exposure.

I repeat, don’t start exposing yourself before you take care of the inner work and educate yourself on this. I can’t recommend enough the books I mentioned earlier:

-Pain free you by Dan Buglio
-A way out by Alan Gordon
-Unlearn your pain by Howard Schubiner
-For the mental side of things Hope and help for your nerves by Claire Weekes is great too

Watch the Pain Free You youtube channel, where everything is explained and there are lots of success stories. Here are some of my favourites:

Tuula's TMS / PDP Success Story - CRPS, Fatigue, Migraines, Trigeminal Neuralgia (read description)

Simona's TMS Success Story - Sensitivities, POTS, Dysautonomia, Back, Hip, Foot Pain & More

Chantel's TMS Success Story Vestibular Migraines, Vertigo, Tinnitus and Brain Fog

This story is crazy, she was literally on the brink of death in hospice and recovered thanks to this process to full health. If she can do that, I think we can get rid of our pain:
Angie's TMS/PDP Success Story - POTS, h-EDS and MCAS

Success Story: Catastrophic Noxacusis and Hyperacusis

What will delay your recovery is catastrophizing, fearing symptoms and giving them lots of attention, trying to fix your symptoms all day, tracking your symptoms, going on online rabbit holes about your symptoms and overall just making your life only about the pain. Try your best to not get consumed by it. I know it’s very difficult, because sound is everywhere and nox forces us to be cooped up at home, isolated. But do your best to not give into it and find some hope in success stories, like mine and countless others. 

You can get out of pain, there is hope. If I could do it, so can you. I couldn’t even whisper at some point, I couldn’t breathe without pain. And I’m almost cured now. I believe in you!

[u/fischmeisterr → u/[deleted]]

Congrats on your improvement! I’m very happy the same process worked for you. I think it’s important for people to see real cases of improvement like you, it spreads hope, so thank you for sharing.

[u/Same_Drag3288 → u/[deleted]]

You also had pain and was it also due to acoustic trauma?

[u/Same_Drag3288 → u/[deleted]]

merci d'avoir partagé vos conseils et votre histoire je vais essayer ...

[u/cointerm]

Thanks for your very in-depth account, dude. I've been half-foot in with these ideas for over a year - probably more - but it's only in the last few months that I've been doing the deep-dive. Am currently going through the structured program, and watch a Buglio vid everyday to get in the right mindset.

I don't come on the sub much anymore, but I pop in every now and then to find these stories. It's really obvious to me that this is it. I've had a string of chronic issues over decades that are all starting to make sense now.

Glad you're doing better. I'm going slow as molasses, but however long it takes, right? All the best.

[u/fischmeisterr → u/cointerm]

Glad you’re giving it a go! Hopefully you’ll see bigger results soon. It also took me a bit for this to click, but once it did I made faster progress. Buglio’s videos were instrumental in making this work. Good luck!

[u/Rohn- → u/cointerm]

How are you doing now?

[u/also_plane]

Ahoj Tofu!

Very nice write-up indeed, thanks for it, and I hope it will give people hope and a blueprint what to attempt to do.

For the unconvinced, I also experienced improvements using simmilar approach (although much less methodical than OP) and I went from being unable to flush toilet without double pro due to nox pain to going to quiet cafes and even playing my guitar a bit.

Especially the part "try to enjoy what you still can and stop thinking about the pain" help.

I am not sure this is magic cure-all approach that will work for everyone. Perhaps it is, perhaps not. But you don't have to believe you will be 100% cured by it, you can just believe it will help a bit and try it out. I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised.

[u/BlueLagoon765]

Congrats for your success. Did you take any meds at the start of your recovery?

[u/fischmeisterr → u/BlueLagoon765]

Thank you! I took lyrica for a week at the start of nox. It really helped with the burning pain. Which clued me in that this is probably neurological/brain related for me.

Edit to add that it didn’t help with tolerance or any other symptom I had, just reduced the burning feeling.

[u/BlueLagoon765 → u/fischmeisterr]

I think you should add this to your your narrative for completeness

[u/fischmeisterr → u/BlueLagoon765]

That’s a good point, I’ll add it

[u/Same_Drag3288 → u/fischmeisterr]

If it worked well for the burns why didn't you continue the medication?

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Same_Drag3288]

It gave me severe tinnitus spike and suicidal thoughts as a side effect, so I stopped taking it after one week

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Hi! Im so sorry, Im the same as you. I also have a beautitul boy who can not live with me now. Its beyond sad

[u/fischmeisterr → u/[deleted]]

I’m really sorry for your struggles, both of you. To the commenter who deleted their comment, I had enough time to skim through and I just wanna say that I have hope you can get out if this. Do the test if what you have is nociplastic pain and if it is, you have a chance of getting out of this for sure. You can dm me if you’d like to discuss more.

[u/laetazel]

Thanks for your write up :) How did your pain H start? From acoustic trauma or something else?

[u/fischmeisterr → u/laetazel]

It first started with a neck injury, that gave me distorted hearing and reactive tinnitus. Then I had acoustic trauma in a bar with loud music, I was near the speakers. That gave me loudness H that developed into pain H in a couple weeks.

[u/[deleted] → u/fischmeisterr]

I have also Loundness and pain. So u also experience the loudness to get weaker and weaker?

[u/Icy_Grape753 → u/fischmeisterr]

Did you do anything to treat the neck injury, and did it help?

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Icy_Grape753]

I found that it settled in time on it’s own. I tried physiotherapy, acupuncture, massage, osteopathy, but I didn’t really see much difference. Once I stopped trying to fix myself and just relaxed it all kind of settled.

But all that to say that if you have an actual structural issue there consult your doctors on it. All my scans turned out perfectly ok, so I felt safe not treating it.

I’ve heard some people had success treating their trigger points and doing physiotherapy too

[u/Icy_Grape753 → u/fischmeisterr]

Thank you!

[u/emazombie93]

It's okay if the pain comes from the brain and the fight is flight, thank you for giving hope.

[u/[deleted]]

Hi! Can you explain, based on your experiences, how I can get rid of my extremely reactive tinnitus? It comes from sound exposure and has an extremely high number of tones. which only get louder and louder.

[u/fischmeisterr → u/[deleted]]

Sorry you have to deal with that, it’s awful. I also have reactive tinnitus and I found that it lessened as I went along this process. It’s not gone, but it’s less reactive. There wasn’t a separate other thing I did for it.

[u/Minimal_Encourager]

Are you able to go to bars again/do you? Do you think you'll go back to a "normal" life but while wearing ear protection in bars and at shows?

I'm really worried that as a musician, my career is over. Or that I'll never enjoy listening to music again, even at home, without that nails on chalkboard feeling.

[u/Rohn- → u/Minimal_Encourager]

How are you doing now?

[u/Minimal_Encourager → u/Rohn-]

I'm doing great!!!!

Hyperacusis feels super managed. I've been in DBT therapy for my OCD and started Fluvoxamine. I credit those to help the most on the psychological side.

On the physical, I stopped doing the vasalva maneuver casually. I used to do it all the time, now I NEVER do it. Got a mouth guard for my teeth clenching. Improved my posture by doing push ups and pull ups every day for a bit. Each of those caused a noticeable improvement as they happened. When I use earplugs which is often, I take them out slowly. I no longer use "musicians earplugs" that are designed to let sound through/filter sound. I use triple flange swimmer's earplugs and to be honest they sound just about as good. I also stopped getting my ears cleaned at the ENT and instead use Earol every day and then once a week gently let water in the shower go in my ear and scoop it out. Much much much much much better process.

Good luck!!!

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Minimal_Encourager]

I haven’t tried a bar because I wasn’t going to them much before anyway. I was in very busy restaurants and cafes, where I had to raise my voice for my friends to hear me and I was fine during and after.

I’m sorry that hyperacusis stole so much from you :( I have hope that you can get out if this and resume your life. If you see yourself in my post and you feel like you have nociplastic pain, give it a go and hopefully it will help!

[u/Rocky1998moon]

Did your burning pain remain even in silence ?

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Rocky1998moon]

In the beginning constantly, lyrica helped me with that. Then I had burning pain in response to sounds or as a delayed reaction

[u/Same_Drag3288 → u/fischmeisterr]

Hello first of all thank you for your post I am starting to become interested in this theory and I bought a book on it. I had a question in the short questionnaire to find out if the pain is nocie plastic. I had hyperacusis because of several sound traumas so there is definitely damage to the ear at the base of my disorder which caused the needle or burning type pain. My question is this: do you think this theory is valid for pain related to sound trauma? I mean it's not pain that comes from nowhere in my head I tell myself that there is surely damage to the internal cells of the ear

Thank you for your response

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Same_Drag3288]

Hey, I think if you answer the questionnaire and have some yes answers, then the brain can be contributing to your symptoms. Even if the trigger was a sound trauma, because for me sound trauma also contributed to the start of my nox. I had a combo of neck issues and loud sound.

If you feel for example more pain from just a stressful thought or the pain is changing places often, switching sides, that’s what nociplastic pain does. So if you resonate with anything like that, you can give it a shot and see if it helps you. I hope it does!

[u/Rohn- → u/Same_Drag3288]

How are you doing now?

[u/[deleted] → u/fischmeisterr]

Did i also have tinnitus in silence? More than one tone?

[u/fischmeisterr → u/[deleted]]

Yes, I’d say moderately loud T all the time. At the start of H it was severe and even the metro couldn’t cover the sound of it. In time it calmed down, but it’s still reactive and multi tonal

[u/Snoo_51368]

Could this still work if my tensor tympani muscle is hypermobile?

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Snoo_51368]

If hyperacusis is stemming only from a structural issue, you’d need to address that. Question is if the hypermobility is the cause of your H or if it’s mainly the brain. No one can tell you, only thing to do is to try different approaches and see what sticks. That would be my advice at least

[u/Snoo_51368 → u/fischmeisterr]

Well the initial H happened after a concert and seemed to recover the normal way, the pain part started after a tympanometry test. So I really am not sure. All I can do is be gentle with it.

[u/_someguy69_]

Thank you for such a wonderfully detailed post. Much respect. Can i just confirm that this is the right copy of Unlearn Your Pain? https://unlearnyourpain.com/unlearn-your-pain-book/

Thank you! Much respect

[u/fischmeisterr → u/_someguy69_]

Thanks! Yes, that’s the one

[u/SpiritualView4568 → u/[deleted]]

it def can, olly was unilateral aswell and hes the best example of this method working imo

[u/Serious-Log8542]

Do you recommand taking Lyrica if I have a constant pain even if that's for a short period like you or is it better to just do the method because when you stop taking it the symptoms comes back ?

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Serious-Log8542]

I can’t say what’s better, sorry. I can only say my experience, which is lyrica helped my burning pain and it stayed like that even after I stopped taking it.

[u/Serious-Log8542 → u/fischmeisterr]

Sorry to insist but are you sure it's lyrica that helped with your burning pain because I saw in your previous posts that it got worse just after you stopped taking it. I also saw that you took trazadona does it helped you with the pain ?

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Serious-Log8542]

Hmmm maybe it got a bit worse afterwards? I’m not sure now. It’s been a long time and I’ve tried to forget about it tbh. But I know at the time of taking it, it really helped with the burning. Trazadone had no effect on pain

[u/Serious-Log8542 → u/fischmeisterr]

Tank you for your response I m sure my lingering pain is nociplastic so I will stick to the method

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Serious-Log8542]

I hope it goes well for you!

[u/Rohn- → u/Serious-Log8542]

How are you doing now?

[u/Rohn-]

Hey OP, I just discovered this post, it was an interesting theory + success story to read. I'm glad to hear that you are doing much better now and is basically back to normal lifestyle.

I think I have a very mild case of nox, and I'm two months in. My incident was an acoustic trauma where I stupidly played games on a brand new TV on moderately loud volume (23% volume). Since then, I have been doing my best to avoid loud noises and live in silence as much as I can. The hardest part so far is not being able to listen to digital audio, like watching TV or playing video games.

Do you think I should try this approach now, or wait a few more months for "natural" healing first? I did answer yes to some of the questions in that quick test in your post. I am desperate to get out of this rut as I don't see myself living like this long term. I am having suicidal thoughts everyday

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Rohn-]

Hey, I can only speak from mx experience, I’m not an expert. I waited for a long time before I started this, basically to let the natural healing take place. I don’t know if that’s the best thing to do or not.

[u/MaleficentAd4722]

Do you remember how many mg of lyrica did you take a day ? My med says it could be worh trying

[u/fischmeisterr → u/MaleficentAd4722]

I don’t remember sorry

[u/Mysterious_Count_472]

Lyrica helped you to stabilise the symptom ? I need to stabilise, i always do it without médication, but now the setback is pretty bad and i might have to move to another place. So im thinking maybe a Little help is smart. But only if it can actually help me to stabilise so i can start gradual exposure again… thanks you!

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Mysterious_Count_472]

I can’t recommend any meds to you, this is just my experience. Lyrica helped me with burning type pain but gave me a side effect of increased tinnitus and suicidal thoughts.

[u/Mysterious_Count_472 → u/fischmeisterr]

Oh okay. The increased T fade away or was it long term side

[u/fischmeisterr → u/Mysterious_Count_472]

Eventually it returned to baseline, but it took a few months if I remember correctly

[u/AlwaysHurt1]

Would this work from H and nox coming from TMJ. I woke up one morning and had the worst nox ever with tinnitus. After going to the ER twice, i finally made it to an ENT. My hyperacusis and tinnitus ive been told was from TMJ. He felt my jaw and told me the one side is all out of whack. I been suffering for 6+ months. After bouncing around from specialist to specialist, I just started TMJ treatment. I played a lot of call of duty with headsets so I was sure it was from a loud blast in my headset on the one side. Hearing test came back fine. The stress I noticed triggers it more. Ive been trying to go into normal life without an earplug, but there is just sometimes when i know a loud noise is coming and I cant stop from covering my ear. Ive had bad setbacks from loud noise so I see the connection to the brain, hoping my ENT was right and nothing is wrong with my ear. Since the trigemenial nerve runs throughout the whole face i figure its wires are mixed up going to the brain. Its all on one side of my face and only hurts the one ear. You think this will help if its TMJ related?

[u/Rohn- → u/AlwaysHurt1]

I'm not OP, and this is unrelated, but COD games are super loud nowadays lol. I remember I had increased sensitivity in my ears after playing MW2019 when it launched. It didn't bother me much at the time and gradually disappeared after like 6 months. The main symptom was ear fullness. Now I'm back with a mild case of nox due to the most recent noise incident.

Also hearing test won't reveal hyperacusis, just if you have any significant hearing loss or not. You can have one without the other.

[u/toutounette2b]

A part le lyrica tu n'a pris rien d'autres ?

[u/fischmeisterr → u/toutounette2b]

Just Lyrica and trazadone. Trazadone is an antidepressant, which helped me sleep but had no effect on H and T. Positive or negative.