HEALEARS · exposure & response-prevention

Turn toward the sound.

Tinnitus stays distressing the way an obsession does — not because of the sound itself, but because of the alarm response and the checking and suppressing it triggers. Fighting it harder makes it louder. This trains the opposite: stay with the sound, drop the safety behaviours, and let your brain learn it's safe. The aim is not silence — it's that the sound stops running the show.

Before you start. Experimental wellbeing prototype, not a medical device or a cure. See an audiologist first — especially for one-sided, pulsatile, or sudden tinnitus, or any hearing loss. Keep volume low. This is not for acute crisis or severe distress; stop and seek support if distress climbs.

The principle — borrowed from OCD therapy

Bothersome tinnitus behaves like an OCD loop: an intrusion, a threat appraisal, then compulsions (checking "is it still there?", masking, avoiding silence). Each compulsion gives brief relief and quietly makes the sound matter more. The fix is exposure with response prevention, not suppression:

Predict
Before each round you rate how bad you expect it to feel.
Approach
You pull back and launch your own tinnitus seed onto the line, filling it with blooms. Aiming at the sound — and nothing bad happens — is what rewires it.
Response prevention
When the urge to mute or check rises, you practice letting it pass instead of acting on it.
Tolerance, not silence
The sound stays present on purpose. You're building the capacity to carry it calmly.
Expectancy violation
Afterward you rate how bad it actually was. Predicted-worse-than-real is the score that matters.

What does yours sound like?

Tinnitus comes in different flavours. Pick the closest, then tune it until the preview matches what you hear. This becomes your seed — and tells the app what kind of competing sound to build.

pure & narrow ⟷ broad & noisy

No exact match? Get as close as you can — you can recalibrate any time. Keep it just barely audible.

Before you begin — your prediction

You're about to spend 90 seconds with your sound present, on purpose. No muting, no checking. First, predict how it'll go — this is the belief we're going to test.

0 = completely fine · 10 = unbearable

🫧 0 · 🌸 0
Tolerance — staying with it (the sound stays present)
⏳ 90s
Urge to mute / check — let it pass
…or do nothing and ride it out

You stayed with it. How was it, really?

Rate the round you just finished — honestly, looking back.

0 = completely fine · 10 = unbearable

Session ledger

This session+0 🌸
Petals saved0 🌸
Daily streak0 days 🔥
Sessions · total blooms0 · 0
Expectancy violation (predicted − actual distress)0
Approaches (turned toward the sound)0
Urges ridden (resisted muting/checking)0
Percept statuspresent · safe · not running the show

This isn't a clinical measurement. The win isn't silence — it's that you stayed, the urge passed, and it was more bearable than your brain predicted. Repeat that and the prediction itself changes.