u/HopefulShallot3922

Hey all,

I'm back to living my normal life, including headphones, after struggling with progressive nox which eventually became severe (couldn't tolerate soft human voices). Basically I tried the "Ronnie" method of gradual stimulation, saw some progress but had a big setback and lost my patience and just said fuck it. I can't live like this the rest of my life, in constant fear and isolated. At this time I also read Sarno and Unlearn Your Pain and watched Buglio and things started to click.

I eventually settled on a kind of "Pascal's Wager" of Hyperacusis. For context Pascal was a philosopher who said in a strictly rational sense you should believe in God because if He exists, He will reward your piety, and if He doesn't exist you lose nothing, since there's no God to punish you. Now I'm just using this as an example for H, not trying to talk about religion in any way. The big question we all ask is whether there's something physically wrong with us or not. What I began to believe, like Pascal, is that it doesn't matter, we should believe (that there's nothing physically wrong with us) anyways. I formulated my situation to myself as follows, either:

1. There's nothing wrong with me physically and it's just my brain making anxiety and pain due to my past trauma, and it will go away as I expose, or
2. There is something physically wrong with me. If there was, then I'm fucked anyways. I would rather live my life in pain doing normal things that I want to do and seeing my friends and family, than isolating myself and still being in pain anyways. As we all who have suffered from H know, even when you isolate and protect you get setbacks and pain because you can't predict everything.

I stopped wearing plugs completely and only used them at night at home when sleeping. This is basically the opposite of common advice "protect outside but not inside so you don't overprotect". However I think this advice teaches your brain to fear the environment. I turned plugs into a treat for me I could look forward to at the end of the day, not a crutch that made me fearful. During the day I packed my schedule as full as a possibly could to keep my mind off the pain (think I read this tip from Olly). I kept telling myself "you're fine. live your life." The first week I was in 24/7 pain. The second week it started to taper off and I started listening to mellow music in high quality headphones at night. I still felt pain, but was enjoying the music so much I found myself having to force myself to stop to not stay up late lol. In the past I would struggle to survive 5 seconds of any music at any volume. Around the 3-4 week mark I was pain free except for super loud sounds. Now I haven't even thought about it in days. I didn't even want to open this sub, because it used to freak me out so much because of all the negativity, but I swore to myself months ago that if I got better I would make a success post. And others' success posts were instrumental in keeping me positive.

So yeah, that's my story. I'm not going to go on longer cause I basically have the exact same experience and beliefs as Olly: https://www.reddit.com/r/hyperacusis/comments/1i0bkkm/success_story_catastrophic_noxacusis_and/ The only thing I really wanted to add was the Pascal analogy and reversing how I treated earplugs, since I personally haven't seen those posted elsewhere (although they well may be). Wishing you all the best and a good recovery. This is what worked for me. And a special thanks to Olly and Dan Buglio.

Mike

Hey all,

I'm back at university for a Master's in History after completing a Bachelor's in CS in 2023. Since I've begun something that has really been bothering me is the misuse as well as overuse of technology in the classroom. I saw a few posts about this on the sub but they are all either quite old or more about AI. As I am planning to pursue a PhD and am very passionate myself about teaching, I wanted to hear some opinions on this sub.

Basically in every single one of my classes there's a wall of a hundred screens in front of me. I get some people will say, "I like to use X note-taking software, technology helps me do Y, etc." Fair enough, but I'd say in any given class that's at most 50% of the students. The rest are doom-cycling through social media, messages, Wikipedia, and so on the entire class. Regarding the 50% that are not completely tuned out, they will still inevitably be checking social media for a decent portion of the time. The only people using paper are myself and 1-2 older non-traditional students.

During my bachelor, I was an average student, and my friends and I belonged to the half-focused group. Going to ~75% of the lectures and paying attention for half the time was generally enough to coast by. Now that I am taking my studies more seriously, I've realized if you want to really immerse yourself in a complicated lecture you simply cannot have a giant glowing screen in front of you begging you to check your messages or look something up on Wikipedia every 60 seconds. Once I ditched tech class immediately became more immersive and I was way more focused.

Other students goofing around on all the screens in front you naturally defeats the purpose of coming without tech. As a student I am able to avoid this partially by sitting up front. But my question for instructors is, how do you feel about this? When I teach my own class in the future there's no way I wouldn't have a technology ban. Given how old fashioned some of my profs are (one of my favorites doesn't even own a phone) I'm baffled that not one of them has this policy. Do universities not allow it? I would seriously reconsider doing my PhD/teaching at a university that wouldn't allow instructors to have no-tech classes.

I'm not a Luddite against all tech in class, I just think the cons VASTLY outweigh the pros. There are of course obvious cases where tech makes sense. Presentations with images, students with disabilities, programming labs, etc. are all great use cases for tech.

Anyone can watch lectures on Youtube and read books at home. But the literal best and most unique part of university is coming together to learn and debate with peers. This requires everyone to be focused! It breaks my heart that this isn't really the case anymore. And I'm sad about the time I wasted myself before I realized this.

I ended up rambling but what do you guys think? For those of you who banned tech, how did it go? For those who don't, why don't you? Does your institution prevent it?