Most people trying sound therapy for the first time make the same mistake. They turn it up until the ringing disappears. The silence is a relief, and leaving the volume there feels like the obvious move.
It isn't. Getting the volume wrong is one of the most common reasons sound therapy stops working — or never works at all. The good news is that finding the right level is not guesswork, and once you land on it, it tends to stay right.
Why louder isn't better
The goal of sound therapy is not to drown out your tinnitus. It's to change the way your brain relates to it.
Your auditory system is constantly sorting sounds into foreground and background. When your tinnitus is the only sound in the room, your brain classifies it as significant and keeps it front of mind. When other sounds are present, the classification loosens. Over time, with consistent exposure to sound at the right level, your brain can be trained to reclassify tinnitus as background noise — the same way you stop hearing the hum of a refrigerator within minutes of entering a quiet kitchen. This process is habituation.
Complete masking — setting your therapeutic sound loud enough to cover the tinnitus entirely — feels like relief, but it works against habituation. Your brain never has to practice ignoring the tinnitus because the tinnitus is hidden. When the masking sound stops, the tinnitus snaps back to full attention. Some people find they need louder and louder sounds to get the same effect, exactly the opposite of where you want to go.
Consistent, complete masking also has a more immediate problem: it's hard to sustain. A sound loud enough to cover your tinnitus is often loud enough to disrupt concentration, conversation, and sleep. The volume that should be helping you starts generating its own friction.
The mixing point
The target volume for sound therapy has a name: the mixing point.
At the mixing point, the therapeutic sound and your tinnitus are audible simultaneously but blend together, rather than one competing with or drowning out the other. Your tinnitus is still perceptible, but it sits alongside the therapeutic sound rather than on top of it. The contrast between the sound and the silence around it is gone, and with it goes most of the urgency.
This is the level that actually does the neurological work. It keeps your auditory system engaged with external sound without removing the tinnitus from earshot entirely. Gradually, with enough repetition, the blended sound-plus-tinnitus becomes the new baseline your brain learns to treat as unremarkable.
Finding your mixing point
This is easier to do than to describe. Try it in a quiet room, ideally when your tinnitus is at a typical level rather than during a spike.
Start with your therapeutic sound at the lowest setting where you can clearly hear it. At this volume, your tinnitus is almost certainly louder than the therapeutic sound. Slowly raise the volume — pause for a few seconds at each step — until the therapeutic sound and the tinnitus begin to blend. You should still be able to hear your tinnitus, but it should feel less isolated, less sharp, less foregrounded.
That's your mixing point. It will usually be lower than you expect.
A few things to check: at the right volume, you should be able to have a conversation without raising your voice much. You should be able to fall asleep without the sound feeling intrusive. If you can't do either, the volume is probably too high.
Adjusting for context
Your mixing point is not a single fixed number. Your tinnitus perception changes throughout the day and across situations, and your volume should move with it.
During focused work. Cognitive load reduces tinnitus distress for most people because your attention is occupied elsewhere. In these conditions, a lower volume often works better — enough to soften the contrast with silence, not enough to become a distraction in its own right.
At bedtime. The bedroom is where sound therapy typically needs to do the most work. The environment goes quiet, your defences are down, and tinnitus often feels loudest. Many people find they can keep the overnight volume slightly below their daytime mixing point because the brain is less actively monitoring the environment when drifting toward sleep. Run the sound through the whole night rather than setting a timer — the middle-of-the-night wake-up is when quiet rooms do the most damage.
During a spike. When tinnitus is temporarily louder, the instinct is to turn the therapeutic sound up to match. Resist this. Chasing the tinnitus with volume teaches your brain that spikes warrant a response, which reinforces rather than diminishes their significance. Hold your usual volume, let the spike run its course, and trust the consistency over time.
What your ears are telling you
A few signals that your volume is off:
- Too loud. You're straining to hear conversations. You feel fatigued or vaguely headachy after sessions. You're using the sound to feel immediate relief rather than as background. Bring it down.
- Too quiet. The tinnitus sits clearly in front of the therapeutic sound and feels just as demanding as it did in silence. Move it up in small steps.
- About right. You're aware of both sounds but not focusing on either. After a few minutes, the tinnitus has softened into the background. This is the feeling you're looking for.
The mixing point is a small window, but once you've experienced it, you'll recognise it quickly.
Consistency matters more than precision
It's worth saying plainly: the exact decibel level matters less than showing up. Research on sound therapy for tinnitus consistently finds that duration and consistency of practice predict outcomes more reliably than the specific sound type or volume — within reasonable range.
Getting the volume approximately right and listening every day is more effective than obsessing over the perfect level and listening inconsistently. Start roughly right, pay attention to how your tinnitus responds over the first week or two, and adjust from there.
How StillWell helps
Knowing the principle and applying it in real life are different things. StillWell is designed to make the mixing point easy to find and maintain. The volume interface is built with gradual increments that suit the precision this approach needs, the sound library is curated for sounds that blend naturally with tinnitus rather than competing with it, and the sleep session format keeps audio running through the night without cutting out.
Most users settle into their mixing point within a few sessions. The ringing doesn't disappear on day one. But the way it feels in the room starts to shift — less urgent, less central, less like the only thing in your ears. That shift, sustained, is how habituation begins.
