Habituation is real but slow. The honest clinical timeline is months, not weeks. Most structured tinnitus therapy trials show meaningful improvement somewhere between three and six months, with continuing improvement past a year. A few people habituate faster than that. A small minority take longer or need to combine therapies — hearing aids, CBT, sound enrichment — to get there.
The trajectory is rarely linear. Most people who eventually do well describe a sawtooth pattern: a couple of good weeks, then a flare-up that feels like a complete reset, then another stretch of progress. Bad days inside a good month are normal and do not mean you have started over. This is the single most useful thing to know.
Three things predict faster habituation in most studies: addressing any hearing loss with aids, doing CBT-style work on the cognitive layer (the meaning your brain is putting on the sound), and consistent low-level sound enrichment. Sleep and stress sit alongside as quiet multipliers.
Give it six months before judging whether your plan is working. Track distress, not loudness.