This is the Original Poster:
I have found what I believe works for my needs and wanted to share.
https://moondroplab.com/en/products/jiu
An additional item that aided me in my search was learning the vocabulary. When I searched for "earbuds", i kept finding the wrong items. When I searches for "In Ear Monitors" or "IEMs", suddenly i found appropriate results.
Good luck to everyone out there!
I would think that would be the preferable option, but I haven't had any luck with the 3 that I have tried. I've tried one from Google, and two from Logitech. The Logitech ones both were too quiet, and all 3 seem to have occasional missed-triggers with inline controls when my home screen is locked. For some reason, only Apple's USB-C Earbuds have behaved consistently well. I would be willing to settle for those, but they just keep slipping out of my head.
In fairness: I haven't tried Apple's specific dongle with my other earbuds. But I haven't felt much confidence with dongles in general thus far. If I can't find a USB-C set of earbuds that ticks the original post boxes, I may just have to gamble on that dongle.
Thank you again for this suggestion.
Thank you very much for this post. I realize you gave me the right answer to the wrong question, because of my poor wording. My mistake. I have updated my original post. I should have specified I am looking for "earbuds" rather than "headphones".
regardless: these articles are helpful. Thank you!
I have two phones. One has a headphone jack and isn't compatible with my carrier. The inline controls work fine on that phone. If I plug in the USBC dongle I got from google, the controls will pause, but won't play again if the screen goes to sleep. Same for the USB-C Dongles I've gotten from Logitech.
My primary phone has no headphone jack. the configs I've tried above all yield the same results.
2 phones, multiple earbud sets, and 3 different USB-C dongles. Same behavior across stock android, LineageOS, and GrapheneOS.
When I tried the earbuds from Apple, the controls work great. but they keep slipping out of my ear.
That's why I'm looking for earbuds that terminate into a USB-C jack.
Do you use a USB-C to 3.55mm adapter? If so, what phone and set of earbuds have you had success with?
I know music has already been stated, but learning an instrument during my episodes greatly helped me. It's not super interesting at first, but if your symptoms are like mine and others, sometimes just having the boring distraction of practicing a scale pattern can be that helpful. Learning the patterns of the major scale and doing that repeatedly can just be a nice way to productively occupy your mind and hands long enough for the episodes to pass when they get bad. And once you get to a point where you passively start hearing different ways to play that scale, you begin to improvise and it can actually go from boredom to fun. Another cool trick is that if you're used to typical 12 note scale stuff and associate Major sounds with "happy" sounds, it can give your brain just a little cognitive dissonance and help jolt you out of some moods if you're in a lighter episode.
Again: it's something that has worked for me. I don't think there's anything wrong with you if it doesn't work for you. But maybe it could be worth trying if you have access to an instrument.
Physical. Support your local library!