A few days ago I randomly got tinnitus out of nowhere and I didn’t understand what’s up. An hour or so ago I finally understood/learned what’s happening to me and read up on tinnitus and I’m devastated. I’m only over 20 and having this for the rest of my life as it becomes worse is heartbreaking to me. I was already overly sensitive to certain noises and am in love with music but with tinnitus I lost something precious and permanently gained somethimg that I just will need to live with. I’m heartbroken and scared. I know I will learn to accept it within a week as my brain processes this new experience but right now I just feel gutwrenchingly horrible. Especially so when I was already having some other physical and mental health issues that I’m unable to cope with and this adds to the burden. I need some advice on how to live with it and some comfort in knowing of other people going through the same. Thank you. :(
(I don’t live is US if that matters in any way.)
give it time, you brain will adapt and filter much out! - also my experience is that lack of sleep and alcohol sort of temporary suspend this “filter” :( … also search for head tapping tinnitus, a technique that gives you a few minutes of “freedom”
You can get temporary tinnitus from an active ear infection or a swollen/inflamed ear, it may not be permanent.
Were you exposed to any overly loud sounds recently, or chronically over the course of your life?
Just before that happened I was taking new meds to help with my lifelong issues of falling asleep and went to sleep with noise cancelling headphones on top of that. It was just for 2 weeks where on some days I skipped them so I took them 10 times. That’s the only major thing that changed recemtly that comes to my mind and I suspect it being the case but it may be unrelated and I will be seing a doctor rbout that. The substance is trazodoni hydrochloridum. I wasn’t listening to music very loudly but given I’ve been listening to it almost daily for ever decade as background sound to calm me down I expect my ears to have worn down and it to just have hit me in one go. D:
According to wikipedia, Tinnitus is listed as an uncommon side effect of that drug, so that is indeed the most likely culprit, meaning it is very likely not permanent. :)
Constant background sound does not hurt your ears unless it is over a certain decibel level.
meaning it is very likely not permanent
I honestly don’t believe it with my luck and I’d rather not give myself hopes and prepare myself for the worst. Today I will rest to let my brain process things and tomorrow I will investigate things more about what’s going on. I’m so disappointed with my body/situation in so many ways… :/
I just realised that I should message my psych about that as well since she brought it up unprompted and recommended it to me to try for my sleep issues.
Sudden onset tinitis should be treated as an urgent medical problem or medical emergency. There are a number of conditions that can cause it that are very nasty but reversible if caught early
Maybe you never noticed because you’ve been listening to music all the time.
But certain meds can cause tinnitus. And Covid.
Or cerumen clog
My source of tinnitus is stress/poor mental health. So living less stressful life helped me a bit to go from 6/10 to 2/10 level.
Shit, I’m essentially always stressed out and live in a bad environment. 🫠
I had that once or twice, and for me it worked to treat it like being sick. Simply doing only the minimum for a day or two and then it went away. I assume it was somehow stress related.
But this is not medical advice, better go to a doctor instead of listening to me.
I’ve had it for most of my life. Luckily, mine only comes in near silence, but my perception of the ringing is very loud. Basically I always have something around me making noise. I fall asleep to YouTube videos, and I read and work to music.
As someone who went to a lot of raves in the 90s and was a speaker hugger, I can empathize completely. I haven’t really found anything to relieve it besides ignoring it and just living with it, sad to say. But I will keep an eye on this post, hopefully someone will have some more advice about alleviation for you. (and me.)
Having never had tinnitus, I’m going to assume the correct answer is:
Shoot! why didn’t I think of that?! Will update ya in 2 minutes.
Hello?
I’m cured, gg guys.
E: Or so I fucking WISH.
Close, but we crave that needle driven through our ears.
I have transient tinnitus. As with so many things in our perception, if we fight/hate it, it’ll just drive us crazy. Like the floaters in my left eye. Easiest to accept that it happens and it’s a normal part of living in your body. After making sure it’s not got a known medical cause of course.
I’ve had tinnitus for probably close to 15 years at this point. I definitely tune it out most of the time. For a little while I was wearing ear plugs to bed, and the ringing was actually somewhat calming, kinda like my own personal noise machine. It can certainly flare up (gets louder and kinda painful) from time to time though, and the trick with covering your ears and thumping the back of your head helps when that happens, at least for me.
Just keep in mind, you can totally still live a normal life with tinnitus. There are services that can edit music for you to remove the exact frequency of your tinnitus from the audio, so that when you listen to it your body fills in the missing pieces and helps you ignore it. I haven’t used them though, so I can’t attest to their efficacy.
I got some tinnitus too but it’s luckily not audible in normal situations. I hear it in quiet rooms but it’s not something that bothers me anymore.
Hopefully yours is not super loud. It may also decrease in strength with time and it doesnt have to become worse. I’ve had mine for 25 years and it’s still not worse.
It’s not loud luckily (by default and most of the time) but it does intensify with exposure to noise (but doesn’t completely go away) which I’m not sure if it aligns with experieces of other people in the thread. I’m not sure how diverse the experiences can be. Someone in the comments tried to convince me that it’s very likely temporary due to my new meds I tried but I’d rather start adjusting regardless and make additional decisions after hearing from the doctor soon.
Great to hear that it doesn’t have to become worse. The experiences I’ve encountered when looking things up were consistent on that so it’s a bit of a relief that it isn’t a guarantee.
Yeah and you get used to it. For me it took several weeks or months to get used to it and I was constantly thinking of it. I felt very scared it would get worse but it didn’t.
If it’s not an annoying sound, its probably your fear that makes it hard to relax to. It was like that for me. The fear was worse than the sound. And then the fear goes away when the sound doesn’t get worse in weeks, and then you can finally stop thinking about it.
Have you spoken to a doctor about this? Please do, especially if you have sudden hearing loss in one or both ears. You could have an underlying issue that can be treated, but you want to get it checked sooner rather than later.
Will absolutely do. I just wanted some immediate psychological relief to cope with new experience since getting an appointment will take some time and especially so when I live in a village. I also wanted to learn more on the subject and being able to talk with people that share experience and had it for years would naturally be informative. I’m not planning to use it in place of a specialist obviously.
Ugh I’m so sorry. Tinnitus blows and in the more than 30 years I’ve lived with it I will say I’ve tried everything, spent all kinds of money on apps and gadgets and tests therapies of all kinds, and nothing works for me.
Maybe something will work for you, but the only advice I can share is do everything you can to protect your hearing from loud noises now to reduce the chances of getting more damage and making it worse. You only get one hearing capability and it doesn’t seem to regenerate and there’s currently no treatments to help it do that, so save what you have now!
I was an idiot in my 20s a loud concerts right next to speakers because it felt awesome, and I’ll pay the price for it till I die.
I’m definitely going to treasure it now now that I experienced how bad it is when you throw out the sense of hearing of the equation. I realised just how much I rely on sound for everything and how disabled I become without it. I will be adding todo’s to improve my nixos config in terms of different accessibility features regardless of accessibility type or whether i’ll be able to adjust to the pitch. Better to be ready for other scenarios in advance and it’s not like I can’t benefit from accessibility if it’s not the only way for me todo something. I’ve stopped using mouse years ago due to wrist issues so I’m (un)luckily already somewhat familiar with hunting down for niche accessibility stuff.
I’ve had it for as long as I can remember, so I’m pretty used to it. However, sometimes it gets really bad for a bit and it’s annoying.
I’m not too bummed about not experiencing true silence as I listen to music most of the time anyway.
Disclaimer: (classical) music lover, here. With a lifelong allergy to noise. Suffering from constant loudtinnitus for the last 20 years or so.
Sorry you got that. It’s a sad shit.
Mine appeared one night, out of the blue and never went away. The next day I got an appointment to have my ears tested and the doctor told me I got tinnitus plus I was starting to lose my hearing (which slowly got worse as the years went… now to the point that I’m really considering I should be using hearing aids).
I’m unable to cope with and this adds to the burden.
I was unable to, at first.
Don’t fight it. To me at least, it was making it so much worse as I was only thinking about that stupid noise, it was everywhere I looked, so to speak.
Nowadays, I’m able to barely think about it… It’s there, I can hear it, like right now I just heard them, but I can also ignore them like I will ignore the roaring traffic noise coming from the street through the windows. Not all the time though. And it shows, when I’m overwhelmed by that sad noise, my spouse instantly notices it as I suddenly look… exhausted and very much unhappy.
You might want to check with doctors (plural) what you can do but what helped me the most was to learn to consider that ugly noise part of myself… Accepting it for what it is: one more limit I have to learn to live with.
Like me getting older each year (nearing my 60s) and not being able to have all night long intense fu…, sorry, not being that physically able to provide long lasting efforts, anymore. Like me knowing for a fact I will be immensely lucky if I manage to reach 70 years old, because I’ve already been incredibly lucky for the past 20 years or so to be alive, as I should not be.
The level of noise constantly comes and goes. It mostly depend how stressed I am but it’s not just that (it would be too simple).
To this day, my spouse is impressed how ‘easily’ I learned to live with those two whistles constantly blowing their uninspired single note and loud music directly into my ears … but the real secret is that I did not learn to control them. I just capitulated to their invasion of my personal space. The only thing I did is to study those noises (as there is a narrow range of variations between loud as fuck and just loud) and teach myself to be fine with them being there.
One thing that often helps me a lot when it’s too loud to ignore it is to go out for a (long) walk, without any music/podcast… nothing in the ears. Just me listening around to nothing but random outside noise… Birds singing are great for that, plus they’re great to watch too, and I will often try to walk wherever I know I might hear them, even though there are quiet a few whose cute voice I can’t hear that well anymore.
Herbal infusions can also help, or even a good tea. And just having a calm chat with my spouse talking about mindless things (we would avoid talking politics or anything stinky like that).
I’ve been procrastinating on meditating and yoga for years but this may finally prompt me to train my mind to keep comtrol with the experience.
Regarding visiting multiple doctors it’s something I haven’t thought of and is a great idea!
I also talked with my psych earlier via phone and she said that the meds she gave me are safe and that she never heard of something like this so I guess it may not be entirely related to them but I don’t take her full word for it.
I’ve been procrastinating on meditating and yoga for years but this may finally prompt me to train my mind to keep comtrol with the experience.
I don’t do ‘official’ yoga/meditation but I have my own version of those, including the long walks I mentioned, and it helps. And not just with tinnitus. With my whole life.
Regarding visiting multiple doctors it’s something I haven’t thought of and is a great idea!
Not even considering the possibility that one of them may be incompetent, it’s always a good idea to get multiple opinions. Doctors are people and like all of us they may not know everything about the issue at stake.
To give you an idea how it matters: had I only listened to the first eye doctor I consulted (a years long practitioner of mine), I would have lost my eyesight some 10 years ago. Becoming legally blind (I had already scheduled a formation to learn to read Braille). I did not become blind (not yet) for a single reason: I decided to get another advice. Thx to a a first doctor that mentioned some experimental type of thingy that was going at some place I had never heard of, and then took on herself to ask the doctors doing that experiment to meet me, and thx to them considering I could be good candidate, almost 10 years later I still see. To me, it is not just a daily miracle (it is, even though I’m a non-believer, it is the miracle of people being able to do scientific research and experiment), it’s also an acute reminder that one should never settle with a single opinion ;)
And btw, the first doctor was not an incompetent one. She was just not aware of the latest things that were going on.
I also talked with my psych earlier via phone and she said that the meds she gave me are safe and that she never heard of something like this so I guess it may not be entirely related to them but I don’t take her full word for it.
And you should not. Get another opinion. I’m not saying those meds are responsible (no idea about that) but they could be. And that possibility alone warrants itself a visit to a different doctor, if not two. Se my previous remark.
by constantly having white noise going in the background (usually TV or music), or having headphones on listening to something.
Audio stimulation tends to tampen out the tinnitus.
I’ve been listening to music in the background for over decade and have a small fan running 24/7 because I can’t stand hearing certain sounds in silence so I get at you mean but also here’s the thing that for me the pitch intensifies with sound which makes it hard to find balance between the two problems. :(
