tinnitus

Liberal Irishman

Does tinnitus drive you crazy?

looksee

Liberal Irishman, could you open up your question a bit? Do you have tinnitus? Have you attempted to do anything about it?

Yes I have tinnitus, and no, while it is annoying, it does not drive me crazy, because I think that the more aggravated you get about it, the worse it will get.

It is not considered to be a medical problem so it may be helpful to discuss it here and get other people's experience. There is a lot of useful information on the British Tinnitus Association http://www.tinnitus.org.uk/ - I will put that link in the useful links thread.

Liberal Irishman

Yes I do suffer from quite severe tinnitus. I totally understand when you say that ‘the more aggravated you get about it, the worse it will be’.

However, there are nights, probably when the tv has been on for a while (too loud as per usual), that I really think “how the hell am I going to live with this for the rest of my life”.

Thanks for the link I’ll check it out.

PS. I’m amazed that it is not considered to be a ‘medical condition’! I suspect this may be because there is currently no way to detect or measure it.

I’d like to here other people’s stories.

Justjens

Also a sufferer for nigh on 16 years, self inflicted by loud noises (work related). Unfortunately you just have to 'manage' it and not let it control your life. My hearing was and still is very sensitive, I can still hear a pin drop and hear the TV when my OH cannot, so we end up turning it up for her, and everyone thinks I'm the deaf one!!

Social engagements and pubs are difficult, and not just because beer makes the tinnitus worse, but it's hard to concentrate on, and hear, who you are talking to.

Still suffering an aggravated bout at the moment, thanks to the fire alarm in Lidl that went off unexpectedly yesterday just above the check out, it should calm down in a day or two, he said hopefully:).

I don't go anywhere on the farm without my custom made ear plugs, they are a must, never know when you need to beat the living daylights out of some inanimate object with a sledge! It is well worth the extra few bob to get them made and use them whenever you are in noisy environments, or if you know there is going to be an unexpected loud noise, like dropping saucepan lid, hum, as this has the affect of naturally blocking your inner ear.

If you have trouble sleeping try a 'white out' noise, I sometimes use a fan heater/blower beside the bed, usually after I've been chainsawing for a few hours:eek:.

But the biggest change I found was when I stopped drinking alcohol, but to be exact, giving up beer.

Mars Bar

Yep, I have it bad and I'm only 22.

I have a degree in Music Technology and Production too.

It drives me bananas. I get nervous when a room goes quiet and all I can hear is the ringing in my ears. It's horrible. Wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy...

We knew from when I was 12 that my ears were screwed but as a self conscious teenager going into secondary school, the hearing aid just wasn't an option. So what did I do? I started learning to play the drums with no ear protection and when I was old enough, I started going to more concerts with no ear protection and it got worse and worse. I have no one to blame but myself really.

I now never play the drums without ear plugs or let any body I'm teaching in to the drum shed without ear protection. I always have my Vic Firth ear plugs for concerts. They are great for taking out the harsh top end of guitars and pianos.

Regarding white noise, I set my radio between stations so it's just that tuning in sound. I also have an application on my phone that allows me to set the noise I want like white noise, car sirens, rain, thunder and so on so forth...

looksee

My hearing aid has a setting called 'zen' that plays soft random 'music' without affecting the ability to hear. Just kind of bingling noises (that's a technical term ).This acts as a distraction from the tinnitus. It does work except that I only have one hearing aid so I still have tinnitus on the other side! It is not an instant cure as you have to 'train' your brain to use the hearing aid.

Mars Bar

looksee wrote: »

My hearing aid has a setting called 'zen' that plays soft random 'music' without affecting the ability to hear. Just kind of bingling noises (that's a technical term ).This acts as a distraction from the tinnitus. It does work except that I only have one hearing aid so I still have tinnitus on the other side! It is not an instant cure as you have to 'train' your brain to use the hearing aid.

That's really handy!

Liberal Irishman

looksee wrote: »

My hearing aid has a setting called 'zen' that plays soft random 'music' without affecting the ability to hear. Just kind of bingling noises (that's a technical term ).This acts as a distraction from the tinnitus. It does work except that I only have one hearing aid so I still have tinnitus on the other side! It is not an instant cure as you have to 'train' your brain to use the hearing aid.

Thanks, I’ll definitely check it out. Condition gets worse when I have to strain to hear things. Ringing, hissing and humming. Hopefully hearing aids will help!

ongarboy

Almost 3 years ago, I got my ears syringed due to a blockage of ear wax. After getting them done, I started noticing a constant whooshing or hissing sound. I went to a doctor and due to issues about the quality of my hearing in general, they recommended a referral to the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin where I got a catscan which found nothing that contributed to my hearing impediment or tinnitus.

I remember getting really down about the tinnitus diagnosis and reading up the online literature didn't help me much - the whole you have to learn to live with it scenario. I almost let it control me as I could think of nothing else but the tinnitus for about a few weeks (while at work, in the evenings, especially at night before I went to sleep when it was at it's most noticeable).

However, after a few weeks, I ended up going to Oz for a holiday. I'm not sure if the distraction and fun I had during this trip made me not think about it (or hear the actual tinnitus noises) constantly and made me think that maybe it doesn't have to be all consuming. As time went on, I could go a few hours each day without thinking about it.

Over time, this extended into days without thinking about it. I can honestly say this year that I can go for weeks without thinking about it and sometimes have to remind myself I have it at all. As I'm typing this now, I can hear it as clearly as the first day 3 years ago that I became aware of it as I'm allowing myself to pay attention to it. Perhaps I always had it but did not pay attention to it or else the syringing aggravated something to make it more acute. The point I guess I'm making in this long winded post is that you can train yourself to not even notice it by focusing on other things. Certainly, the key is not to let it preoccupy you as you end up focusing on nothing else. If you go through a bad patch, try and do something immediately to distract yourself - go for a run, watch a good dvd, phone a friend for a chat, listen to meditation tapes.

The doctor at the time said (perhaps unhelpfully) that some people have been known to be suicidal over it. Perhaps their level of tinnitus is far more acute than what I suffer from that would drive them to such thoughts. This contributed to my low feelings at the time but I'm so happy now to know it has not taken control of my life. I still have hearing difficulties but not so much that it really affects my quality of life/job/socialising etc (eg I miss certain comments made in noisy situations etc). I have hearing aids which in reality only marginally benefit my hearing. (my defect is clarity rather than volume of speech and multiple tests/trials with different audiologists haven't as yet addressed this by being able to provide me with aids that I feel help my issue - here's hoping future technology will address this!).

Liberal Irishman

Yea I’ve had this since I was a kid. Sometimes it does make me feel like life is very unfair. Suppose feeling sorry for myself won’t help.

gmac102

yup i have it for as long as i can remember, its always there every night.... i always think to myself its the day playing back in my ears. sometimes its worse than others..im almost deaf in one ear and have perforate ear drum and lots of scaring in my ear canal due to ops over the years, not sure if this contributes to it or not... while it can be annoying at times i know no different

Lardy

Long time sufferer of Tinnitus here too. I go to weekly meetings that help with coming to terms with deafness or being hard of hearing. I found that this helped me a lot with my own issues surrounding me being hard of hearing, but i also found that i was kind of the exception to the rule with regard to Tinnitus. Yes, through out the day, it can get very loud and irritating, but for me, when it comes time to go to sleep and i start to relax, the sounds i hear are actually very calming and relaxing. I mean, when i start to relax, the normal high pitched buzzing sound that i get all day, turns into the sound of my own heart beat. There is still a slight buzzing noise, but i find i can kind of drown it out by just listening to the heart beat. I'm sure others may find this a bit odd, but its how i manage it when i need to relax or get some sleep.

looksee

Lardy, can I ask you about the meetings you go to? Who organises them?

Lardy

Yeah, no problem at all. I didn't want to post them in my original post because i didn't want it to look like i was touting a business.

The meetings are run by an Irish charity called DeafHear. I put a link to their website in the interesting links post at the top of the forum.
They also run free courses that help deaf and hard of hearing people understand the causes of deafness, and how the hearing works. Also advice on hearing devices etc.

Just to add, i am in no way connected to this charity, i have only benefited from it.

looksee

Thanks Lardy, that's interesting.

Solair

I stumbled upon this thread and thought that I would ask for a little advice, tips, or any suggestions for ways of dealing with this?

I'm in my 20s and suffer from pretty weird tinnitus. It's like a high pitched tone, which I can match up to about 10.5kHz on a tone generator. It sounds a little bit like an engineering test tone on a sound desk, or the feedback you would get if you put a microphone too close to a speaker.

Most of the time it's not too bad, but if it kicks-off it's bad enough to make it really difficult to sleep. I will actually wake up in the middle of the night with it and just be completely unable to sleep unless I put on music to drown it out. This leaves me absolutely exhausted at times. Mostly I sleep with the radio on.

The background to this is kind of complicated. I had a typanoplasty to repair a hole in one of my ear drums when I was in my teens.
Unfortunately, I do not have the full details of this surgery as the ENT surgeon at the time wasn't all that communicative and tended to only give the most minimal details and also I was quite young at the time and probably didn't ask enough questions.

Anyway, the surgery basically involved taking a bit of muscle tissue from under my scalp and grafting it into my eardrum. It also, and I am unsure exactly why, involved widening my ear canal slightly. This has had the side effect of causing it to be unable to clear out its own debris. Wax / dead skin etc builds up and I keep getting external ear problems resulting in needing to get the ear cleaned by vacuum at an ENT clinic ever year or two. This tends to really aggravate the tinnitus as the micro-suction used is extremely loud!

I want to get the full medical notes from my teens as the ENT surgeon that I attended recently seemed to think that the operation was more involved than just patching up my ear drum. It took >4 hours!

Oddly enough, I also work with sound a lot, but mostly just editing voice etc. However, i am taking a short module of sound engineering as part of a university course I'm doing at the moment and I am really finding it very hard going.

I was doing a bit of mixing and I have found it has made the tinnitus absolutely unbearable. I just cannot even bring myself to put on headphones again.

In general, I don't listen to music anymore on headphones as I find the whole experience unpleasant. The beats just interact with the noise in my operated ear and I get a kind of painful sensation if the levels suddenly change. So, all in all, I just don't really listen to music anymore.

But, to get back to the main point, ... Has anyone had any success with dealing with this kind of tinnitus?

I am tempted to experiment with some masking techniques and was even considering writing some software to generate masking noises tailored to the noise that I am perceiving.

Any products out there that could do this?
Or, has anyone tried this and had good / bad results?

Lardy

If you are experiencing any pain due to sound, you really need to go back to ENT to have this investigated further.

With the tinnitus, a good hearing aid will usually help, but it would be best to see an Audiologist who would be better placed to offer advice. I do know DeafHear offer Tinnitus management courses free of charge. I will be taking this course sometime in the new year. You will find a link to their website in the Useful Links post in this forum.

Hope you get it sorted! Matt.

Solair

There isn't all that much hearing loss in the ear, so any hearing aid type device would only be to mask the internal noise.

In general though the ear's just never quite right since it was operated on.

Tinnitus, it pops/clicks and the audio levels vary day to day depending on what it's up to, the canal blocks up as it produces almost no wax (damage to the canal lining due to surgery), and little things like I get twitches in my scalp around the ear if I wear glasses / shades which means I usually wear contact lenses for comfort's sake.

I suppose I just have to put up with it!

Mars Bar

Solair wrote: »

I stumbled upon this thread and thought that I would ask for a little advice, tips, or any suggestions for ways of dealing with this?

I'm in my 20s and suffer from pretty weird tinnitus. It's like a high pitched tone, which I can match up to about 10.5kHz on a tone generator. It sounds a little bit like an engineering test tone on a sound desk, or the feedback you would get if you put a microphone too close to a speaker.

That's exactly what mine sounds like.

Oddly enough, I also work with sound a lot, but mostly just editing voice etc. However, i am taking a short module of sound engineering as part of a university course I'm doing at the moment and I am really finding it very hard going.

I was doing a bit of mixing and I have found it has made the tinnitus absolutely unbearable. I just cannot even bring myself to put on headphones again.

I'm a qualified sound engineer who hasn't touched a mixing desk since graduation due to tinnitus.

In general, I don't listen to music anymore on headphones as I find the whole experience unpleasant. The beats just interact with the noise in my operated ear and I get a kind of painful sensation if the levels suddenly change. So, all in all, I just don't really listen to music anymore.

I used to go the whole summer between college years barely listening to music coz it would make my ears so tired.

But, to get back to the main point, ... Has anyone had any success with dealing with this kind of tinnitus?

The only thing I do really is have a white noise generator (lightening bug) on my android.

cynder

No, im lucky ive had since i can remember, at least from the age of 4 anyway. im used to it. If it wasnt there i dont know what i would hear, ive never heard silence. Im a bit deaf as well, got my first hearing aid a few months back at the age of 30.

When i was little i used to have nasty dreams of rippled sand and a cotton reel that was turning and never ending, i later figured out these were images i was bring up to account for the noise i was hearing, im my dreams i would have a squealing noise only its not, it was tinnitus.

My tinnitus would be a constant eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... Some times its oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo and less often its mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I dont concentrate on the tinnitus i always have background noise except bed time and i try and concentrate on images rather than eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Jordo141

Yep another sufferer here.

I've been aware of it for the last 2 months or so now... I say aware because I believe I'd had it as long back as I can remember; and anxiety only led me to realize that I never have proper silence.

Btw, I'm only 19; and surprisingly enough I did absolutely nothing to cause it: no physical trauma, no loud noise, no tumor pushing on aural nerves, no infection, no wax. Pretty much either random or anxiety.

It drove me crazy for the first month. I was thinking "How can I live with this".

But it DOES get better. My advice: distract yourself. It sounds silly, but do anything but think about it. When I go out on the town for example, I'm enjoying myself so I don't notice. Now days pass without me noticing. I because I am sorta used to it, when I notice it (like now for example), it's very low in volume., If I was stresses then it's loud. So jut don't worry so much.

That's my story. I'm glad there's actually a community on this site to discuss the issue with.

bogmanfan

I've had it for about 15 years now. Caused by a combination of gigs/clubs and ear infections when younger. Mine is low, and can only be heard in a very quiet room and I can honestly say that it really doesn't bother me at all.

Habituation is the key to coping with tinnitus. Basically you have to train your brain into ignoring the noise. Our ears are bombarded with noise and sound, and your brain has to filter out the important ones from the unimportant. Think of how your ears prick up when you hear your name mentioned in a conversation. This is your brain identifying this sound as important and alerting you. The conversation up to that point was simply being tuned out.

Now think of the hum from the fridge in your kitchen or the fan in your computer or Xbox. When you go into the kitchen, or first turn on your pc, you notice the noise, but it soon disappears. Your brain simply tunes these sounds out and you cease to notice them. Basically tinnitus is similar. It's a constant (but hopefully low) background noise. If you look for it, or focus on it, it seems louder as your brain is identifying it as important. The best advice I would give anyone is to stop listening for it, or paying attention to it. Avoid quiet rooms or total silence. If you find it loud at night, leave a window open, or play a Cd while going to sleep. In no time your brain will cease to focus on the sound, and will simply tune it out. It won't disappear, but you will stop noticing it.

However, do be careful around loud noise etc. I still go to gigs regularly (was at one last night actually) but I always wear earplugs to protect my ears. Same in nightclubs or while using the mower or power tools.

Solair

Yeah, I agree.

I recently did a course in sound engineering and it was a complete disaster from that point of view!! The noise in my left ear is clearly quite loud, but I had tuned it out over the years and stopped noticing it.

When I started doing the practical elements of the course, the noise became extremely noticeable as I was obviously listening out for subtle noises and it became very difficult to ignore it.

It has taken me weeks, with a lot of lost sleep, to try and get my brain to re-filter it. It's still not quite pushed to the background.

I actually couldn't do the various practical elements of the projects as I just cannot really hear musical subtleties, even though I can hear speech fine and have no problems learning foreign languages.

I find things like loud drum beats actually physically painful and they sound more like a squelsh too.

It's a little different in my case, as I actually know the cause of the tinnitus. I had a lot of surgery done on that ear - tympanoplasty and one of the ossicles has been replaced, so I suspect it just isn't anywhere near normal. I get all sorts of odd audio distortions on that side.

The hearing in it is OK-ish but it basically rings 24/7. I would reckon the tinnitus is louder than any background noise. Maybe the same kind of level as you would get from say a boiling kettle, or a radio on in the background. It's extremely high pitch, almost pure tone that just never goes away.

I also get a lot of clicks, pops, gurgles and variations in the hearing in that ear. Sometimes I can hear OK with it, sometimes the hearing fades and it feels like I need to 'pop' my ear by blowing my noise/swallowing but sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

I suppose, on the plus side, at least what was done with it prevented it from deteriorating into complete hearing loss on that side. The main purpose of the surgery was to make it stable and prevent an endless cycle of ear infections which, was quite dangerous if it had continued. So, I suppose from that point of view it achieved its objective quite well and at least didn't make the hearing any worse than it was.

I think as I head into my 30s and older that ear will just get worse though. It's certainly not stable or improving.

I suppose it's just a case of ignoring it. There's not much else you can do.

I've been told it can be worth trying hypnosis (with someone who knows what they're on about) as you can actually train your brain to just 100% ignore the noises.

At the end of the day, it's just like a noisy microphone or a badly tuned radio, there's really no point in listening to noise in the signal and your brain has an incredibly powerful audio processing system that can just actively filter it out / push it into the background.

Once you've ruled out any fixable or dangerous underlying medical cause, there's really not much you can do other than deal with it from a filtering point of view.

There are also various tinnitus maskers that you can try out. These usually inject a sound via a small device in your ear which will mask the annoying 'sound' you're hearing.

Often with tinnitus it seems that there probably is an underlying physical or neurological cause, but we simply don't have the technology or micro-surgical sophistication to accurately identify or repair the problems. Ears are incredibly intricate organic devices, so if something's not quite right or has been damaged by loud noise exposure, repeated ear infections, side-effects of surgery etc there's probably nothing much you can do about it if it's beyond the abilities of modern ENT surgery.

We can repair the bigger problems e.g. torn ear drums, damaged bones, etc but it could be some minute little subtle problem that is causing the tinnitus by messing up the signal somewhere along the signal processing chain.

It's very complex!

Air Pressure Waves ...... (focused via your outer ear) ..... (converted into mechanical energy by ear drum) .... (carried along a chain of bones).... (reconverted into pressure waves in a liquid in your inner ear).... (back to mechanical movements by tiny hairs).... (into electrochemical signals carried by nerves).... (processed by your brain's auditory cortex).... and interpreted as sound!!

So, anything going wrong along that very complex system can introduce noise.

waynerooney

i'm 39. i went to a rock concert in slane about 15 years ago and heard the usual 'disco hiss' that i'd heard before. It always used to go away. however the morning i woke up after the concert, i heard it the minute i woke the next morning. I panicked for some strange reason. Since then, I have always heard the hiss. I have been living with tinnitus for 15 years. it is manageable. there is no magic cure but anybody who's deeply concerned about it, i beg of you, do please go to a doctor or psychiatrist. Presctiption medication (benzodiazepine - I will not mention the commercial name for the medication) helped me.

Solair

Get yourself checked out by an ENT specialist to rule out anything physical that can be fixed or anything serious like tumors that could be seriously life threatening if not treated.

Once you've ruled out anything like that then you can try to manage it yourself.

If you can't manage to activate your brain's internal filtering system yourself. It might be worth going to a good hypnotherapist (preferably someone who is a psychologist by background).

Think about it this way, your brain has an incredibly sophisticated audio processing facility. You can learn to ignore/filter the noise in 'software' without any drugs.

You do this all the time with background noise e.g. the car engine, fans, your own heart beat and breathing noises etc so it's just a matter of teaching yourself to ignore the noise.

waynerooney

hi solair - just to note, I am not promoting the use of drugs (benzodiazepine) to alleviate the symptoms. I am simply stating that it is one of the options that are out there to alleviate tinnitus. I understand that you've a in-depth knowledge of sound that you learned from your course on sound engineering etc. and you summarise the sound process as being very complex. I don't believe it is - it's pretty much as you've described it your post above. As I see it, the complexity is not addressed unless you look past the soundwaves and look towards the way the soundwaves affect your fight/flight genetically in-built response. Your emotional response. The complexity I believe is the piece that comes after sound (air-pressure waves) has been encoded, decoded, encoded, decoded and so on until eventually the sound is perceived by the brain as a 'noise'.

to elaborate, the noise we call tinnitus is not the problem i believe; the problem is the way the brain deals with the noise for each individual person. To most people, the noise is dismissed by the brain as "i am not in danger or concerned, so therefore brain, you can ignore this noise". To people who have tinnitus, the noise for some reason does not get dismissed. Therefore, I felt the need to reply to you because for some people, the ability to [as you say] "learn to ignore/filter the noise", is not easily done without the help of a medicine/drug.

I am not criticising you, in fact I admire that you've the skill to train your brain to categorise the noise as 'non threatening'. I wish I had that level of skill, but I don't. I had to accept that. I use the drug because it allows me to lead a happy life, and enables my brain to set aside the distressful symptoms of my tinnitus and get on with the business of living life to the full.

I also have an opinion on the 'masking' treatments (white noise generators, ear pieces and leaving the radio on etc.). I'm not sure that these are effective in the long term because I think the brain
subconsiously picks up on the fact that "if I must mask the sound it must mean it's a problem for me"... and so will continue to generate emotional responses.
I truly hope this helps anybody with tinnitus. It is manageable (I've had it for about 15 years. There are ways to manage it. Pick the best one for you.
Love life, make tinnitus become your friend, you will be o.k. Believe me.

Funny_Bones

Hi all,

I've been suffering(or aware rather) of tinnitus since November. I have noticed that it seems to be pulsatile tinnitus(the whooshing sound is exactly in line with my pulse). It also gets louder when I sneeze or blow my nose. My problem is not so much the noise but why the noise is occuring. I am getting myself stressed about it and feel it is impacting on my sleep..
My question is do any of you suffer from this exact sign as well and if you have.. have you had it assessed properly? I have been referred to ent but been told it will take 1 to 2 years for my appointment.

Solair

1 to 2 years? Wow! that's a hell of a waiting list.

Can you go private, even just for the consultation?

A wooshing pulsing sound could also be blood pressure related, so perhaps it might be worth getting your GP to do a quick check to ensure that you don't have high BP.

Funny_Bones

I ended up getting a private appointment as I really am anxious about what it is. Have to get tests done now as the doc wasn't completely satisfied with assessment.

Gormal

Ok I was told something very interesting last night. An extended family member went through an extremely stressful time when he was younger. Because of this he got ringing in his ears, (not sure of the medical term, roughly translated into english is ear crash). Now here comes the interesting part. After 3 weeks he was sick of it and ended up in hospital, they gave him something intravenously which reset something in the brain and got rid of the noise in his ears. They told him had he ignored the noise that he would have suffered hearing loss which would have deteriorated rapidly over the years. To point out he has perfect hearing and is now 50.

Had I know this when the racket started in my ears, there may have been a chance to save my hearing. So I just thought I would let everyone know, as it might help somebody.

Amzie

Gormal wrote: »

Ok I was told something very interesting last night. An extended family member went through an extremely stressful time when he was younger. Because of this he got ringing in his ears, (not sure of the medical term, roughly translated into english is ear crash). Now here comes the interesting part. After 3 weeks he was sick of it and ended up in hospital, they gave him something intravenously which reset something in the brain and got rid of the noise in his ears. They told him had he ignored the noise that he would have suffered hearing loss which would have deteriorated rapidly over the years. To point out he has perfect hearing and is now 50.

Had I know this when the racket started in my ears, there may have been a chance to save my hearing. So I just thought I would let everyone know, as it might help somebody.

Ok im worried now so are you saying that if try and ignore the noise in my ear's that it could lead to deafness later in life??

Im 24 and have it fairly bad, It depends on if im stressed though cos it will get louder if I am! some nights I cant sleep with it and its enough to stress anyone out Ive been for a hearing test and im almost 100% perfect so I dont appear to be going deaf.... and Ive been to doctor who said I had a wax build up in one ear so I had that syringed but that made the sound louder for about a month after it:rolleyes: He basically said there's nothing can be done for it but I want to go to an ENT will I seem like a hypocondriac asking him for a referral??

oh and by the way there was no trauma or anthing to my ears, I dont go to concerts or listen to loud music, only when I go out to pubs maybe thats about it! so I wish I could get rid of this constant noise and sometimes pain/headaches associated with it:(