A New High-Pitch Ringing in Ears — From Bronchitis? Nicotine Withdrawal? Weight Gain?

Hi everyone,

My name's Mark. I've had loud tinnitus since I was young, maybe 16/17 from constant loud noise exposure. I'm 29 now.

The last 12 months have been very hard though, because a new sound has started in my left ear. A higher pitch ringing that isn't drowned out by most noise so it's very intrusive in my day to day life. I haven't taken the time to measure it properly, but It's probably somewhere between 11 kHz-14 kHz.

The higher pitch started early last year and continued to increase. Around this time I was dealing with Bronchitis for months, quit vaping nicotine, started living a more sedentary lifestyle to work on my side hustle (computer about 14 hours a day), and I've gained about 15 kg since then. I'm 93 kg now, which puts me in the overweight bracket for my height. I think on average I had been sleeping for like 5-6 hours a night.

Anyway, there have been a few times where this high pitch hasn't been audible - Just my usual tinnitus without the high pitch. It's made me kind of hopeful that there's some mechanism other than the noise damage that I can possibly work with. This week I started Mirtazapine, got a very good sleep the first day, woke up in the morning and the high pitch was completely silent. Could be a number of things, including getting a good sleep for once? Unfortunately the ringing has returned since that day though. Had a great sleep last night, but it was there waiting for me in the morning.

Does anyone that was in a similar situation have any advice other than habituation? I know I will have to habituate if there is no biological cause. Not my first time unfortunately.

This week, other than starting Mirtazapine, I've started eating healthy, vitamin tablets and exercising every day. Hope to see results from that eventually, but I'm not that hopeful honestly

Hope you're all going well.

And I've been doing all the usual recommended things, ENTs, Doctors, and an MRI coming up. They don't find anything, but it's good to rule nasty things out I guess.

 

Hi, welcome here...

 

Welcome. I’m so very sorry to hear that you’re going through this, but I can completely relate to your experience.

I have had tinnitus on and off since 2015. Fortunately, I have had it resolve more than once. But the tinnitus that I have had that has resolved has all been related to temporary loss in hearing.

What I have now is a whole new animal. In May or June of 2020 I started to get bilateral high pitch noise in my head. At the time I wouldn’t call it a ring. I could hear it over everything because of the pitch but it wasn’t overly bothersome. It went away for about six months. Then it came back around March 2021. Oscillated between a high-pitched hiss or a ring similar to the sound of a jet engine. But I would go through periods of time where it was almost inaudible. For months actually. And then I go through a month to five weeks where it is very noticeable and very annoying.

I had my hearing checked in July for the 4th time in one year. Although I had some losses in the right ear in two higher frequencies, they were all still within normal limits of hearing. So technically not considered hearing loss.

I should mention that I predominately experienced this in my right ear although I would occasionally get it in my left and occasionally they would both chime in at the same time.

What I have now is an excruciatingly high pitch ring similar to that of a jet engine. It’s predominantly in both ears now and I’m not getting the extended periods of quiet that I got before. Maybe an afternoon. Maybe an hour. Quite often it fluctuates within an hour.

I’ve been working with my ENT, who also has tinnitus. She suspects that there’s a relationship between problems with my neck and my TMJ. I’m a huge clencher at night. And since working from home due to the pandemic, I am not in any way working ergonomically.

I am now in physical therapy to address these issues.

You mentioned that you had become more sedentary as part of your job. Perhaps you’ve developed some unknown issues within your neck impacting the nerves that go into your inner ear. Do you have TMJ?

I noticed that I have a somatic component to this new presentation of tinnitus. Yawning moving my neck certain ways definitely makes it louder. I didn’t have that experience before when I’ve had tinnitus in the past. But this whole new frequency cannot be masked at all. It is so difficult to deal with.

Given your age I sincerely hope that your hearing tests come back normal and then perhaps this is related to something mechanical.

Praying for relief for the both of us.

 

Thanks for the responses and the welcome. Good to hear there's something mechanical you're able to work on there Forever hopeful.

Thank you, my hearing tests are not too bad and are in the normal hearing zone from the 0 - 8000 Hz range. Not as good above 8000 Hz though. I'm not in danger of losing the day to day sounds. The old lower tones that fall in this range are still definitely noise damage though unfortunately. My hearing was bad as a kid, but it actually got better as I got older and gave it all a rest.

I don't really know what the symptoms of TMJ are, there's a lot of different info out there that I haven't parsed yet.

However, the high pitch sounds do become far worse when I clench my teeth together. I don't grind my teeth as far as I'm aware, but actually I do spend most of the day with my jaw muscles extremely tense and my lower jaw pushed forward. That, or I'm chewing on something.

I sometimes catch myself and try to relax it, but I can't really tell what a relaxed jaw position feels like anymore. A relaxed position feels tiring too. I don't have any jaw pain though.

I went to a physio for a few sessions, but he spend most the time talking and then occasionally doing some jaw exercises or massages so I stopped. I think he was a student physio or something. It was like 80/20 talking/practical so it didn't seem worth the money.

Might consider finding another jaw physio if there's actually some benefit there.

 

Thought I would post before disappearing again.

Mirtazapine was just making the ringing louder, so I came straight off it (doctor did say this was OK).

Mirtazapine was not helpful in my case, just accepting it and working on my side business has been far more therapeutic. Tinnitus is audible 24/7, almost every environment but I'm ok again now.

I'll probably not be back for a long time I hope. Habituation is a little easier for me when I'm not lurking this forum, despite the amount of friendly, helpful people here

All the best everyone