It's a bit strange cause for me, when I do a regular day at the studio (like 7 hours of 80-85 db lvel max), I feel better in the evenening/night! And when I have a few days in a row in the studio, it's the same ... Like if sound helps me to relax.
@davidchampoux I know you're wearing an excellent pair of musician's ear plugs while you're playing with moderate-to-high sound attenuation.
Some musicians, e.g., Cold Play, claim that their tinnitus stopped getting worse once they began protecting their ears. Others, however, do talk about their tinnitus worsening over time. You need to listen to your body, and perhaps take some vitamins or supplements that might help your ears handle the extra noise exposure of playing.
I asked that question to several doctors and profs and some audiologists and they all claim that a person with T is not more susceptible to further damage, but since there isnt any real research done about it I don't know who to believe.
What I do know from experience though is that my T gets alot worse when I am exposed to sounds that healthy ears have no problems with.
@Bart I don't know of any research that examines if tinnitus ears are more susceptible to further damage than normal ears.
But I do believe our ears our more sensitive.
A few months ago, I found a research article that examined the neural activity in people with tinnitus and in people without tinnitus while each group listened to sounds. (I believe each group listened to music, but I am not certain.)
Most interesting, when the sounds stopped, the neural activity associated with the noise ceased in the normal group--but did not in the tinnitus group. To the tinnitus brains, the stimulation was still very much present.
To me, this article explains the phenomenon of reactive tinnitus. For some people, hearing certain sounds just sets their brain off in a cacophony of abnormal neural activity, which they may perceive as a tinnitus spike. I, for instance, cannot listen to music for more than a few minutes without typically causing a tinnitus spike that lasts between 24-48 hours. And I never listen to music loudly. So the spike is not from further damage to my ears; rather, it must be from my brain's inability to process musical sounds. Such sounds abnormally stimulates my brain, and the stimulation continues until the activity eventually wears out.
Long story short, we all need to be mindful of safe noise levels as we live our lives as normally as possible. But we also need to listen to our bodies and act accordingly if certain noises or noise levels cause our tinnitus to spike or become louder.
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