Got Tinnitus a Few Months Ago, No Idea Why

[Landand]

Sometime mid-2017 I was working on a large and frustrating project for school and I had gotten very poor sleep over the course of a week or so. I was up early in the morning taking a break browsing the internet at my computer when I began to experiencing ear pain. Maybe within ~30 minutes of the ear pain starting one ear suddenly experienced hearing loss and tinnitus that immediately started to go back to normal (which is apparently a normal thing people experience every once in a while) but while the hearing loss went away the tinnitus only went away maybe 90%. The exact same thing happened to the other ear a few minutes later.

I thought that it had been the headphones which I had on for several hours a day (4-8 hours I'd guess) as background noise while working, but it doesn't really make much sense now that I think about it. I probably had them at around 70-75db for the majority of the time and I never experienced any temporary symptoms of hearing loss (e.g. dullness of hearing or tinnitus), not to mention that most of the problems are a lot worse in one ear.

I did talk to a doctor about it, as well as got a hearing test. They said it was probably inflammation or allergies (which I don't have a history of) but it was more of less of a guess. Nothing abnormal was found during the hearing test.

Could the lack of sleep and stress have been the cause? Can you just get tinnitus out of absolutely nowhere? I'm at a loss as to what could've caused it. It's frustrating because without knowing why I'm suffering from it, I don't know how to treat it (not that there's much I could do about it anyway) or prevent it from getting any worse. It's already preventing me from sleeping and I don't think I could live with it if it gets any worse.

 

[Michael B]

There are those in this support group who advise not using earphones or headphones. I agree in that it was daily use of earphones that gave me my tinnitus. Whether headphone use gave you tinnitus is a guess but I would recommend either using them at low volume or better yet not at all. You really want to protect your ears.

 

[Landand]

While I don't think the headphones were the cause (or at least not the primary cause), looking back I did use them too much. Since then I've been trying to keep the volume as low as I'm able to handle.

I know some people recommend speakers but I don't see how that could help much. It definitely gives a better sense of what is too loud but they can still reach dangerous volumes, and my speakers aggravate my tinnitus in the same way that my headphones do.