Headphones with Sound Off — Can Pain in Ears Be Because of Overprotecting Ears?

Hello everyone,

I have had tinnitus since 2013 (3 years now). I have always managed to deal with it and stay positive.
Lately I have been under a lot of stress and I think my tinnitus got worse during this period.

As a reaction to this situation I put on my headphones, with the sound off. To reduce external sounds and protect my ears. I will put on my headphones in crowded streets, when I am sitting in a train or when a lot of traffic is around. Without any music on. Just because I am afraid of my tinnitus getting worse, I am just 22 now.

However... For some days i have had a little bit of pain in both of my ears. Can it be that I am overprotecting my ears?

If anyone can give me some advice I would be very thankful!

Have a good day everyone.

Husk

 

Unless you are wearing extreme noise isolating headphones, average circumaural headphones offer only 10-15 db reduction, so they only take the edge off so to speak.
Technically, you are still exposing yourself to 60-70 db when wearing your headphones in noisy public areas. It would surprise me if this is considered overprotecting the ears.

 

There is no such thing as overprotecting the ears

Does over protecting the eyes make them more sensitive to light ? Yes for a few minutes perhaps

This is the type of concept TRT people mention when they want you to believe your mind has issues dealing wiht T and you should not let it run the show - works fine if you have anxiety caused T with perfect ears that don't require protection

I never saw any study saying that zero Db coming into the ear can be harmful

Under protecting in the other hand can be harmful if your ear is already damaged from previous loud noise

 

Yes. Every doctor has told me NOT to overprotect the ears and that it can absolutely make H worse.

 

This is a myth propagated by the pseudo-scientific nonsense of the sound therapy crowd. People get sound sensitivity, tinnitus, and TTTS-like symptoms from things such as syringing for ear wax. People get sound sensitivity after surgery inside the middle ear merely because the ear drum is healing. So what's most probably happening with ear phones is that all that toying around with cotton, headphones, plugs or earphones with your ear drum or so close to it probably causes a nerve or muscle to shift or twitch ever so slightly to induce the symptoms.

People have reported disappeared tinnitus and/or newly acquired sound sensitivity from stapes surgery and from tenotomies of the middle ear. Those are the hard facts. Sound therapy just provides poorly fundamented conjecture. It's pretty clear there is no neural process going on at all. The world isn't just going to suddenly stop and come up with a neural connection that just happens to mimic the mechanical processes of the middle ear.

So yeah, I guess that you can worsen your sound sensitivity for putting earplugs but not for the reasons we've been told.

 

Btw, true misophonia patients are entirely different, they're really obsessive compulsive and have selective sound intolerance, which mostly if not always doesn't even have a feeling in the ear, just an anger rage or brain zap.

That the radical Jastreboffians managed to come up with the idea that acoustic trauma creates hyperacusis and then therefore that leads to misophonia is probably the biggest crock of bullshit ever written.

 

What a load of shit, overprotecting leads to H! Yeah you need all those loud construction noises and sirens to maintain a healthy auditory system. Ive heard that people that live in quiet areas automatically get H when they visit the big cities!! Most of them then have to invest in TRT treatment and are healed like magic!! Keep things constantly noisy if you can, that will ward off the nasty H disease. It's all true!! Never be in the quiet, veery dangerous stuff!!! Lol

 

I'm curious is all TRT based around this idea?

 

Basically yes.Your encouraged to be around more noise and not to protect your hearing in safe environments and only protect in obviously loud environments.Using hearing protection while walking through a busy city would be seen as over protecting to the TRT people.

 

Well that's unfortunate, and if your T gets louder in the process more money for them? It may actually work for some cases in which it's mostly psychological. Are there CBT or TRT approaches that aren't completely moronic?

 

The specialists of H like Dr. Silverstein never said something like that - they treat H with a "permanent ear plug" surgery that limits how much the drum can move when sounds get loud.

But yes if your H is not due to noise exposure, then overprotecting your ears isn't really required.

And again, there is no real way to avoid silence unless you plan on playing 50db music all night long in your normally very quiet bedroom every night, for the rest of your life in order to avoid the "damaging effects of silence" on worsening H - ..of course these doctors haven't though of that.

How much time we spend in bedrooms compared to walking along loud streets..