How Do You Know How Severe Your Tinnitus Is?

Is there an objective rating system somewhere?

 

No, there isn't one.

I had figured mine was moderate, but after talking on here and finding out a large portion can't even hear their tinnitus outside I guess mine is more severe than that. You can do loudness matching test to match the loudness over your sensory level. Mine was about 29-30dbsl, but that wasn't frequency matched.
I think the most important factor is how easily it is masked. Can you only hear it in silence? Can you mask it by going outside? By driving on the highway? Can even the shower mask it?

 

you know it's loud when you atempt to use masking at night for a little distraction and your partner thinks it's so loud that it's echoing of the walls and hurting their ears, yet you can't hear anything but your T raging over it.

 

You know it is bad when you play a sound clip matching your T to your family members and they all instantly scream, cover their ears and ran away as quickly as they can. LOL. That was my experience.

 

My thoughts exactly.

But basically any pure tone above 3.5 kHz is physically painful to human ears when it's by itself so it's not entirely fair...

I have an 800hZ fluctuating, pressure-related tone in my right ear that's loud but doesn't hurt.

My left ear makes a tone somewhere above 6 kHz and that ear hurts 24/7 even when I don't hear the sound. I guess that's how I know it's worse than my right ear, because I don't have hyperacusis or anxiety and the pain is just because of some sort of damage.

 

Well I guess that answers the question. I'm screwed. Every time I come on here I realize this is really really bad. I used to be able to mask it with the shower. Now the shower masks some of the tones but I can hear the low one. Sometimes, my ultra high pitch comes out when I turn on running water when it wasn't even there before. There is no masking it at night. I would have to turn it up so loud that it would hurt my own ears. It is worse when I lay down. There is so much crap going on in there, low tones, high tones, beeping, whooshing, crackling, my heart beating. I can't get anyone to help me out with this. I don't even know what ENTs go to school for. Do you really need a degree to send someone for an audiogram and then tell them I don't know when there is no obvious loss. I would think they would be able to do a little more than that.