How Is Your Mental Health with Tinnitus? Is Depression or Anxiety an Issue? Or Are You Fine?

Mentally ill from tinnitus or unchanged?

 

I have my T for 1,5 years now so relatively short compared to your case.

Depression was an issue in the first period of 1 year since I had sleeping and concentration problems and could never relax.

I'm still on antidepressants but the lowest dose and I plan to give it up in a couple of weeks complately.

However anxiety and frequent mood swings are an issue, therefore I also take some antyanxiety drugs during the day to calm down my emotions. I have to control my emotions during the day in order not to get into panick mode.

I also encounter concentration problems at work mainly at the meetings to follow the conversation and be active. I manage the best in the afternoons and evenings when I learnt to relax either by riding a bike, watching TV or making puzzles (the last one really occupies my mind and helps me to relax mentally).

I have no more sleeping problems so this helps to calm down. So in general I cope better or worse using lot of masking and trying to keep myself occupied but it's an emotional rollercoster for me.

My T is rather mild, I would rate it 1-2, and it's rather not the sound of T that annoys me but more the fact of lost silence and no medical solution on the horizon that makes me feel anxoius at times.

So masking helps short term but obviously does not address and issue I have with lost silence. But I'm in general quite a nervous person with difficulties to accept unexpected events in my life so I guess there are many people who cope much better with my level of T.

My wife is an example of a person who has T for years already and louder than mine and she is never ever bothered by it, she just does not care. So the way we cope depend a lot on personality.

I have to learn to live one day at a time not letting my thoughts fly to much in the future cause when I think about the future and another 40 years with T ahaead of me this makes me anxious.

 

I did not mention that sometimes my anxiety is replaced with feeling of being tired with white noise, nature sounds, radio or music I listen to 24h a day. All in all this feeling of tiredness is better than anxiety, I just long for silence but I suppose we all now this feeling.