Hyperacusis? :( Looking for Help

[Clmnt]

Hello everyone

I am looking for help, I am a little (much) helpless. I will explain my story in broad outline. I am 28 years old, I live in France. Since I was little I have a strong myopia until my adolescence no major worries, until 3 retinal detachment in a few years. So much to say that with all this I became anxious as it affects the health ..

November 2016, the 2 most exactly. I started hearing a rather shrill whistle in the left ear. In the 7500hz according to my memories. For the cause? I remember to listen to music with my headphones (if I could go back at that time and fuck me slaps!) It was pretty rare anyway. May be 1 or 2 times in the week and less than an hour and a half. I also had a big crisis of anxiety a few days before. Impression of dying and the sky falling on my head! (Just writing these lines I have the ball to the belly and a feeling of strangulation in the throat).

Period quite black .. in January I started to go out with a girl who nevertheless helped me to no longer focus on it. My tinnitus for me had become bearable, I resumed taste for life. I walked in the street, I even no longer hear my tinnitus! I was always listening to music with headphones but mid-volume without ever feeling the slightest embarrassment.

In the meantime I separated from my girlfriend. And I resumed a life of bachelor without too much concern, my tinnitus had become very bearable. Some time they were a little stronger especially sitting or lying down. End it all went well. Early July my parents left on holiday I have to go home. No license. So I go by bus, then 1.5kms on foot. Always with my headphones set to mid-volume. I stay down two days and I go on foot with some luggage (backpack, and a little less than 5kg in each arm) I go home and not worry. I just "locked" the shoulder by turning the head but not very painful. I continue what I had to do.

The following days I felt that my tinnitus was much more present even when being busy. I began to worry, mini crisis of anxiety. And the more days pass and the more I feel that the sounds instantly increase my tinnitus already strident. It resonates in my head like stunned.

So I started to learn about hyperacusis. I read all day and night. I fall asleep at about 8:00 in the evening to wake up around 4:00 am. Always with anguish and palpitations. Impossible to go back to sleep. I watch series on the tablet but a quarter of the volume plus I increase and more ca resonates. I also feel a cottony ear but not all the time.


This will be 2 weeks soon and I am completely lost. I did not have any sound trauma (headphones?) I also noticed a heavy noise in my head when walking walking or turning my head left or right. But that disappears by looking up. Maybe it has no relation .. I'm so afraid: '(live with tinnitus I can but with that sensitivity to sound rotten life .. not being able to listen to music or chat it's sad .

What do you think? Is that hyperacusis and can it go away? How long? Which strategy to use? (No more headphones!)

Sorry for bad english
Thank you!

 

[Clmnt]

There really is no logic .. When I took my shower, I noticed that the flowing water did not sound anymore! And tinnitus rather low, just a sensation of having a cricket in the throat. Once out of the shower you can imagine it is back .. but it's really a crazy!

 

[Chris Heinrich]

I wish I had the time to write up my story with T & H, but you might not want to hear that anyway. My T started as a pure but painfully shrill sound in my right ear. That was all I had for the first few months, but OMG I was obsessed with it 24/7 and beyond heartbroken. Then I noticed myself being annoyed by certain every day sounds, the best example being metal hitting metal in the kitchen (e.g. silverware). I lived in NYC at the time, where there is no shortage of metal-on-metal (e.g. brakes) and sirens. It got so ridiculous for me that sometimes the voices of women passing by would knock me sideways. I eventually learned this second little monster is called "hyperacusis". Great, as if T wasn't enough, I had to add H to the mix. The H got to the point where I would tell people that I don't care about the T that much, it's the H that's killing me. I struggled with the H for at least 6 months. It was getting so bad that sometimes my eardrums would flutter (so I added another self-diagnosis: tympanic tensor syndrome)! I finally read this post on this site:
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/overcoming-obstacles-to-habituation.6886/
H for me was self-created, and self-destroyed. My constant (and I do mean constant) attention (obsession!) to the T caused me to be over-listening to the world. And living in NYC made that even worse. I was so upset over my T that I listened to it, and when you listen for your T you can't help but hear everything else. And in my case my T is at a very high frequency, which is probably why I was hearing high frequencies much louder than I had just a few months before. This led to a bad spiral in which my limbic system had decided that high frequencies were a big threat to me, so it conveniently turned up those volumes to be sure I wasn't caught by surprise. It was so bad that I probably heard a truck braking before anyone else; and the decompression sound that buses make, I heard it from the first nanosecond.
Here's the best comparison I can think of. Imagine that you live alone and you hear the floor creak. That creak may have been super low volume, but you really noticed it and looked in that direction ("things that go bump in the night"). Your fight-or-flight needed that information to make a decision: is someone here, do I need to do something! Now imagine that you live with people -- the floor might creak frequently, but it's never a threat (maybe just a message to turn your head out of curiosity). In our daily lives, we make agreements with our limbic system that we don't even notice. It's really an amazing piece of machinery set out to protect you. But it can backfire, and in my opinion, hyperacusis is commonly related to letting this get out of control. You need to stop obsessing over your T, and find ways to retrain yourself to tolerate sounds and not be threatened by them. It will happen with time, but there are things you can actively do to stop feeling threatened by sound.