If You Shake the Anxiety, You Lose the Suffering

Tinnitus has been with me to some degree since Feb 6, 2008. Got guilt tripped into going to a shitty ska concert during Mardi Gras break my freshmen year in college. left the concert with a ringing in my left ear that didn't fade like it has after the multitude of concert I had been to before. At first, the outlook on the rest of my life looked bleak. "How am I going to be able to live with this my entire life"? "This has robbed my life of joy". "It's all over". These were just some of the thoughts running through my head at that time. I honestly felt the overwhelming blackness was smothering me, leaving me unable to enjoy any of my life. Being in school, though, I tried powering through despite the tinnitus consuming me.

Over the course of the next few months, I started to get on with my life with the encouragement of my friends and parents. After a while, I started to be able to enjoy myself again. The tinnitus was still a frequent annoyance, but I was able to have some fun at the same time. Come Christmas, I transferred schools and moved across the state. The new environment and social circles I formed must of stimulated my mind enough to lose the anxiety tied to my T. Mid way through the semester I noticed out of the blue that I haven't even thought about the ringing for a few days. I walked into a quiet room to search for it. Sure enough, it was still there, but it no longer made me anxious. It was the most liberating feeling I've ever felt in my life.

I went the next five years without the T affecting my life at all. I was having a great time, but then I had a relapse . Due to other unrelated life event, I became very stressed in 2014 was having a tough time with school and work. One afternoon while watching a movie and stressing about life in general, I suddenly latched back onto my T. Over the course of the next few weeks I wound up hitting rock bottom again. The since of dread and doom was back and the ringing had once again consumed me. For the next month my life was in tatters. Couldn't eat, stay asleep, or focus on anything but the ringing. I once again felt that the future was ruined for me. I was crushed, but once again, it eventually passed.

About 5 months after the relapse, I moved out of my parents house and rented a house with some friends. Once again, the grip the T had on me disappeared. I got to enjoy that for about a year or so before life through me a curve ball. Sometime at the beginning of 2016, my mother left my father. We were both devastated. I hurt for my dad and was caught off guard by my mothers coldness. After a month of depressing, T was a thing for me again. For the third time, I was back in the pit, and after a few more months and changes in my life it once again faded into the background. Today, I feel like all those relapses are just weird dreams.

I know that was long winded and probably a chore to read through, but I wanted to show anyone reading this the pattern didn't notice till after my third fight with T. All of those times I had issues with my T came after times of high stress. I started seeing a mental health professional last year and started to realize I've been a worrier my entire life. Since I was a child I've always been a worrywart. I used to be deathly afraid of storms and tornados. If there was so much as a black cloud in the sky, I would stay glued to the weather channel watching for anything that could happen. Having to stand in front of a class to give a speech would leave my gut in knots for weeks. My grandmother not answering a phone call had me convinced the worst had happened to her. I was eventually diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.

This revelation has been changing my life for the better ever since. I've been learning mindfulness and CBT, started working regularly for the first time in my life, and trying to live in the moment instead of the future. At the present time, my grandmother is starting to have major health issues and the stress has skyrocketed. Just like the past three times my mind is locking onto something to fret over. Now it's my eye floaters which I've had for as long as I can remember. That same since of dread is present, but I'm keeping it at bay with the stuff I've mentioned before. One of the biggest things I can tell you is to not search the internet for these issues too much. These forum and message boards are filled with people suffering and when you see that it makes it seem like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. This simply isn't true. Droves of people stop coming to places like this because T is no longer a problem. They've gotten on with their lives. Anyone suffering heavily from T should look into how they handle stress and anxiety in general. Too many has similar experiences with T and floaters for this to be a coincidence and pretty much everyone gets to where it's not a problem. Shake that anxiety and you my just find that you'll be free of the dread and obsession and enjoy life again.

 

I have had off and of stress over the years, some like yours with family member illnesses. I have tried to assess whether it had anything to do with my T volume, and can say that I don't think it really matters much for me. Mine is just real loud most all of the time. The only time that just maybe it isn't is if, like I've said in a few of my posts, is if I'm busy or just distracted. Its there, just not as noticeable if distracted.

Kind of reading between the lines of our post I think that maybe distraction is what helped you. You had something else to think about.

 

Thats kind of what I'm saying. Distraction is needed in the early stages of suffering with it to break that hear it - focus on it - get anxious about it loop. If you can break that cycle, your brain stops associating the sound to anxiety, which is what people having a hard time with tinnitus are feeling. The sound is benign. It is a sound. Full. Stop. I'm not saying the volume changes, or that I always stay busy every waking second to distract myself from noticing it. It's when the noise is causing you stress and anxiety is when you are locked onto it. It becomes a part of your day, something that demands your attention and makes you anxious. That can be broken. I have loud tinnitus too, that I cant mask with anything other than very louds music or just the right white noise, but I don't even bother with it anymore. I can sit in a quiet room and read for hours with it humming away, and it's nothing more than a passing sensation. I've fallen asleep countless time just listening to it. If someone would have told me would be doing that 10 years ago, I call them fucking batty. It's just a non-issue now. I feel like I did before getting tinnitus. I don't worry about it or linger on it when I do remember, which is only once in a few days or weeks. Now, that being said, being on here today is making me remember how I felt when I first started to have issues with it and now my ringing is more pronounce and "seems" louder. My tinnitus isn't any different now than it was yesterday when I didn't cross my mind once, that old anxious feeling is making my mind find the tinnitus and feel those dreadful feeling again. I may even have a few days where it bugs more or becomes a major issue for me again, but I've habituated 3 times to it and each time it happens even quicker. I'm 100% convinced habituation is a thing.

 

Hi @msroach89

I have always been described as a worries and handled stress poorly. I recently developed it or at least I became more aware of it around Dec 2, 2017 and the first few weeks were filled with anxiety and needless panicking. In reality, the sound of my Tinnitus is very minor... I even think I may have had it for a while (as I would hear slight sounds when napping in quiet rooms or when I wore earplugs to sleep each night) but for some reason it bugged me and continues to.

I feel personally better than I did earlier in December, I have had many moments where I don't hear it because I am having a good time, focusing on something else, or just enjoying the outdoors. But I also have moments like now where it seems to bother me (even though its very faint) and make me panic. I have been avoiding these forums upon the advice of a well known doctor with Tinnitus who was once on these boards responding to people but found them to be counterproductive. I have avoided the forums for quite some time, but just decided to come back to check in today out of curiosity.

I am having trouble getting my mind off of it. Many days I wake up without thinking about it, but on other days it still makes me worry (though I don't really worry about anything rational... just about the fact that I hear the noise). I worry and focus on it to the point that my ears "feel" like they're strained from searching for noise (haha). I have had more days where I just don't care, some days where I don't hear it, but still have days that it bothers me even if its very faint (its currently very faint, 1-2/10 in annoyance).

I just wanted to know... do you "hear" your tinnitus currently or have you gotten to a point that you don't hear it unless you force yourself to be aware of it? Plenty of people have told me that is that case for them, including the doctor, but I just am just wondering if that is the case for you? Do you recommend seeing someone for help with the anxiety and worrying?

Thank you,
Robert

 

Hey Robert,

I hear my tinnitus all the time, or should I say that it's audible all the time, but I often don't register it. It's why I became a firm believer in habituation. When I first heard of it, it just seemed like someone telling you that you will always suffer from it, but will eventually give up hoping it will go and just drag along the rest of your life like a zombie. At some point, I just accepted that I had tinnitus and it was very unlikely to go away. That was one of the hardest things I had to do. Once I did that, I stopped researching it online, stopped going to the forums, stopped actively monitoring and assessing it, stopped trying to mask it, and stopped letting it influence what I did day to day. Those last two are probably the things that got me on the road to habituating. I used to have a small fan that I kept on my nightstand to drown out the noise. It was quite old and I had to push the fans with a pencil to get the motor enough kick start to start the blades spinning. I just got tired of fooling with it and threw it away. One night, I remember challenging myself to go to sleep without my tv on as well. I remember laying there listening to my ear ring away, but I just listened to it. after a while, I was just listening to it without having any panic. Kept listening and at some point my mind had wondered and I was thinking about all kinds of other stuff. At some point I realized I hadn't been aware of my tinnitus for a while despite that being the only thing I could hear. I made it a habit to do this everynight. Some nights I would eventually sleep with the tv on if my day had been long or stressful, but I made sure it was more on occasion.

the part about just doing getting on with my life was also majorly important. I made myself go out with friends when they would invite me, even if my mood told me to stay in. I forced myself to live in spite of the tinnitus. I would actually tell myself(feel silly for saying this) "fuck you, tinnitus. You are going to go along for the ride like it or not." I would go hang out, have some fun, be bugged by the tinnitus, and actively try to keep it to the back of my mind. I would go run errands even if I was in a black mood. Instead of staying in all day and being worried about never having silence again, I accepted it was gone and just did shit regardless.

I don't remember exactly when I turned the corner, but at some point I had gone days without even thinking about the tinnitus even though I was just as loud and noticeable as in the beginning. At some point, even though I'd hear it, it didn't affect me at all. That may not sound like it's even possible, but it happened. The tinnitus was a just a sound, not this thing that made me feel as though my life was over or that everything would be tainted by it. It was just there. That may seem like the worst thing in the world when you're first going through it because you just want the goddamned thing to go away, but it really is the next best thing to a cure that there is. It works so well, if there was a cure today but it cost an astronomically high amount, I'd wait indefinitely for the price to come down. Even then, I wouldnt care to go for it until I got bugged by it again somehow, if I ever did. It really became that much of a non issue. It had become a non-issue. I had just become a sound that I was ignorant of for sometime weeks at a time.

I'll fill you in on a little of what I'm currently having trouble with. My grandmother has being have bad health issues the past few weeks, I'm trying to finished college, and I have been having a bad bout of depression(non tinnitus related). While I was in class last Thursday, as usual, darting my eyes back and forth from my note book to the board would cause my eye floaters to go flying around my field of vision. Been like that since highschool. I guess being super stressed and anxious for almost three weeks had my mind primed to latch onto stupid shit and instead of forgetting about the floaters when I walked out of class like I always do I honed in on them. Went home still focusing on them, got on the internet and started reading up on them(worst thing I could have done). I am now hyperaware of them. I can't get them off my mind. I feel like I would have my tinnitus issues. Same feeling of dread, bleakness, and panic. I know for a fact my floaters aren't any worse now then they were before Thursday, but my mind has associated them with a threat, hence the anxiety I'm feeling from them. It's the same beast with a different coat. I caught myself saying I would take my tinnitus getting twice as loud if my floaters would go away the other night. When I caught that, I laughed to myself. The tinnitus was never a problem, my floaters aren't a problem either even though my mind is currently taking them as a threat. The anxiety that I mind is producing is the issue. I'm going to do what I did for my tinnitus and accept that they're there and just get on with everything. Currently about to leave the house and go have lunch with my cousin even though my mind would rather me stay in bed searching the internet on my laptop digging through forums to satiate my obsession. In fact, being on this site has been making me relive those feelings I had during my bad days with tinnitus. May not be coming here for a while after this week.

Acceptance and the habituation that follows really are powerful things. It made a believer of me. I don't remember where the article I read was, but a doctor wrote about habituation and said it was the next best thing to a cure. He said something along the lines of "maybe a cure will be here next week, maybe next month, may a year from now, a decade, a century, maybe not even in our lifetime. Until that day come, if it ever does, wouldn't it be wonderful to enjoy your life despite the tinnitus? For it to just be another sensation not unlike the wind on your skin, the cloths on your body, or the smell of your house. Many people achieve this despite the severity of their tinnitus. Some with horrible tinnitus adapted to it with little effort and just never mentioned it because I was never an issue for them. Some have very minor tinnitus and are tormented by it. All the people who have tinnitus,regardless of the severity, that move past it all have accepted it and dont let it control them." Once I knew a cure wasn't here or coming tomorrow, I cried some, and then realized I still wanted to enjoy my life. It was the best way to do so, so I gave it a try, and what do you know... it worked. My life became the same as it was before the tinnitus. You may have to rehabituate in the future. I've had to do it twice. each time took less time achieve and now each time seems like a weird dream, like it wasn't even a real period of my life. If I can get there, anyone can. Live your life. Do it to spite the tinnitus. Do it for your loved ones. Do it for your future. Most importantly, do it for you. It's a battle that can be won if you put in the effort.

 

@msroach89

This is incredible. I am in exactly such a situation. I have had tinnitus for five years now. Was extremely troublesome in the first year. Second year already much better. After that no nuisance at all. I could read with earplugs in. I could sleep with earplugs in. No masking required. Now last week I went to the dentist and was a bit nervous about the sound of the drilling bit. I'm also currently going trough a rough period. I'm worried about my father's health, moving out of my parents house, and my future generally. This is my last year of university, and a lot is about to change.

A couple of hours after the dentist visit I noticed that I was noticing my tinnitus again. Weird. This made me feel pretty uncomfortable, but not too bad. However, in the days that followed it became worse and worse, until today I checked the sound of my tinnitus literally a hundred times. Almost being crippled with fear. It is like a flashback to five years ago when it first started (I'm 22 now). The fear is exacerbated because my daily routine involves a lot of intensive studying (I do mathematics at university) and I am going to graduate school next year (I was actually admitted to Oxford, but this makes me only more nervous). The fear is that I won't be able to concentrate well enough to be able to make a career out of mathematics. Funny, because writing this I have almost perfect concentration! When I take up a book for school however...

Now I am scavenging the internet for everything related to tinnitus (just like I did in the early days), and feel worse and worse, until reading this post. It feels so recognizable.

It has only been a week. I won't even refer to it as a relapse at the moment, but would it persist, that would be a appropriate term.

I found your post so interesting and inspiring that I am wondering if you could PB me your contact details. Unfortunately people often vanish quickly from forums! It is like you said. For the past three years I have not visited a single tinnitus forum, and now I am browsing the entire day reading all these depressing stories. I even saw a documentary on TV in which a woman is euthanized because of her tinnitus and hyperacusis (which I luckily don't have). This does not make it much better! But I guess it is like you say. People that are doing fine don't usually come back to tell that they are doing fine. I figure most people actually end up doing fine (not sure how common relapses are, but could be that more "anxious" people are more vulnerable to it).

What do you advise me? I'm still early on in this relapse and do not want to waste a lot of time on it. What can I practically do to prevent full blown relapse in this early stage?

I hope to hear from you.

(You may also send me a personal message for certain things if you want. I guess you can do that too on this forum, although I'm not familiar with it. Your advise seems very valuable to me, especially in this stage, that is why I ask if you would share a more persistent method of communicating with you, because like I said... people vanish really quickly on forums)

 

I'll send you a private message later on with contact details.

The best thing I can suggest is, and this is going to be weird saying on here, but stop going to forum. I had to make a conscious choice to delete my browsing history at one point because it was literally filled with thousands of views in tinnitus forums. I re-read the same threads, went through the same rabbit holes for cures, investigations into the causes, checking to see if different kinds of sound equated to higher chances of going away, etc. I had to fight every compulsion to look up anything tinnitus related. I forced myself to look at what I did the day before tinnitus. And like I mentioned before, carry on with life like you did the day before tinnitus. The moment you start altering your day to day because of it, you are locked in for the ride. I'm not going to guarantee you that you won't have a full blown relapse, because I had two and about to have a third if you count this current fight I'm having with my eye floaters. That's not to scare you. Sometime you have to get to a point before you get better. Then again, I never was able to identify the start of the past two relapses like I have now. I've been an anxious person my whole life and am very prone to stress and worry, so I'm going to chalk my relapse up to not having appropriate coping skills. I just got back in from lunch with my cousin and running a few errands, and I feel better than I did before I left. Not great, but better. I had quite a few of those kinds of days when I was trying to habituate. Somewhere down the road your body will lose the anxiety and get out of fight or flight and your adrenaline will drop too. Once you get to that point, the noise(or my floaters) will no longer be oppressive but become an annoyance at worst. And it's at that point that your brain will start filtering it out as it'll no longer be viewed as an existential threat. That's when that transition will happen where you start finding those days where you realize you haven't thought about it for a few hours, to a whole day, to two, to a week... Just do your thing and stop coming here or to any other forum if you find that it brings on more anxiety than to takes away. Do relaxing things to break that anxiety cycle. Take a long hot shower. Watch a movie. Exercise. Eventually the brain will unlock from the tinnitus and you will get your mind back.

 

Thank you for this clear and helpful reflection of what many of us are experiencing. To me the issue is anxiety.

When I come back to this forum, I know that I'm falling in the hole of dread again. I only view success stories, which is what brought me to this thread and I'm grateful for what you posted.

On a lighter note, I think that if an IQ test were done that identified tinnitus sufferers it would find that we tend to be very intelligent, able to worry and analyze up a storm! Our brains are busy!

 

And like Jori, I would also like to be able to contact you. I couldn't see a way of contacting you privately on your profile page.

 

Hi everyone,

@msroach89 : I am actually doing quite well. To be honest, my Tinnitus is extremely faint, its a high pitched hiss. I have debated whether I have actually had it for a while as I remember hearing a sound when I splet with ear plugs (I did so nearly every night for 3 years) and moments where I heard a high pitched frequency several years ago but couldn't find the source (I eventually jsut thought I was some electronics and never though about it again haha). It wasn't until December when I for some reason got bothered by a sound and was going to a physician anyway for a different reason and I asked them about it, they told me about Tinnitus and I went online... and thats when I began panicking. Honestly, this forum can be extremely counter productive... some of the responses I got to my first post instilled a lot of doom-and-glood and fear that actually made it worse.

But I continued to go about my life as normal (hanging out with friends, going to parties, etc...).

I have had many moments of silence where I completely do not hear the hiss. These moments of silence occur when I am focused or super relaxed so I agree that stress can make it worse.

But @msroach89: I do have one question. When you say "I hear my tinnitus all the time, or should I say that it's audible all the time, but I often don't register it. It's why I became a firm believer in habituation." Do you mean that you filter it out? As in, its audible (the noise is present) but you do not consciously "hear" it? Basically, I asked someone once if they can appreciate or enjoy quiet and they said that they can absolutely enjoy quiet and even don't use a masking device anymore because their brain just filters it out to the point that its as if they don't hear it and that they only hear it if they tune into it consciously. Is that something you have experienced? Or do you hear it constantly but just don't react? Mine does not bother me as much as it once did, but I still get annoyed when I detect the hiss.

And I agree, getting off the internet does wonders. I just came back here to reply to someone and I saw your post which I found to be positive so I had to ask a question ahha. And I am only coming back here to see replies to this thread... and will soon not return.

 

It's both. I guess the brain just filters it out all the time, but if I walked into my house from a loud heavy down pour, the contrast MAY make aware of the T but then it still doesn't bug me. Just a noise. Not a bad noise. Not a good noise. Just a noise. Ill notice it like I would notice a smell of something baking, then my mind moves on. Its no a threat and doesn't elicit any panic or anxiety in me, so it doesn't focus on it.

 

@msroach89 I'm doing a little better now. I am at least in a place where I can cope, yet definitely not yet where I was. I think the "objective" sound has returned to its old volume, but "subjectively" it is much more present. It still strikes me as odd, I was doing four years without suffering. I was at a point where I wouldn't even have paid 1000$ (or something) to have it cured. Now that exact same tinnitus is at the forefront of my entire day, really hard to ignore. I can only assume I will return to my old habitation. Especially since the volume has not really changed.

You have not yet sent me a private message!

 

I totally agree with the OP that if you shake off the anxiety, the suffering stops. The added benefit is that once you train yourself to focus away from the anxiety and sinister thoughts, and your emotions calm down, the T quietens down too.

It starts a kind of positive feedback loop where you start to gain faith in the resulting longer and longer quiet/silent periods.

At the very least, when you get a spike, ask yourself what good anxiety can do? I know it's not easy to do this in the early days, but the quicker we do it, the quicker we can get back to life. If life issues are causing lots of anxiety, then changing things around might be the answer for some.