Irregular Tinnitus for Over a Year

Hello all,

My tinnitus is disrupting my concentration today and this has pushed me to join the forum. I think joining this forum and introducing myself and describing my experience should help keep the frustration at bay which so far I haven't given in to. In this post I will introduce myself, my lifestyle, and describe in great detail the past 14 months that I have had tinnitus. I do not expect anyone to read this entire post nor do I even encourage it; I am simply typing it all out to make myself feel better about it; and perhaps with the hope that someone with a similar "version" of my tinnitus can make suggestions on ways to reduce it.

Summary of this post (TL;DR)
First I briefly introduce myself and where I am and what I am doing in life. Next I type out in full detail my timeline with tinnitus. Two highlights of it are the fact that it comes and goes; and what factors may or may not cause its coming and going (moving seems to be a common one!). Next I describe aspects of my lifestyle that may or may not have contributed to getting it. I believe I have noise-induced tinnitus. Finally I describe how my attitude in life has been affected, as really this is what it all boils down to.

About me
31 year old male born and raised in the suburbs of Ottawa, Canada. Moved out at the age of 18 to Montreal for school. Earned a Bachelor of Commerce specializing in International Business with a minor of Anthropology at Concordia University. Spent a decade growing a shipping business with my father, brother and a few others before quitting to transition in to software development where I am now. Currently residing in British Columbia for the winter while I work on my skills and projects and enjoy the world class skiing.

Tinnitus timeline

• When it entered my life (late November 2019 [age 30]): I remember precisely where I was and what I was doing when I realized I had a new hearing problem. Deep down inside I knew this was going to be permanent. Over the next few days all kinds of weird sounds were happening in my hearing. It made me really anxious.
• Emergency Room visit (early December 2019): I had a couple days at school where the tinnitus reached a level to which I could not concentrate whatsoever and it was really, really loud. This is where I began getting a bit freaked out, I'm sure you all know the thoughts of "what if this is the rest of my life?". I called ENTs for appointments, unfortunately in Canada unless you have something life threatening / seriously debilitating you will wait for months. So I went to the ER at a hospital and just asked the doctor to refer me to an ENT in the hospital in the hopes of bumping me ahead. This proved to be a waste of time as I did not get an appointment with the ENT until about 5 months later. Fortunately the tinnitus dropped significantly over the next few weeks, I suppose my brain adapted. I finally to managed set up an appointment with another ENT in February.
  
• First ENT appointment (February 2020): I met with the ENT and by this time the tinnitus had all but disappeared. He gave me an audiogram and when reviewing the test said "you have a musician's hearing" which was somewhat surprising to me considering my party lifestyle through my 20s (more on that later). The summary of my conversation with him boiled down to more or less to the following:
  • Tinnitus just happens to people, is a normal part of aging, and it's just not understood why.
  • People who overly stress about their tinnitus are just stressful people in general. Things can get dangerous when tinnitus is combined with mental health problems (this was in response to me mentioning the fact I saw people who post on the internet about considering suicide due to their tinnitus).
  • Though he did not say this, nor was he suggesting it - I figured he had far bigger fish to fry than the thousands of people that get tinnitus. He was incredibly nonchalant about tinnitus and that just made me realize how common this is.
  • I left the appointment feeling much better about my tinnitus and since it wasn't even there at that point I was just hopeful it would stay that way as long as possible.
• Return and disappearance of tinnitus after move to Ottawa (April 2020): It's simply impossible to know the real causes of why it came back, but there were some changes in my life right before it came back:
  • I had just gotten over a brief encounter with a mental health problem (depression) after a traumatic event involving a betrayal by a romantic partner, among a couple other things.
    
  • COVID-19 had just hit, and during first lockdown I moved back to my parents basement so that I wouldn't be completely alone in my apartment all the time. My diet increased dramatically in quality thanks to my mother.
    
  • For some reason I suspected the Wi-Fi. So I took out my Wi-Fi device from my PC and switched to Ethernet cable. Shortly after this the tinnitus disappeared again. Again, it is impossible to determine causation, but the correlation is significant enough to note here.
• Second ENT appointment (May 2020): The hospital eventually called me for the appointment I had set up after the ER visit. I accepted just to get a second opinion. This appointment was mostly unhelpful. It was at a huge hospital in Montreal and I only spoke to the doctor for maybe 10 minutes. (I am understanding - once again I'm sure he had bigger issues at hand. In Canada our health care system chooses to prioritize time over money). I was not given an audiogram and he did not say anything much of value - apart from the fact that surgery was an option but it was a very difficult and risky operation. He did say one good thing which was to not let it disrupt my lifestyle, just use hearing protection when I am near loudness, and followed it up with an ominous warning: "when it comes back it will come back worse".
• Return of tinnitus at nearly its worst after move to mountain town (November 2020): In October of 2020 I bought a Honda Civic and packed up my things and drove across the country to Calgary and stayed with friends for 2 weeks until I found a room to rent in Golden, BC. The goal was to escape the coming lockdowns and what I knew was going to be the worst winter in living memory (Montreal winters are just brutal; many people suffer from seasonal depression even without a pandemic happening) and spend this winter skiing. This is where I am currently (in fact I can turn around right behind me and see the Rocky Mountains from my window). My tinnitus returned very gradually this time around, and I can't pinpoint when it came back. Regardless, it's been getting worse and worse to the point that today it started breaking my concentration on my software work, hence me typing out this lengthy post. Once again it's impossible to determine a cause, but here are some factors I think may be relevant:
  • Geography & climate. Golden, BC is elevated at 800m above sea level, which is much higher than what I'm used to in Montreal which is pretty much at sea level. It is also much dryer than back home as well.
  • Constant changes in elevation. I am skiing 2-3 times a week, and I have to drive up to the resort base which is about 400m above the town and then spend the day going up and down the mountain whose summit is at 2450m, the difference being about 1300m each trip up or down
  • Lifestyle has changed greatly. Dropped some of my vices (drug use) however that comes at the cost of much more time at the computer.

Lifestyle
Here I will describe different aspects of my lifestyle in detail, that may relate to tinnitus.

• Reckless partying and clubbing: through my 20s I was serious party animal. I am passionate for live music and enjoy experiencing altered states of consciousness so Montreal offers to engage this lifestyle very easily. In the first half of my 20s every weekend was spent drinking heavily and doing the party drugs and going out for live shows at all different types of venues all over the city. It happened far more often than I cared to admit that I would wake up with high pitched ears ringing that would go away over the next day or two and my young, stupid, careless self just never thought anything of it. At 25 things calmed down in frequency, but intensity increased. I became a regular at a world famous after hours club called Stereo Montreal. Roughly once a month I would go to this club and party for anywhere between 8 and 24 hours (it's extreme - I know). This club is designed with acoustics in mind however so the music was loud but not painfully loud and one could easily walk out of there after 12 hours and not have any ringing in the ears at all. After I got my tinnitus in 2019 it didn't stop me from going but I did start wearing earplugs and I most definitely noticed a difference in that my hearing and t was largely unaffected after a night out at this club (I had noticed shortly after getting my tinnitus the first time around that extended periods of loud activities would induce it for a few days). If COVID-19 never hit I would still be frequenting this club and that's really the only hard partying I would have in my life.
• Loud music: as mentioned several times by now I am a passionate music lover, I'm sure many reading this understand. After my tinnitus appeared I would try to avoid headphones as much as possible, and I do try to reduce the frequency of loud music sessions, but on Friday night it's time to drink beer, smoke weed and immerse myself in a long DJ mix at high volume. This gives me great joy.
• Motorcycle riding: another one of my passions is riding my sport bike motorcycle in the summer. This is an extremely loud activity, even with ear plugs. I frequently forget to put in my ear plugs and next thing I know I'm on the highway at a velocity of 130 km/h with wind noise blasting in to my ears and I know my tinnitus will flare up the next few days.
• Diet: I would describe my diet as neutral quality. I don't think I eat poorly, but I certainly don't eat really well (due to a combination of factors).
• Sleep: I'm an excellent sleeper and unless I force myself out of bed in the morning I can easily sleep 9-10 hours per day.
• Work: My entire career has been spent in front of a computer screen, whether that was producing essays for school, doing office work at the shipping business, or developing software for my current projects. I don't know if this contributes to my tinnitus but I do know the human body did not evolve to spend this much time sitting and staring at monitors.

Attitude towards life

• Happiness and positivity: I am, thankfully, a very happy person. I have a lot of gratitude and am always actively looking around in my life for the things that make me happy and acknowledge them frequently. I am not prone to mental health problems. I wake up happy to be alive. So I am capable of not letting the tinnitus ruin my life.
• Stoicism: this past year I took an interest in the philosophy of Stoicism. One of the core teachings of stoicism is that things don't make you feel a certain way - it's your reactions that make you feel that way. So, choose how you react, and that's how you'll feel. Simple, actionable, effective. However, when it comes to tinnitus, Stoicism starts to reach its limit. Events in life happen, then disappear. Road rage happens briefly and then it's gone. Controlling your reaction to something like that is relatively easy. Tinnitus, on the other hand, stays no matter how much you stoically want to not react to it. It is as persistent as gravity itself. Most of the time I can let it irritate me for a brief moment, and then focus on something else and forget about it. Sometimes the tinnitus is so bad that it's just obnoxiously invading the most private space you have in the universe for no goddamn reason at all and there's nothing that can be done about it, and you give in to the anger and frustration bubbling below which leads to all sorts of dark thoughts about hating God and this stupid ancient meat vehicle called the body. These moments are rare at least.

So I think that's it. If you read all of this, well congrats and thank you! I am happy to join a community like this, I'm sure it helps enormously. To end on a positive note, the sound therapy sounds I have been listening to for the past 90 minutes while I typed out this encyclopedia of my life for you all has worked very well and will give me enough relief to get back to work.

Cheers!!

- Shea

 

Hello, Shea!

This was a great post to read. Like you, it tends to help if I can write out and "catalog" everything in a similar way, as it gives me a perspective on the situation and helps ensure I am not missing anything too crucial. I am sorry to hear that you are going through a rough spell at the moment, and I wish that it is very short-lived.

I hope to someday emulate some of your positive aspects, such as your happiness, attitude, and ability to sleep. I think these three issues here are part of what's holding me back, but they were issues beforehand. Having another issue that may be temporary or may take a little long on top of that just makes it all the more difficult to improve. I wish it was just as easy as telling yourself not to feel a certain way or to ignore something.

I am a bit curious of the whole "musician's hearing" definition. Does this mean you basically had perfect hearing for your age? That's an odd term, since I actually interpreted it as a negative at first given many musicians end up with poor hearing as a result of their constant playing. This might be a fun fact you don't know, but Beethoven both had considerable hearing loss and tinnitus!

Pointless digressions aside, it is nice to hear your story. Given that your symptom tends to come and go, even if it sometimes returns with much more intensity, you may just be having spikes that you will either lose or habituate to with time. There's no way to sure what causes spikes or drops unless there's instantaneous change, but either way, I have confidence given your positive nature and inner strength that it will be handled.

I wish you the absolute best!

 

I'm not about to tell you that whatever you have going on in your life is able to be dismissed in your head instantaneously. What I will say though is that the ancient Stoics were on to something. I promise you that if you were to read the words of Seneca or Marcua Aurelius, certain things that did bother you no longer would. These men that lived thousands of years ago in vastly different cultural contexts will speak words that resonate as true today as though they were still living and know some of your struggles on a personal level. There is a very deep power in that. Since I'm still only halfway through Seneca's Letters From a Stoic and haven't gotten anywhere else yet (it's dense reading) it's difficult to me to suggest where to start if you were so inclined. If you're interested in Stoicism but don't know where to start, let me know and I'll come up with some ideas for you!

I think what he was referring to when he mentioned having a musician's hearing was a statistical grouping. So scientists will measure certain things about people, maybe say personality traits; hair density; vision clarity. They test massive amounts of people with a standardized test and record other data about them. For example, you measure the eye sight of 10 thousand people and a relative few will have poor eyesight, some will have excellent eyesight, and most will have average or close to average eyesight. So “A person with 20/20 vision can see what an average individual can see on an eye chart when they are standing 20 feet away". You will begin to notice patterns at various points in the curve of eye sight. For example (I'm making this example up for the sake of the point), pilots (as a group) will have better eyesight than say, accountants. Important note here: in statistics it's crucial not to confuse correlation with causation. For example - it's tempting to assume becoming a pilot will give you better eyesight, but in reality it's more likely that people with good eyesight are attracted to the profession of pilot and that pilots simply are not allowed to be pilots if they test below a certain threshold of eyesight. So in the case of hearing, the doctor looked at my audiogram results, and apparently my hearing is as good as that typical of musicians. Which explains quite a bit actually. I have loved music and sound my entire life, I have a home theatre sound system because I get as much enjoyment out of movies' sound as I do from the pictures! Now where I *think* this may be a disadvantage, as you mentioned, is that perhaps my hearing is more sensitive than usual, so that means I pick up the tinnitus tones where others wouldn't! I wish I asked the ENT about this hypothesis but I only thought of it after. I also suffer from the eyesight vision of tinnitus which is eye floaters (nowhere near the same level of irritating though I can tell you that) and I think it's because I have good eyesight and good hearing that I can detect the normal deterioration happening that arises from ageing. So it's a double-edged sword.

You're right, we must get comfortable with an amount of uncertainty in our lives. Thank you for the kind words, I truly appreciate it! I wish all the same to you! People like you are why I love the internet. You're showing me how positive of a community this is already. I firmly believe that at least some level of happiness is within all of our reach.

Cheers Drachen!

 

Absolutely! I think I understand at this point that there is no magic bullet that will make my problems disappear immediately, but I am sure there are better techniques I can utilize or philosophies I may follow that would help change my mindset. My issues in terms of handling anxiety, stress, and depression extend even beyond my recent onset of symptoms here, so there's likely some value I could gain from pursuing new strategies. Stoicism may not be for me, but it is something I have yet to research extensively. All I know is that I need to change somehow.

It's strange this even came up, as after looking in my drawer, I see my copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius sitting there, unread. I'd certainly like to get back into it, but since my symptoms have begun, I have found it very difficult to just sit and read a book. I have always needed almost complete silence to do it before, at least what I thought was silence, but now it gets very irritating after a while.

Should you have any advice, I'd be glad to hear it! I do not know as much about Seneca as I should. I am somewhat of a casual fan of the old Roman times, but most of my limited knowledge extends to the civics and history.

Ah, this is interesting! Yeah, it makes sense now that you've explained it like that. I also didn't catch the correlation with pilots and good eyesight, but I can see why that's a thing. It's good to hear that your hearing is seemingly good all the same.

The sensitivity of your hearing could very well be contributing to your perception. I have a similar feeling in my case that my obsessive-compulsive tendencies might have caused me to latch on to this sound. I really need to figure out a way to address that as it has almost always been responsible or a major player in my mental episodes.

If only I could compel myself to do that which I know to be true. The cognitive separation between understanding and feeling/emotion is sometimes quite debilitating.

Thank you very much for your kind words. I am always glad to see that I have been able to spread some sort of positivity, especially in the midst of a problem that doesn't often compel it.

Best wishes, my good man. Let us all find the ability to either eradicate this problem or move past it.