Is It True That Some People's Tinnitus Go Away?

T-Bone wrote:
After hearing so many things, is it truly possible that tinnitus can disappear fully. Or have you heard of anybody's tinnitus is going away without habituation?

Tinnitus has many causes. If the cause of your tinnitus is resolved then you most likely won't have tinnitus because tinnitus is after all a symptom.

 

Love these responses, @billie48 and @Magpie.
I always worry about the brain's plasticity over time, i.e. memory of t embedded in it. Billie, is the timing usually within the first year of onset with the stories you read?

 

Yeah, I've read stories about it going away. One story I read that a guy visited a nightclub and had it for three years.

Don't read into the "brain memorizing" stuff. I think it's largely BS kind of like how you'll read on the internet how an audiogram can make tinnitus worse, which makes no sense. It's measure the lowest levels you can hear at, so normal hearing is what below 15 or 20 decibels? Or in other words if a whisper doesn't spike your tinnitus neither should an audiogram.

 

Do you think there is a 'normal' t everyone can hear? What do you think it sounds like?

 

Surprisingly I still remember what "scilence" sounds like since I only got tinnitus 4 months ago, and plus I have a very good memory. I remember that normal tinnitus sounds like a faint hum you only hear it if you are in a very quiet surrounding.

 

The time frame seems to vary. Of course those with medical cause will see their T fade away after the root cause is treated. New T sufferers also report a good number of cases of T disappearing.

 

Yeah now that i think of it years and years ago everytime i would be in my bathroom doin whatever i would hear a low hum like really faint and just thought it was normal.. And would only hear it in the bathroom cause thats the quietest place in my house

 

maybe the hum came from the bathroom then?

 

I never heard anything - even when i closed my ears. Is it possible that you had tinnitus a long time ago already?

 

Maybe idk..you could be right but it kinda felt like a real low hum coming from my head like a vibration but then again maybe it was something else but there isnt any noise in my bathroom when the heater isnt running so who knowsss lol

 

Kris wrote:
Do you think there is a 'normal' t everyone can hear? What do you think it sounds like?


In 1953 Heller and Bergman performed a simple and classic experiment. They placed 80 tinnitus free individuals (university members) in a sound proofed room for 5 minutes each, asking them to report on any sounds that might be heard. The subjects thought they might be undergoing a hearing test, but actually experienced 5 minutes of total silence. 93% reported hearing buzzing, pulsing, whistling sounds in the head or ears identical to those reported by tinnitus sufferers. This simple experiment shows almost anyone can detect background electrical activity present in every living nerve cell in the hearing pathways as a sound. Although some areas of the auditory system may be more active than others, every neurone will contribute to some extent to the final perception of tinnitus. These electrical signals are not evidence of damage, but compensatory activity that occurs all the time in the auditory system of each one of us. Compensation can occur as a response to changes in our sound environment (e.g. silence) to hearing loss which may be a natural part of ageing, or to exposure to sudden noise.

 

When i first got T my dad promised me it would go away in a day.. It didnt i panicked freaked cause i was nearly deaf with loud ringing.. He said oh well i have that all the time! My dad plays guitar all the time very loudly he loves his music loud and every single time we jam he says his ears ring for like 30 mins then dissapear... This was my situation to for like the past few years.. Id stop drummin and my ears would ring.. Wouldnt even think bout it didnt face me whatso ever cause i knew it would go away and it always did after 20-30 minutes. But that one time it stayed for 2 straight days scared the shit outta me then went away..but now its barely audible but still there. Now im wondering if mayb past few years this happened and i just wasnt aware of it cause after the two days of intrusive ringing i googled and scared myself to death thinking this was here permantly.. And thankgod it dropped to almost nothing but now i feel like it was a life lesson to take care of my ears more. And i deffinately do. Just scared for my dad cause he doesnt understand. Its gonna get him one of these times. It got my uncle for 1 day too.. He jammed with my dad and his ears rang for a day and told me bout it too. But im startin to think more people hear sounds then they realize they just dont know what tinnitus is and if they hear something not so loud they go about there life until it gets to the point where its LOUD then there like what is this?! So for alot i would say it goes away... I scared myself cause my dad was playing at least 130 db of loud music for 40 mins when i got it so once it didnt go away for an hour i thought for sure it was here for good.. But i got lucky for the most part. Thankgod. I will say if i was in that room for another 30 mins that loud ring WOULD be permanent. Just take care of your ears.. Wear ear plugs.

 

how long has it take for your T in the first place to go away I also got the H. Do you feel any better with H.

 

@tabby well it's not gone now - but it would of been almost a year with T when it was down 80% in volume. H is definitely a little harder than T.

 

Am I right to hear your tinnitus has gone away? If so how?! That's great! What sort was it and from what may I ask?

 

Hey Penelope,
Ours will also go away or we will no longer be aware of it.
Many here took the same route and can go days or weeks without being aware of their T.
All the best,
Martin

 

You're on the high road.
You said you think it's going away. And you don't cover your ears to listen for it.
If it bugs you, measure your response, don't measure the T. I believe this actually changes something psychologically .. or biologically.
After 40 years of T, I think there were many times it must have been 'gone.' But %#@* loud music brought it back every time. And every time it came back it was louder.

 

Hi IWLM,
I don't have to measure my T. It is constant and I can always hear it.
Yes, it bugs me that I am tensed, anxious and depressed.
But I do not react to it in a way that I stay at home and cry - although oftentimes I would like to.
I mask with cricket sounds and I know I am still in flight or fight mode and that it is just music of the brain.
But it bothers me.
Really difficult living this day by day working towards habituation.
But I have children and a wife to survive for.
You and others give me hope that I can make my way through this.
Take care,
Martin

 

When I first got T it had actually fully disappeared after a few months completely!!I was delighted and over the moon about this.Then St.Patricks day arrived which is obviously a massive holiday in Ireland and a few friends had decided to go to a club and next thing you know all my friends were going.I was extremely against going but of course being 18 and not wanting to be left out I decided to go.I brought hearing protection i.e ear plugs and of course my friends were poking fun at me for wearing them but I didnt care.I spent most of the night away from the music and enjoyed the night.It had been the first time in a long that I had been out partying with my friends.The next morning I was shocked when I woke up and T was back and stayed ever since.

 

The tinnitus consultant at my hosp told me that people rarely go back to hearing silence. I hate to think of that. My friend said the other day 'what's so great about silence anyway' no one knows do they? What it is like to have to deal with noise. I feel like I'm in a prison sentence for life. I pray it will go or reduce.

 

Think of it this way: people only go to a T consultant if they need help with T. If your T went away, you wouldn't go back to a T consultant just to tell them. Perhaps she has had people who have had their T go, but because she hasn't seen them she doesn't know.

But you are right: people without T don't seem to understand. They are very understanding, but after a while they get sick of your whining. My mother has lost her patience a few times, though thankfully on the whole she is understanding and tries to comfort me.

Since your T had disappeared I think there is a chance it will go. Remember: people can live with T. Even though it is difficult, people still have great lives with it. I think the hard part is adjusting.

 

Yes it does.
I like you read a lot of stories online from people who are bothered by it and so they post about it a lot and I got the Idea that It will never go away.
But like the dude said somewhere there when you talk to people in real life lots of people have had Tinnitus noise induced,random,stress,medication and have had it go away completely.
My ENT had Tinnitus, he says the only time he hears Tinnitus now is if he literally has to imagine what the Tinnitus sounds like and then tries really hard to listen for it.
My mom had Tinnitus for 2 days lol due to air pressure and stuff.
For some it goes away for the ones for whom it doesn't they habituate to it and it never bothers them again.
You have to understand that it's not the Tinnitus that bothers you rather it's the emotion and importance you give it.
I still care about mine so it's still a slight problem BUT I know me I am going to pay attention to my Tinnitus for maybe a month more before I give up on it and start not giving a f@k about it any more at which point I will barely notice it.
Chances are it might go away on it's own seeing as how it's still decreasing and it switches from my left ear and right ear at times which I hear is a good thing (means the brain hasn't locked on yet).
Give it a year hell give it two.
All in all 5-10 years from now all of us are probably going to be Tinnitus free anyway due to so many researches being done today (stem cells,mute button,AM-101,Brain surgery and so on and so on).

 

Yes. My T disappeared after 3 months for a good while and it would only periodically come back. Unfortunately it finally did come back.

And no, it had nothing to do with habituation. Because even when it was gone, tinnitus left me so traumatized tgat I found myself still thinking about it constantly. In fact, I even would go into quiet rooms with ear plugs just to see if I could hear it, and I could not.

Now unfortunately, I can hear it no matter what. This time I want to habituate so I don't have to fear it.

 

Hi,

I just wanted to know if anybody knows anyone whose tinnitus went away? I just want to know if it goes away gradually or it goes away on its own suddenly? Recently I experienced a weird 2 seconds of silence when my T changed frequency for about 20 seconds and then for a couple of seconds there was silence and then the old high frequency came back? Are there any statistics which say, how many people experience T and for how long and for what percentage of sufferers it goes away?

Also, I also want to know when is T considered chronic? After a year?

 

Actually, my Tinnitus which I have had for only a month and a half has gone to the point where there are only a couple of ways I can hear it.
1.) Put on my headphones (but even then it's low)
2.) Go to the bathroom in complete silence and listen, after a while it feels more like pressure sound rather than Tinnitus.
3.) When I put an ear on a pillow (again only air sounds nothing bad)
Right now I only have a gripe where I seem to be able to hear sounds other people can't, mostly coming from electrical appliances making hisses rings and so on but I believe this is simply because I have a mild case of phonophobia and my brain simply locks onto some Tinnitus sound and amplifies it, should be gone after a month or so just needs time to settle down, I was very very stressed during the first 3 weeks (no eating,hated everything,suicidal,angry,depressed) this all probably caused that, as I couldn't hear it the first 2 days.
Anyway I'll add one more story.
A friend of mine went to a loud concert and had Tinnitus, he had it for 2 months, he actually habituated really fast by the time it was gone he needed a whole month to actually notice it gone while he was using the facilities.

 

I have had it twice before. Both times it was very quiet but the second time it was loud enough for me to go to the doctors, and get told no cure, that's it. I didn't care as I had a lot of other things to worry about, and I never really noticed that it had gone until it came back a 3rd time. Much louder this time, can hear it over the TV, when driving and so on. This time it has become an issue for me, but, it has gone away twice before. My Dad has it as well, but he never mentiones it, he got it after a car accident. He still has it, but only if there is amplified music playing. After I got it he tried to listen to his in a quiet room, and couldn't find it.

10% of people experience it, yet we don't get millions of posts here on this board. I think it goes away for most people.

 

Good point. The TinnitusTalk forum is not representative of T sufferers at all.

I wrote a post about the chance that T will fade/go away to the extent that people report that it is not "bothersome" here; https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...ood-of-temporary-vs-permanent-tinnitus.10177/

I think because the statistics are not easily apprehended and because I was wordy naming the thread few people have joined the conversation. I always think back to this data when I read well intention-ed forum posts about anecdotes. The NHANES data this is based on is 100 times more reliable than anecdotes. In short if you have had T symptoms for less than 3 months you have at least an 80% chance of resolution by one year and a 73% chance that symptoms will last for less than 3 months.

The 10% of the population statistic put out by tinnitus associations is the number of people at any one time affected by tinnitus (probably over the course of the last year). NOT the total cumulative number that have ever reported having tinnitus. The vast majority of people get habituated or it gets resolved to the point that they no longer report that it is "bothersome". I like that description in the survey data because its super easy as we all know to be "bothered" by T. Also of the 10% who report T sounds may of them must have been previous T sufferers because 73-80% of the 10% do not become chronic.

If you think carefully about this survey data and how the questions are asked it makes clear that the questions elicited affirmative responses from EVERYONE who had bothersome T and most of those cases will no longer be bothersome after 3 months.

 

Yes I have encountered around 5 who recovered. One of them recovered after a plane ride.

 

It can go away anytime its so unpredictable, even after years. Personally I think if it lasts more than a couple of weeks, it rarely disappears or goes away overtime and is permanent in most cases. Not to scare or disappoint anybody I can be wrong it's just my personal opinion after reading and knowing about it so much. But as its tinnitus, there is nothing certain about it as we all know

 

hi! i'm 13 and about three months ago i noticed a ringing in my right ear when i was trying to sleep. it doesn't bother me throughout the day, because i can only really hear it when i'm in dead silence or like at night when i'm in bed. it gets really annoying and i have no idea why i have it? like it came out of nowhere and i don't listen to loud music or anything. do you think it will go away? like i'm still really young and have a lot of my life ahead of me so i'm really scared