My Tinnitus Keeps Getting Worse No Matter What I Do

I wear earplugs on the streets, on bus or other cars. I don't go to any loud events. I don't listen to music on headphones. I take my supplements: Vitamin C, Magnesium, Zinc and others. I took Betaserc and Ginkgo biloba in the past with no results. I've had it for almost 2 years.

I'm 19, in university and I'm afraid I won't be able to keep going. No matter what I do, my tinnitus keeps getting worse on a weekly basis as far as I can tell. The only way I managed to not get my tinnitus worse is by staying home all day. And I can't do that... My University is in a city about 250km away from home so I stay there.

Every single doctor I've been to didn't help in any way (4-5 different doctors from my memory - ENTs and 1 neurologist).

Audiogram looks fine, but we all know they only go up to 8 kHz.

What do I do?

 

How's your stress/anxiety levels?

 

@HeavyMantra I was always kind of anxious. I am obsessive about my tinnitus. I am quite stressed...especially now with university. I have been a guy with good grades and pretty hard working. I'm not the brightest but I compensate by the time I put in.
It begins to feel like my past self is someone else. It feels wrong to not worry about my tinnitus because tinnitus is not normal.

 

What's it sound like? Maskable? How long?

 

@dan Since the beginning of 2018. Maskable only in loud environments, which I don't like. It can be however partially covered by TV or if I play music on my PC/phone. If I knew it wouldn't get any louder I would 100% take it. But that's not a given it seems...

 

Wished I could offer some advice, I'm in a similar situation. My tinnitus just keeps getting worse even though it shouldn't.

Do you have hyperacusis?

 

Just stay away from loud noise and you'll be fine. Don't make the mistake I did 10 days ago.
Apparently earplugs are not enough in some cases. Buses give off low frequencies that reach via bone conduction...

 

@Autumnly Not really. Only mildly. I try to avoid loud sounds anyway but I certainly don't have it as bad as other people on this forum.
I actually feel I am a bit less sensitive to sound recently due to having to go outside.
I could go on with my paranoid thoughts, but they're not useful.

 

Hmm...Any way to avoid this bone conduction?

 

No.

 

So I’m one week in on prednisone and things are getting worse. I’ve been “masking” with more and more fan noise, but I wonder if this trauma is acting differently. I wonder if I’m making things worse... can’t hurt (other than my sanity) to try earplugs 24/7...

Any thoughts on this? Will this make my brain solidify the noise, or help my freaked out hearing nerves heal?

Thanks.

 

I think that complete masking is not very helpful since it makes some sort of habituation impossible. Outside noises should partially mask it and over time the masking should become less and less necessary.

Btw: What is prednisone?

 

Hi... I can still hear some stuff of the outside world, so it’s not just my head noise... a week in and this hasn’t been getting better... I’m just not sure which way to go. Last night scared me, I’ve never heard my tinnitus that loud, to the point I almost couldn’t drive.

I think I will try more quiet and less masking.

“Prednisone is used for many different autoimmune diseases and inflammatory conditions”... it’s a strong steroid that many ENTs will prescribe shortly after acoustic trauma, mostly with a hearing loss associated trauma...

 

Prednisone made me feel better. Wasn’t taking it for noise exposure but still helped my tinnitus. But have seen others who have negative reaction from it. So could be the meds causing an issue. I have spikes from serotonin drugs, curcumin, Ambien, NSAID’s. Everyone is different.

Plugging your ears consistently after a noise exposure is recommended as far as I can tell on here to give your ears time to heal. But at some point many recommend gradual noise exposure to prevent causing hyperacusis which can come from overprotecting or to not exacerbate it if you already have it.

 

Hey,

did you just recently get tinnitus?

I think the masking should be adjusted to the loudness of the tinnitus. When I first got tinnitus (without hearing loss) it was extremely loud as well but it became quieter after some weeks. Partly this is also due to my better understanding of why some people react to the tinnitus and some others do not although their tinnitus may be loud as well. In the beginning the masking was relatively high because the noise was unbearable for me but I followed the instructions that I found in the book "Tinnitus Retraining Therapy" and tried to mask the tinnitus only partially.
Now, I cannot say with certainty that the noise went away because my brain habituated because I suspect that I have some sort of somatosensory tinnitus that may be related to some real physiological malfunction in the region of the ear and the neck. So it may well be that the noise became quieter because the situation in that region improved.

As far as I know there is no relation between the loudness of tinnitus and the ability to adapt to it, i.e. no matter how loud it is you can get used to it and your brain after some time starts to shift the signal out of your consciousness.

Also: Can you modulate your tinnitus by neck movements or by moving your chin?

 

There certainly is a correlation. For example, many people were able to cope well with mild tinnitus but are struggling since their tinnitus has gotten worse. For millions of people, loudness is an essential factor as to why they are struggling. Also, not everyone's brain will eventually tune out the tinnitus. The idea that loudness doesn't matter at all has been a longstanding misconception that harms tinnitus patients, especially severe sufferers.

I’d really recommend these papers showing whether people habituate or not is not just due to their level of emotional acceptance:

• The potential role of auditory prediction error in decompensated tinnitus: An auditory mismatch negativity study
• Toward An Exploration of Habituating to Tinnitus: Perspectives on Sensory Gating

 

I had tinnitus around 15 years ago, got used to it after 4 years... life was good. Went into an MRI with only the muffs and no panic button, so I was essentially stuck for 20 minutes with the loud banging... silly me I expected a nice whirring to take a quick nap too. The tech was a complete idiot...

I started this week sleeping at night with a fan, keeping fans on in the car... but I wonder if this isn’t working this time around (frankly I don’t recall what I did last time... forced silence versus masking, I would always have spare earplugs on me just in case... but after a decade I got complacent.)

I didn’t have kids before, so it was probably more quiet. I’ll wear partial earplugs most of this week and see if it helps.

On the prednisone.... I’m not sure if it is helping the healing while increasing the tinnitus, not helping... just increasing the tinnitus....or maybe it’s helping and I’d be dead right now... hard to tell.

I believe I have experienced debilitating tinnitus last night, and everything I had before did not compare. I know why people discuss suicide, and worse... but no matter how sh!t your life is, you can try to make someone else’s better—my philosophy... damn it was difficult last night.

When the tinnitus got higher in pitch and loudness, the disabling levels... any movement of my jaw would raise the pitch and loudness more. Chewing gum raised the loudness as well. I am considering that I have tensed up my middle ear and my neck when I was pushing on the muffs to increase any seal it had against my head.

I should have just thrown the muffs off and plugged my ears looking back... but then I would have had zero protection for a few seconds... if only we could all go back and do it over again!

Thanks again.

 

I think that all depends on which kind of tinnitus we are talking about. If the phenomenon is purely neuronal and associated with hearing loss, then the process of habituation works differently then if the tinnitus is (partly) caused by other bodily components such as nerves, muscles, bones, etc. For example, when I have a cold the noises often get unbearable and I ask myself whether I ever habituated. After the cold goes away the noises are still there but for some reason they don't bother me anymore because they changed tone and are for some reason not so annoying anymore.

Regarding your first study: If I understood it correctly the study simply states that some people habituate better with the tinnitus than others. I guess that this study also didn't differentiate between tinnitus patients that have a purely neuronal phenomenology of the tinnitus and other subforms of tinnitus so I wonder whether a study like this can even say anything except that "some" people have "some" problems with habituating. It may well be that people with somatosensory tinnitus don't habituate because the sound is "real" in the sense that is has a real bodily origin. That sound may have different effects on the signal processing than a sound that is purely neuronal.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that there is only one kind of tinnitus and it's purely neuronal. The ability to habituate to a tinnitus is in my opinion strongly linked to the acceptance of the fact that someone has tinnitus and to all the stress that comes along when someone is by no means ready to deal with the tinnitus as a fact (and believe me: I was one of them in the beginning). I guess the patients in the study weren't screened for their psychological condition and the way they are dealing with the tinnitus itself. We know from brain scans that people who develop tinnitus have malfunctioning regions in their brain, specifically the medial prefrontal cortex (https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(15)00179-5) (Btw: The conductor of the study, Josef Rauschecker, was interviewed by Tinnitus Talk in the first episode of their Podcast). This brain region is responsible for valuating the tinnitus and attaching emotions to it. People with tinnitus showed less grey matter in that region, just as people with chronic pain. I think that this is the main explanation why some people can deal with tinnitus and other can't. However, this is not bad but good news. Since it is the brain that shows malfunctions it can be altered due to the fact that our brain is plastic (neuroplasticity).

But if we really want to find out why people habituate differently to tinnitus, I think it should first be thought about whether the patients can be thrown all together in the category "tinnitus patient". Yes, all people experience tinnitus, but it may well be for different reasons. The severity of tinnitus may increase because someone spends more and more energy on the tinnitus and thereby increases the importance. It may, however, well be that some other patient has a medical condition (e.g. neck muscles or so) and the tinnitus gets louder because this underlying problem is not treated.

I am really wondering why there is no effort to ask the people first what kind of tinnitus they have since this may even prevent the development of useful therapies.

 

Nothing, you are very welcome.

Look, I am not a specialist, but I suspect that every sort of tinnitus that can be modulated by the movement of the muscles or the jaw, is not a "classical" tinnitus, i.e. tinnitus caused by dead hair cells and a brain that is not able to process those signals properly. It is thinkable that there are combined sorts of tinnitus with tinnitus caused by dead hair cells and muscle/bone-problems at the same time and I suspect that this is the case for me personally. There is even a third option involving the cochlear nucleus region of the brain but I don't think it's helpful here.

The first thing that you should remember, as hard as it may sound in this moment is that tinnitus is "just" a harmless noise. The most important thing for me in the time when I developed the tinnitus was to have people around me, to interact and to thereby at least experience also some other emotions than the unbearable despair attached to tinnitus. In a second step, I think that it is important to understand your own kind of tinnitus better by playing around with the jaw, observing whether the tinnitus is always constant or whether it changes, etc. It helped me also to read through a large amount of publications (mostly the abstracts) to get and understanding what the specialists say. When you feel that you understood the tinnitus better, then it could be time to see specialized physicians who really know that there are individual conditions to tinnitus and don't simply assume that tinnitus is the same for all people. This is important to track down the possibilities of treating the tinnitus because every kind of tinnitus may require its own treatment. For example, a somatosensory tinnitus in which only muscles are involved, my disappear or at least be improved by treating the muscles that cause the tinnitus (I had for some months a very high tone that disappeared as soon as I discovered very painful tensions in my back and massaged them out by myself and with the help of a physiotherapist). If it is a tinnitus that is purely neuronal, treatment will be different and physiotherapy will help you nothing. I hope you get my point.

I hope this helped, my friend. I know that it is unbelievably hard, especially in the night. Try to surround yourself with people close to you and to get some other emotions involved and in the night I would suggest that you try to partially mask the tinnitus. For me what helped best were sounds of creeks, rains and birds because it was something natural while white noise distracted me. Try to play around with different sounds.

Best regards

 

I'm so done with conversations like this one. Loudness can absolutely matter. Not everyone's brain will tune it out and no, it's not just due to someone's level of emotional acceptance. Severe sufferers have been ignored and put into a "it's just a mental health thing"-box for decades. Even when they share their stories, people will just say "no, it's not the loudness, it's their attitude".

"increases the importance" or because the tinnitus actually got worse, e.g. if they develop a new permanent tone.

You have had chronic tinnitus apparently since March of this year. There are enough stories of severe, long-term sufferers showing that this process of habituation doesn't work for everyone and that loudness can matter. We can either listen to their stories or continue to ignore them.

 

I think that it's pretty clear from studies that at least a large share of tinnitus patients has problems with the processing of the signals and emotions in certain brain areas. This is well established and if you don't believe me, you can listen to the first podcast that was hosted by tinnitus talk and read the study of Josef Rauschecker (I think that there are enough similar studies). It is also well established that only a small subgroup of people who experience tinnitus really suffer from it while the majority has no problem whatsoever with the tinnitus. We all belong to the subgroup that experiences problems with the tinnitus which makes us "patients". That is all nothing new, it's known since several decades.

This is indeed a very good question. I would suspect that there are two cases:

1) People whose tinnitus loudness increases because they unconsciously spend effort in observing the tinnitus
2) People whose tinnitus is actually worse but caused by at least another (additional) region than the brain

You give as an example that people develop a new tone. Well, where does this tone come from? Did new hair cells die? If that is the case, then we are back in the neuronal tinnitus-arena and we are dealing with nothing more than malfunctions of the brain in the auditory cortex, in the cochlear nucleus or in the medial prefrontal cortex. This sort of tinnitus reacts well to several therapies that are out there.
What if the new tone has no relation to the hair cells? In this case there may be two scenarios that I can think of: Either the brain structure changed and led to a change in perception, or the tinnitus has an entirely different origin than the hair cells dying. In this case, there is another disease underlying the tinnitus, for example muscular or nerve problems and these should be treated differently.

My feeling say that when a tinnitus get worse suddenly without a noise trauma, then this is an indicator that the tinnitus is related to muscles, bones, the jaw, arteries, nerves, etc. Tell me if you see a mistake in that logic.

I have no doubt that people suffer a lot more than I do at the moment. I also think that a very loud tinnitus can be more bothering and intimidating than a tinnitus that is not so loud. Sorry if you meant that. But the loudness per se doesn't change anything that it is "just a noise", nothing that actually kills us and nothing that we cannot at least in principle try to deal with. And this is the psychological barrier that I am thinking of. When I first experienced tinnitus, my reaction in the first weeks was hateful towards the noise. I had no hope and all I wished every day was to make the tinnitus go away. If someone sticks to the thought that the tinnitus has to go away completely and immediately, then a cool headed examination of the tinnitus by oneself is not possible. That's what I meant.

 

This is actually really offensive to people that have struggled to live with loud intrusive tinnitus for a long period of time. This type of message also makes it seem to the general public that tinnitus is not nearly as big of a problem as it really is which not only creates massive misunderstanding about what we are struggling with but also deflates any urgency in the research community to make any real progress towards a meaningful pharmacological treatment aimed at lowering the volume. Worst of all, it makes it seem like it is the fault of the sufferer for not being able to cope.

 

To Autumnly:

I have been on this Forum since February and I must have had this same debate with probably 15 different respondents (I recall one in particular who actually maintained that Gaby Olthuis should have been chastised for "not trying harder" in spite of her constantly increasing tinnitus volume).

I am very curious about the characterization of this as being only debilitating to "a small subgroup of people" when the ATA's Website states that this condition is "burdensome" (their definition) to 20 million and "severe" and "struggling" to an additional 2 million.

That total constitutes almost seven percent of the entire population.

And I believe that it has been bothersome for at least 13 million to the extent that they have been driven to see ENT Doctors.

My audiologist said that they get at least one new case for every day of the year they are open.

Our Chicago Tribune has a full page Ad every day for Hearing Aids to reduce tinnitus (which ought to give an idea of the number who are bothered to the extent that they can be counted on to respond since their volume has intruded in their consciousnesses to too great a degree).

The only final important point insofar as I am concerned is that when my tinnitus is very low I am in an extremely enthusiastic state of mind.

When it is severe, I am erased and barely functioning.

I am very sorry but that's just the way I am hardwired.

 

You might want to give ATA a pass.

Their board chair thinks tinnitus is not a big deal and for most people it just fades away. The ATA are the scum of the earth.

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...-is-this-the-right-message-to-send-out.32191/

 

Because loudness drives distress.

 

I remember the ATA being no different 15 years ago... what a joke. Look at the GoFundMe sites and all the actors that are afflicted, the ATA should be easily able to pick up millions to donate to some of these researchers... I would think.

...I’ve never seen a PSA about being careful with your ears. Plenty of “get out the vote”, “dump the plastic straws”, “save the whales” etc. PSAs all the time... heck, I see more research on cold sores and herpes... other afflictions which never go away... but at least they aren’t 24/7.

I wonder how much money Beltone and other hearing aid manufacturers are lobbying against a cure?

Cynical I know... but if there is a cure, that will hurt sales of... hearing aids, herbal supplements, noise generators, etc.

So can I get some input quick, I’m going to start wearing earplugs this whole week and just deal with the squeal, will this cause any more harm? I should have thought about this sooner... but if our hearing nerves are inflamed and swollen, it makes sense... .if someone scratches their cornea they wear a patch... right?

Thanks.

 

HI @Gabriel5050

I believe your tinnitus is getting worse for a number of reasons. The main one is that you are overusing hearing protection and this will make your auditory system more sensitive to sound, by lowering the loudness threshold. Secondly, you need the right treatment. A combination of counselling and sound therapy possibly using white noise generators to help desensitise your auditory system so it becomes less sensitive to sound. By overusing hearing protection you are allowing your brain to focus on the tinnitus more. This can make the tinnitus more intrusive over time. I also think stress is a factor and this is directly linked to tinnitus. Stress makes tinnitus worse and tinnitus makes stress worse. It can become a vicious cycle of worry and discontent. This needs to be reduced and managed.

My advice is to get a referral to a Hearing Therapist or Audiologist that specialises in tinnitus and hyperacusis management and treatment. In the meantime I advise you try and reduce the wearing time of earplugs. You can start by using "noise reducing" earplugs that have filters in. These will not totally block-out external sound.

Please click on the link below and read my post: Hyperacusis, As I see it. Your condition can improve but you need treatment preferably with the health professionals that I have mentioned.

All the best
Michael

PS: Start using sound enrichment during the day and also at night by placing a sound machine by your bedside. Keep the volume slightly lower than the tinnitus. This will help to desensitise your auditory system. Keep the sounds playing throughout the night until morning.

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/hyperacusis-as-i-see-it.19174/

 

Well, I am quoting from studies, it's not my personal opinion and I would be happy to be proven wrong in order to update my own views. I just try to make sense of the phenomenon "tinnitus" in general and it may well be that I have got it wrong, at least in parts.

I believe as well that tinnitus is a big problem for a huge share of the population across all countries. The reason I recite this widely accepted assessment is that I think that it is well established in research and that this should help us to take the tinnitus out of a realm of problems that we have no understanding at all and to thereby make it accessible. Every bit of knowledge is helpful for us and if one of those bits states that the loudness of the tinnitus should not be related to the ability to adapt to it in principle and this is true, then it helps us to understand that the problems that constrain a subgroup of patients to adapt to the tinnitus may be rather psychological. I partially would include myself in this group and I think there is nothing wrong about it per se as long as we are talking about facts. Nothing in what I stated should indicate that its the persons own fault. But given that I recite accurate research at least for most tinnitus cases, this could indeed imply that it is in the hand of patients to take their destiny in their own hand by starting to accept the tinnitus in order to be able to deal with it instead of repulsing it. The fact that we have a really big share of every population of this planet that experiences tinnitus but only a relatively small subgroup of sufferers should call our attention.
I think that there are many psychological conditions unrelated to tinnitus that show that some people have the tendency to push problems ahead and to seek for any possible alternative instead of simply accepting that a certain life style or a certain self-image is wrong and cannot be sustained further.

I think there is more to the fact that tinnitus is almost always related to stress. Stress is not something that overcomes us from always from outside without own doing. Not only are stress levels determined by our own attitude towards the outside world but stress can be even caused by ourselves. I would hypothesize that a huge variety of diseases, physical and mental ones, are caused by the patients having a distorted view of themselves and their own responsiblity. By this I don't want to say that they don't need the help and that people are always responsible for everything - of course not. But we need to recognize that some of those cases exist. Think about seemingly trivial things of organizing activity throughout the day. Some people organize everything so that it fits their rhythm. Other people stuff their day full of activities without being able to follow them. Some people are not bothered that they cannot follow them at all, but others are stressed because they can't - but the cause of stress is their own time management and if this happens permanently, then it appears to me that this person may want things and to live a life that is beyond its possibilities. I mean those kind of things.

Let me translate something from a website:

"There is no personality that is particularly "susceptible" to tinnitus. In this respect it is also wrong to speak of a "tinnitus personality". However, for some diseases it has been found that people with certain personality traits are affected somewhat more frequently. This also includes tinnitus. For example, during an examination with tinnitus patients, the following frequent personality traits were noticed:

1. Relatively high need for control
2. Alignment to the intellect ("head-relatedness")
3. Difficulties in the emotional processing of offenses
4. perfectionism
5. hypochondria
6. high accountability
7. basic tenor of endurance
8. Life in restlessness, hectic and time pressure

Furthermore, the characteristics of the individual personality influence how an individual patient experiences his or her tinnitus. In order to investigate this in more detail, a study was conducted to look at the relationship between the tinnitus impairment experienced and the personality. It turned out that some personality traits have rather negative effects on the tinnitus experience, namely:

1. high excitability
2. aggressiveness
3. high strain
4. physical discomforts
5. health worries
6. pronounced emotionality

Dealing with one's own personality with tinnitus

Every human being has a certain personality, and some personality traits are associated with the development of tinnitus (see above). But on the one hand the appearance of a tinnitus is not inevitably and fatefully connected with these characteristics, and on the other hand every person can influence his personality to a limited extent. If there are personality traits in a tinnitus patient which have an unfavourable effect on the tinnitus life, the person concerned can change his basic attitudes and values positively, thus reducing his self-generated inner stress and thus also reducing the tinnitus burden. For this work on one's own personality, it is usually helpful to seek psychotherapeutic help. The aim is to find more serenity - towards the different areas of life and also towards tinnitus."

https://www.thieme.de/de/gesundheit/persoenlichkeitsmerkmale-tinnitusbetroffene-45193.htm (you can translate it with www.deepl.com, which is a very good translator)

I would never say that a tinnitus sufferer is responsible for his own suffering or something like this. But I think that it is important to emphasize that they psyche plays a huge role that should never be underestimated when seeking a therapy for the individual patient. I hope I could make clear what I mean.

Best regards

 

TL;DR.
If you think loudness isn't related to how bad it bothers you or how well you cope with it then you're just stupid.
Don't be peddling that nonsense.

 

Ok, that's your view. I just try to give some facts since giving people a false sense of comfort and security will not help anyone to solve a problem. Either we want to understand diseases and try to work towards solutions or we are concerned with what could be offensive to someone.

But I certainly will read through the papers that were posted above by Autumnly.

Best regards