Poll: Is Your Tinnitus Better or Worse in the Morning? And Do You Listen to Sounds Overnight?

Some on here say their tinnitus is best in the morning, gets worse throughout the day. Some say it's worst when they wake up, and then subsides a bit.

Can both these be true? Could there be another variable in play that explains the difference? Maybe half of us use sound enrichment at night, and half don't? (Interestingly, the use of sound enrichment in itself is a bit controversial. So let's see how this plays out...).

 

Mine is honestly both... and no I don't use sound at night.

Sleep amount, and stress level tends to be more correlated.

 

So far the poll is in line with what you're suggesting @Rb86: that there is no relationship between morning levels and sound enrichment. But it's still early days for the poll. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out once more people have responded.

 

Viewed 60 times; 16 responses.
Come on people: why would one view this poll and not tick the box?

 

I tried going to sleep using 'play thunderstorm' on Alexa in my second month of tinnitus and remember waking up with really loud tinnitus - It did quieten after a few minutes but was very scary at first - I usually find going to sleep with sound being played quite annoying so just leave my window open for some ambient sounds from outside now as I have never liked silence - I remember staying in a hotel with a non opening window and it was way too quiet (this was before I got tinnitus).

 

Been discussed a lot on the forum. I have written about my tinnitus correlating to sleep and even dream type. I remember some of my dreams...or make a point to as it related to my tinnitus.

I asked my audiologist about this dynamic...sleep versus tinnitus. She said the likely culprit is cortisol levels with nightmare type dreams in particular. But even if taking a nap my tinnitus can spike. Does all the time.

She said, tinnitus changing due to sleep is likely hormonal. She says hormones change during sleep.

Her theory at least. What else could it be other than brain chemistry? Brain anatomy doesn't change during sleep. Yes, it could be a somatic influence. I don't believe it is in my case though.

 

Interesting. I feel the same way. Bad dreams can make it seem worse or actually be worse. Naps didn't bother it at first but does seem to now. At any rate, sleep is certainly correlated.

 

My tinnitus varies from day today. It’s not predictable. But whatever loudness it is in the morning can sometimes be diminished if I play music through earbuds for as little as an hour or up to three or four hours and fall back asleep .

the sound then stays at a six or a seven or three or whatever it is from when I fully awaken.

And I agree there is a relationship between sleep and tinnitus . There are mornings where I’ve woken up really early and then found the tinnitus was not too bad. However if I went back to sleep especially playing the radio I could wake up with a much louder decibel level.

Sleep is like a binary switch. Sometimes it makes it better. Sometimes it makes it worse .

 

I use sound enrichment for sleep and have not noticed any pattern with sleep and loudness. Sometimes it seems calmer, sometimes worse in the morning.

 

Mine doesn't change...

 

@Rb86 @John Mahan

Definitely could be chemical; but could also just be vascular. That is, blood flow to the ears likely changes while asleep, and also while just down laying.

Hormonal is *possible*, but wouldn't have been my first hypothesis. Neurotransmitter changes, alteration of signal pathways in the synapse, seem more likely to me (though hormones can technically alter those too).

I have never remembered my dreams, so can't comment on this directly. But cortisol responses (or other related chemical/neurotransmitters) seem very plausible. As we're always told, T has a psychological component, and a link to anxiety, so anything that increases your fear/anxiety response would certainly seem a candidate for increasing symptoms.

 

The thing is, there must be an underlying reason for this variation. It can't *actually* be random, even if it appears to be. As discussed above, it could be vascular, hormonal, chemical. But it has to be something.

That was the impetus for this poll - to see if we can start to cross-reference symptoms/patterns to figure out what correlates. Maybe sound enrichment isn't the key - but this itself is worth knowing. Perhaps I'll try posting other poll iterations in the future.

 

So far only 16% of respondents have indicated that their tinnitus is worse when they wake (including me). In contrast, 58% report lower tinnitus in the morning. Seems a pretty compelling difference there. Sample size remains too low for statistical significance... but probably not by much.

In contrast, there appears to be absolutely no relationship between morning tinnitus levels and sound enrichment. I'd be a little less confident in this result - we'd need in the range of 150 participants to approach reliability for testing an interaction like this. But still, the results such as they are, are pretty suggestive.

 

Mine is never as bad as in the morning ,so bad that I would last a few days if it was always like that.

 

Mine is much worse while I am waking up (extremely high pitched and piercing). As soon as I am fully awake it calms down a bit. I have no idea why.

 

Usually worse in the morning.

 

Depends.... Sometimes when I wake up and it´s loud, I know i´m going to have a bad day. Most days I can´t complain.

 

Unfortunately, the turnout at votes is quite low here.

 

@MattS I would fill in the poll but none of the choices apply to my situation . My answer would be “i use sound enrichment throughout the night and sometimes tinnitus is better in the morning and sometimes it is worse than the night before .”

And I have found, as I posted earlier, that playing music through earbuds will sometimes reduce the tinnitus decibel level and frequency if , in the morning, I am half asleep when I first start playing it.

 

Well, now things are getting a bit more interesting.

50% of people who use sound enrichment are worse in the morning, 75% of people who do not use sound enrichment are worse in the morning.

Numbers are still too low to say anything for sure, but this is starting to show a trend.

 

Mine is by FAR worse in the morning, in fact by the very late night it can often be completely resolved. It gets less and less as the day goes on. Then spikes way up over night. It seems to follow _exactly_ cortisol levels.

 

Better in the morning consistently, and the best when I get a good night's sleep, and use foam earplugs at night.

 

Interestingly enough, if I have a good night’s sleep and a nice dream, my Tinnitus is much better in the morning.

On the contrary, if I have a bad night’s sleep and more notably a nightmare, my Tinnitus is much worse upon waking. I have even been woken up in the middle of the night due to my Tinnitus screaming on a couple of rare occasions due to nightmares.

This leads me to believe that anxiety/nerves play a much larger role than we may think, at least with me.

 

Interesting @Digital Doc - that's like the exact opposite of sound enrichment. Also goes completely against the idea that the brain is trying to compensate for missing sounds...

Don't you find the tinnitus sounds particularly loud when you've got the plugs in? It doesn't affect your sleep?

 

I think this is very possible @Vin. But to play devil's advocate: couldn't you also be more likely to have good dreams when your tinnitus is low, and nightmares when your tinnitus is screaming at you while you sleep?

 

I need to read up more on daily cortisol fluctuations. Is that what happens @foam - are they high in the morning and decrease throughout the day?

 

I sleep better with the earplugs.

The at first gets louder, then halves in volume in about 5 mins.

 

Yes.. Cortisol starts to raise overnight, peaks when you wake up (it's the mechanism by which you wake up) and then gets less and less until you sleep.. Then it builds again ready to wake you up. Maybe there's another hormone following the same curve.. Maybe tinnitus just boosts when you are asleep because you can't hear anything else.. But this makes no logic to me.. Because I can sleep for 5 minutes during the day and be left with tinnitus that takes HOURS to go back down again.. I'm on low dose prednisone probably for life anyway but it hasn't caused me any issues over the 5 years I've been on it. I have no clue what is going on honestly... but it's really weird how my tinnitus goes so intesnse when I sleep and then slowly comes down. If I pulled an all nighter for a day or two my tinnitus would be zeroed by the time I slept. weird.. I do have a bit of a story about my prednisone dosage.. I had moved to alternate day dosage to limit long term side effect I may get.. That slowly led to a state of anxiety and then I got tinnitus. I've gone back to every day dosage now which should put my cortisol levels back in the can where they were before (when I was half asleep all the time). It's not uncommon for people in the prednisone groups I'm in to get tinnitus when tapering off it.. Not sure why, could be coincidence.

 

Exactly the same with me. Sweet dreams = milder tinnitus (last night for example...lasting into the day)
Nightmares which I seem to remember more often = tinnitus from hell which I can wake from in the middle of the night with tinnitus raging.

 

Again, I wonder about the direction of causation here. Do nights with nightmares lead to higher tinnitus? Or do nights with higher tinnitus lead to waking up with nightmares? I don't know the answer, but am tempted to lean towards the latter explanation.