Silence Versus Noise

Tinnitus is caused by pressure on the inner ear, either it can be by sound waves, someone hit you, the middle ear bones grew to big for some reason, or by liquid building up in the middle ear causing a pressure on the inner ear, caused by an infection. It sounds like different reasons, but they are all the same: pressure on the inner ear.

Next step one should consider is: how to get rid of tinnitus? Then I look at what created it. What created it? Pressure on the inner ear. How do I resolve tinnitus then?

Do I turn on white noise?

Do I care about what I eat?

Do I exercise hard?

The only sensible thing to me would be to let the inner ear take a rest from all sorts of additional pressure. Remaining in silence so that no sound waves disturb the inner ear. You think tinnitus is not getting better by remaining in silence? Did you try? Yes you did. Let me illustrate: You broke your arm, but instead of putting a bandage around your broken arm, you just avoiding heavy lifts. But you kept writing with a pen and do the easy things. Did your arm ever heal? Of course not! You then noticed that your tinnitus could never heal if you avoided loud noise. But did you ever try sitting in a sound isolating chamber for several weeks in a row? Probably not.

Here is a good counter-argument: deaf people with tinnitus hear nothing except their tinnitus, yet their tinnitus does not go away. This proves that remaining in perfect silence over an extended period of time, has no effect on tinnitus.

Really? So sound waves do not create any pressure on the inner ear for deaf people? Only for people who are not deaf? That sounds strange to me. Even if all middle ear bones were removed, sound waves would still go into the inner ear through the skull. I am not convinced by that argument until those deaf tinnitus people were put in a sound isolating chamber for several weeks in a row and then reported how their tinnitus was affected by that experiment.

Why do no doctor suggest the sound isolating chamber, nor even make an experiment to check whether the method works or not? I believe there are two reasons:

1. People are not interested. Staying in silence is difficult in our stressful society, it is not fun (all the fun goes on in the noisy environments, coffee shops, pubs, offices, ... rather than at home in the arm chair), it is painful to sit in silence and listen to just the tinnitus, and nobody believes it makes things anything better, especially not so as no health care provider would ever mention this as a strategy to resolve tinnitus. Quite the contrary this may cause hyperacusis and should be avoided by any means.
2. Health care is not interested, since it would cost too much money for our society to deal with a not serious health condition as if it was a serious health condition.

Therefore the short cut is imposed on tinnitus patients. They are urged to never take even a short break from their job due to a recent on-set of tinnitus, and they are instead urged to try to ignore their tinnitus. Then here comes the excellent argument (which is false): If you don't do as the doctor says, then you will be in trouble, since then you will have a harder time to get used to your tinnitus, which by the way will never go away.

I wonder for how many years this will go on. This lie is incredibly persistent. One reason it can go on for a very long time, is because most people who get tinnitus, really like noise. So they are happy to follow the doctors advice. The last thing they want to hear is that they shall remain in silence. Simply because silence is painful for them. It is easier to be in noisy places where one is not bothered by tinnitus. It is very tempting to follow the advice of the health care of today.

So how long can this go on until someone wakes up and realizes that we are all getting fooled?

 

Too much silence makes our hearing alert and increase tinnitus.

 

It increases our perception of tinnitus. Not the signal itself.

 

So what is your idea for tinnitus "cure"? Sit in silence until it goes away?

 

@MountainCreek people without any chronic tinnitus will develop it as a result of being put in perfect sound isolation for some period of time. So, the idea that sound isolation will "cure" T seems pretty dubious to me. Also, you're drawing a nonexistant distinction between "perception" and "the signal" -- when people are perceiving their T as louder, more neurons are firing, the signal itself is increased. We have studies showing things about how just actively focusing attention on an (internal or external) auditory stimulus actually increases the amount of firing in the auditory cortex.

That said, yes, lots of us do benefit from being in reasonably quiet places; overall my T is probably a bit better since I moved out of the city. But, we're still talking, you know, usual 35-40db background sounds.

 

This is not my experience though. In complete silence my tinnitus gets lower after one day or two of initial state where tinnitus appears to be higher. Unfortunately the weekend only has two days, so there is no time for me to cure my tinnitus until society accepts tinnitus as a temporary disease like a cold that one needs one or two weeks in complete silence at home to cure.

 

what is "complete silence"

 

Complete silence is when we can not hear any external sounds but only the sounds produced by our body.

Unless one has a very poor hearing, it is hard to find completely silent room. I have a swiss type of arm watch. When I put that watch on my desk say one meter away from my head and I can clearly hear it is ticking every second, then I think I am in a room silent enough for my purposes of improving my tinnitus, as it then also does after a couple of days in that room.

 

When tinnitus is caused my noise damage the nerves become damaged and then create noise all on their own. Silence won't help that unfortunately. Before boxing night 2016 in a silent room tinnitus would calm down for me but after a panto show on Boxing night it's worse and has stayed worse. Now in silence it's just annoying and I can hear it all the time.

 

My tinnitus gets lower if I remain indoors in silence all the time in a place where no sound exceeds the sound of my tinnitus. Even 5 minutes exposure to some sound like a car outside ruins this for me and I am back to original tinnitus level. After 4 days indoors in strict silence 24 hours a day I get very low tinnitus. As soon as I go out it returns to a higher level.

This makes me speculate that if I could remain indoors for just even a bit more, couldn't tinnitus get even lower and perhaps even disappear?

The problem is obvious: it is impossible to maintain a sound level lower than the tinnitus signal 24/7. At least for me.

Turning it the other way around: has anyone ever got a tinnitus spike or increase, while remaining in silence at home? I guess not. Those increases or spikes happen when people are exposed to noise. Not when they are exposed to silence.

Anyone who disagree?

 

yeah, I disagree, I've had spikes while wearing earplugs in very quiet rooms

 

How long did that spike last? And why did you use ear plugs if the room was really silent?

 

I found this video

youtube.com/watch?v=a8KGvGBcSeU

that describes a reason why people get tinnitus. Not sure it is correct. Let me assume it is correct. What does that mean?

Neurons that are not stimulated become troublemakers. Look at a child who is left in the room with no parent nor friends to play with. That child, if grown up that isolated way, will behave very differently from other people who grew up in a normal environment.

So let me accept the theory: a neuron in the brain that never gets stimulated by a signal from the cochlea may eventually start to behaves strangely, causing tinnitus.

How long does it take? Usually people who heard a loud sound causing their tinnitus, get the tinnitus right away. Right? So that means right away an understimulated neoron would have to start to behave strangely. It is not like that one week after we went to that rock concert, tinnitus starts, right? It may, but I believe those cases are rare.

Anyway, let me still accept the theory of understimuli and proceed assuming its correctness. Then how shall we cure tinnitus? Simple. We just need to find the neurons that do not get stimuli from the cochlea, and start to stimulate them!

How? If the cochlea is really dead at that particular frequency, we would not hear anything at that frequency.

Does anyone have an audiogram with zero hearing at some frequency X? I am not aware of any such person (except totally deaf people).

If one takes an audiogram, then one can see the dips at certain frequencies. Then to stimulate neorons which do not get enough signal from cochlea, it seems to me one should reverse the audiogram, build a sound generator that plays the tones one does not hear that well at a louder volume so that all tones are heard at equally well.

Would such an inverse sound generator eliminate tinnitus? I have some doubts.

 

Here is my own theory: a neuron does not become a troublemaker since it is understimulated. It becomes a troublemaker since it got damaged by a too loud signal that the neuron could not deal with. After that, the neoron starts firing randomly no matter it gets further signals from cochlea or not.

This is in line with the fact that people with tinnitus do not necessarily have hearingloss.

Again look at a child. Now let the child get stimulated by being put in day care center. The child starts to get louder than another child who is never brought to day care but who remain at home in a more silent place with good and rather quiet parents.

To make the day care center child get more quiet one brings that child to another more quiet environment (an island without cars and other children, and with good parents). After a while the child MAY get affected by the quiet surrounding and gets more quiet himself.

Now how about the analogy

damaged neuron <--> loud day care center child
tinnitus <--> sound from that child
reparation process of damaged neuron <--> day care center child has been brought to the quiet island
tinnitus has been cured <--> the child has adjusted to the new quiet surrounding

Then to POSSIBLY cure tinnitus, one should make the damaged neurons get used to silence by not exposing them to noise from the surrounding but by exposing them to silence.

Has research got into the wrong direction here, or not?

 

When we sleep, the brain is resetting by randomly activating neorons. This random activation of neorons when we sleep should be a sufficient stimuli and the best we can do. I believe that no other external stimuli (like white noise) was intended to be necessary to reset damaged neurons in our brains when God created us.

 

@MountainCreek I disagree with some of what you're saying but I was actually having this thought today. Even though my T was not sound induced, it has been reactive to sound. So even if I'm exposed to a sound and I don't get a spike, it could mean I'm setting back the partially healed neuron or making it remain stagnant in the healing process.

I have seen extreme cases of H on here where people have isolated themselves and progressively got better. So the method has definitely been proven to work at least in the case of H. I think there are many cases were people charge themselves because they can handle sounds at reasonable volumes.

I also remember reading something about a guy on here who's T went away after he stopped using a fan for white noise at night.

I would argue that there are certainly holes in this method and by no means would work for everyone but it may be beneficial to a small group.

ENTs say, "don't shield your ears" but deep down inside something tells me that's old advice, not good advice.

 

@Cal18 I think doctors say we shall expose ourself to noise to lower the cost for the mental hospitals, where tinnitus patients may end up if they expose themselves to too much silence.

Perhaps they have a point there.

Perhaps one shall not go to an extreme. I guess going out to milk the cow and growing the potatoes and not using any engines and just walking and living in a self producing farmland away from the rest of our civilazation is the best. Then live a normal life there, never cover the ears.

 

My tinnitus started 12 hours after the exposure. Many other "noise-induced people" reported having a few days, even a week or two of silence, before the tinnitus started.

I think we should expose ourselves to silence as well as everyday sounds. I have absolutely no proof of that statement. It's just a feeling I have after reading everything I found about tinnitus.

 

So did mine, a few times. 12 hours seems the standard time for the neuons to decide whether they are fine with the noise they were just exposed to, or if not, and if they want to start tinnitus to tell us they are not fine.

Not saying my theory has to be correct. I am happy to hear people challenging it.

 

We need to give the arm a break. Obviously.

But do we know what a "break" means for our ears? "Perfect silence" doesn't exist, you always have some kind of background noise.

Should we avoid loud sound. Yea!
Should we avoid sounds like conversation with family/colleagues? I seriously doubt it would be beneficial

I only left my flat if it was necessary for some time. I had a lot of silence For a few weeks. But the only thing I got from this experiment was worsening of my depression.

 

Sorry to hear that. I think high frequency tinnitus is harder to cure by silence. I was successful to cure low frequency tinnitus by complete silence in a couple of weeks. A couple of years later I was also able to completely cure a pulsating tinnitus by silence for two weeks (had no effect) plus another two weeks in complete silence. I am now challenging a very weak high frequency tinnitus by silence but am not that successful there, though I do notice that it gets better in silence and worse when I go out in noise.

Would those *cured* tinnitus episodes have been cured if I had not remained in silence? I believe not. I believe it would have got permanent had I not stayed in silence. I have no proof. What makes me believe silence mattered is that when I tried curing pulsating tinnitus, nearly almost silence for two weeks had really no effect. Only as I increased the degree of silence by moving to a perfectly silent apartment from a more noisy dormitory did my pulsating tinnitus go away. Now I don't have any pulsating tinnitus nor low frequency tinnitus. I believe silence was the trick for those two variants of tinnitus.

For high frequency tinnitus I have no success story to tell yet, but only an improvement story.

 

When you say you were in complete silence for a couple of weeks, do you really mean complete silence? i.e. no exposure to normal everyday sounds e.g. background office noise, cars driving past, etc? I'm currently at university and it's very difficult to have silence when living in accommodation full of other students.

 

Yeah. I'm in exactly the same situation.

Clubs suck mate.

 

You can never escape fully from normal, unexpected sound exposure. Even being out in the country, you get sudden shrill bird calls, falling branches, chain saws, awful children on trail bikes...etc. I think that in the early stages of injury, reasonable protection from normal sounds is essential because with damaged tissue, "normal" levels of sound and frequency change no longer present as normal and no-one honestly knows if acute damage to the hearing apparatus progresses to a cascading process of extending damage in the presence of ongoing sound exposure, and if so, for how long that cascade will run until it self-limits. You don't go out walking the day you fracture your leg skiing just so you don't become fearful of "normal" use. You rest the injured leg until enough healing has occurred that you can slowly rebuild your exercise tolerance back toward normal before you even consider the skis again. Why should the ears be any different?

(Actually, I it does occur to me that using early high-dose steroids in SSNL suggests that Doctors do indeed treat this as a cascading process, on the rare occasions you get one that knows what they are talking about ).

 

This is the exact state I'm in right now.

 

I have had tinnitus a couple of times in my life. I have always treated it by silence until it has been gone. When gone, after two or four weeks respectively for some past episodes, I went back to perfectly normal life afterwards, just as one returns to perfectly normal walking/running once a broken leg has healed. This time tinnitus has been up and down for 10 months depending on noise exposure during the day (with low tinnitus in the morning and high in the evening due to noise). But as tinnitus is not an option for me, I am not returning to normal life until it is gone. I wonder if this 3 months rule for permanent tinnitus can be delayed by all the time keeping sound exposure low. However, healing seems to me only possible once one gets complete silence so that the brain can process the tinnitus without being disturbed by other external sounds. My view at the moment is that moderate sound levels is a way to delay healing without making it significantly worse, and that healing might still be possible once one finds an occasion to be in complete silence for a couple of weeks in a row (as seems to me required for healing to take place). Lack of complete silence this time seems to me to be one reason for delayed healing. But of course age could be another contributing factor. It is easier to heal anything at younger age.

Regarding hyperacusis, personally I welcome it and try to induce it. Since with hyperacusis one gets automatically careful to avoid sounds. I believe Nature constructed us with such a self-repairing mechanism. Hyperacusis makes me avoid noise and enable me to heal tinnitus, Once healed, hyperacusis is gone. If a scar is tinnitus, then my view is that hyperacusis is the blood crust of dried blood that sits on top of the scar. One shall not peel that crust away if one wants a nice healing of the scar. One shall let it be there. Once the wound has healed the crust falls off automatically. Once tinnitus is healed, hyperacusis also goes.

 

The silence and hyperacusis that is required to cure my own low frequency rumbling tinnitus is such that swallowing sounds like a waterfall. This I induce by complete silence for a couple of days where I use hearing protectors to flush the toilet and otherwise read a book (though turn the pages very gently) nonstop and never go out. It is hard work to maintain complete silence 24/7, but the only way I know works for me to get rid of it.

At the moment my trouble is that if I don't turn the page gently enough, the rumbling tinnitus sound comes back again.

My high frequency t gets much lower this way too. But I guess that won't be permanently gone by this *treatment*.

 

I haven't read the entire thread, I'll let you know that.

But even if sitting in complete silence worked, I wouldn't want to live that life.
100% isolated from all noise, all humans, most things that make me happy. Nope.

 

Here is my vision: the years -2098 to + 2098 will go to history as the years when doctors and people thought that tinnitus could be treated by noise. Year 2098 one autistic doctor will convincingly have carried out the simple experiment I have outlined, putting people with tinnitus in sound isolating chambers for two weeks in a row and he discovered they all healed their tinnitus! After that discovery there is no going back. Medical literature will have to be removed and replaced by new books. People will after a while laugh at us who lived before 2098 much like we laugh at people who long ago tried to treat tinnitus with hot bread against the ears. This doctor will likely be autistic since normal scientists follow each others' footsteps modifying the previous research paper only marginally.

 

I don't mean to be rude but there is literally 0 evidence to support that, and your high pitched tinnitus that doesn't heal with silence is a perfect counterexample.

And btw, if you actually developed Hyperacusis you will regret it. H is no fun, much more disabling than T.

It doesn't make you 'careful' it makes you suffer.