Tinnitus from Severe Stress

Hey,

last June I had an attack of chronic pelvic pain. Basically I couldn't sit, had major erectile dysfunction, had a severe burning and a lot of anxiety over all this. Went to dozen doctors before I turned to the internet where I found a cure with stretching, hot baths etc. This thing literally took out 6 months of me and I was suicidal for the better part of that. The problem just gets worse when you think negative, sleep bad and catastrophize everything.

Tinnitus started in my brain 4 months into this misery and I believe now that I was very stress-resistant because if I had just chilled out and relaxed I probably wouldn't have gotten tinnitus. Well it is what it is.

My tinnitus is not in my ears. Only in my brain. I can hear it at night and in quite rooms. I had hyperacusis for a while which I think settled down.

Since I have beat chronic pelvic pain, is there any chance stress-related tinnitus might subside? I basically was in fight or flight mode for months on end.

 

What does your head tinnitus sound like?

 

Btw I am not anxious anymore. Tinnitus seems like a walk in the park compared to the pain and dysfunction from before. I just don't want it to get louder.

 

Good to hear you're feeling so good about your tinnitus. Have you had your ears checked for wax or hearing loss?

 

Sounds like there's a good chance your tinnitus could fade or go if it's already so quiet you can only hear it at night and in quiet rooms. Lots of people seem to associate tinnitus with stress and sometimes stress reduction does help to quieten it.

 

@Paulmanlike I'm not sure. Like a very quiet tone I can hardly identify, something sounding like the cooler of a computer. Sometimes it's very loud as if I was leaving a disco, sometimes hard to hear.

@Drone Draper yes apparently my hearing is fine. Ear wax got removed.

I was perfectly healthy before my (self-induced) stress and I had a hard time forgiving myself.

 

Stress happens to everyone. Part of my tinnitus is from stress - an absolute dickhead was trying to take my job and I ended up having panic attacks, working in the middle of the night. I kept my job, but it definitely was (minor) part of why I now have tinnitus. You can't blame yourself for stressing over chronic pelvic pain and erectile dysfunction!

I know of a few cases where stress-related T went away over time. I will slide some stories into your DMs.

 

That would be awesome.

 

Do you have a history of noise exposure, loud music, loud cars?

Any certain anti-biotics or medicines you were on?

 

I took 7 days of doxy, 7 days of cipro and one shot of another antibiotic. Then I got Seroquel because I couldn’t sleep at all.

It's definitely from stress &pain & guilt &depression & anxiety.

 

Hi @NeoKortex88 -- I'm happy to hear you're mostly recovered from all the health stuff that brought on the stress that caused your tinnitus. It appears your body is dealing with some residual imbalances. Have you considered acupuncture or Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to restore some balance to your body.

Here's a LINK to a short story about a man who had tinnitus for about 14 years, and pretty much got over it using TCM. @Drone Draper -- Here's the final paragraph of his several paragraph story:

"Dr Lily had explained that the ringing in my ears was caused by an internal imbalance, which the tea she prescribed was intended to correct; now, lo and behold, it was taking effect and my baffling condition was getting appreciably better. Eventually, I would ask myself: am I still suffering from tinnitus? It would take a conscious check to confirm that, yes, there was still this fuzziness clouding my hearing. But for many hours and days I would be all but unaware of it.

 

Hey I did go to massages, I did meditation and Carnio Sacral Therapy more to calm my nervous system and get rid of chronic pain. I'm not in pain anymore. But I had so much stress I wonder if it changed my brain structure or if cells died that caused the tinnitus.

 

Does anyone know why tinnitus gets louder and quieter sometimes?

 

I suggest you go down the diagnosis path to figure out a root cause.

 

I know how you feel... I think I also got T from extrem stress: kideny stones, catheter pigstail etc. It was horrible! I blew a fuse and now it´s unfixable. You on the other hand can hear it only in quiet rooms and at night. Which is a big difference... Have a healthy lifestyle, be careful what you take, and very important, be patient. Don´t think suddenly this is going to get better tomorrow... You´re only going to make yourself anxious. Adapt, while it´s there.

Like I said, yours is ´mild´... so I think you´ve got a good chance it will faid or disappear.

 

I also got T while being massively stressed, it's a common trigger for T.

 

May I ask you what caused your stress Kratos?

 

I noticed when I clench my jaw with much force I can hear a new tinnitus pitch, also my jaw clicks when I open it wide. Did the stress cause my jaw muscles to tighten and therefore cause tinnitus?

 

Preparation to become a firefighter (very hard trainning, studying) + working at the same time + lack of sleep + maintaining a very low bodyfat level for a extended period of time + overtraining/under-recovery.

 

Wow. You maybe was unlucky to be naturally prepositioned to get tinnitus then. I wanted to die every single day for half a year. Now I'm sad that my mental capability to deal with trauma wasn’t better. We all carry our weak spots :/.

 

Another question for the tinnitus veterans here

Say I actually do recover from tinnitus. Is it my brain repairing itself? Or is my brain adjusting to it? Because the cells itselves can’t be restored as far as I know? So I'd be always more likely to get it again?

 

The fact that you can modulate your tinnitus sheds light on its character, not on its origins. Tinnitus that you can change using bodily movements such as jaw, neck, head manipulations is called somatic. It is not surprising that yours is like this - somatic tinnitus is the most common subtype, the most widely quoted statistic says that 80% of all T cases are so.

It doesn't really mean anything. We don't know whether somatic tinnitus heals or worsens more than any other T. It's basically just trivia. Further research might shed more light on tinnitus subtypes. It's nothing to worry about.

 

The current best understanding of tinnitus is that it is caused by auditory neurons compensating for lost input from the cochlea. (Your trigger was stress, not a noise incident, but it is very well possible that you already had some hearing damage, but your auditory neurons didn't start their devil dance until the stress prompted them to do so.)

Hearing cannot heal, yes. But the source of T is not the hearing damage itself - it's the overcompensation of the auditory neurons. Since those are within the brain, they're subject to neuroplasticity, they're malleable. This means that they can change their behavior and stop generating T even if your hearing itself doesn't heal. Which is why T fades completely for a lot of people. Also, the action of the currently most promising upcoming tinnitus treatment (MuteButton, check the Treatments subforum) is based on this model.

This is my best understanding based on reading many threads in this forum.

 

I have tinnitus that's more severe, from what you're describing -- none the less, I've been through the chronic pelvic pain thing twice, the second time was after my tinnitus was really bad, and for 2 weeks all I could think was "holy shit is this worse than tinnitus, please just give me back only the tinnitus, because at least with tinnitus I could walk in a straight line without yelping in pain or taking percocet".

I assume you stumbled across the Headache in the Pelvis book; that, plus finding a qualified pelvic PT, was a lifesaver for me... good luck!

No one can answer this for sure. The current thinking is something like, "tinnitus arises when a loss of input from the auditory nerve causes signal gain as compensation in the dorsal cochlear nucleaus, and the brain's filtering mechanisms become impaired and allow the signal to reach conscious perception". So, there's a bunch of things that have to go "wrong" before we start to "hear" the sound. (Using airquotes because it's not really "wrong", it's just the way my body is choosing to work now, and we don't actually "hear" it because it's not a sound).

My best advice is just to assume you're vulnerable to this coming up again or getting worse, and that the best way to protect yourself is to protect your hearing aggressively, lead a healthy lifestyle, and in your case practice probably pretty intense stress management techniques. Maybe it'll come up again, maybe it won't, maybe we'll all get vaporized by gamma rays from space tomorrow.

 

I love this, I so hope it's true! I know they are researching hearing regeneration, so some day we may be able to reverse hearing damage, but in the meantime this seems like such a great area to be focusing on.

The brain is a very powerful organ, and although it can behave very irrationally (Tinnitus, severe phobias, false memories) it's malleable, as you say. I think if we took this approach, and treated the affected organ as a symptom rather than the root cause, we'd be able to cure a lot of problems this way.

 

What on Earth is causing this? First time I heard about this but the fact that two tinnitus sufferers both stated in this thread that it's worse than T makes me really eager to prevent it.

Now wouldn't a gamma ray burst be just an exquisite way to go.

 

If you haven't already, check out the Neuromod Q&A! https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/q-a-tinnitus-hub-meets-neuromod-lenire.32369/

Tinnitus treatment through neuroplasticity is precisely what they're focusing on and they're very close to a commercial release. If you liked my post, you'll go nuts over this!

 

The first PT I saw told me that by far her biggest patient demographic was women who had recently given birth, but that the second biggest was mostly tall & skinny male office workers who sit all day. We're not really meant to do that, muscles can get stretched and twisted, trigger points can form and then this can end up putting pressure on the extremely sensitive nerves in the pelvic floor. Increased muscle tone also makes all those tubes down there a lot more constricted, which can cause orgasm to be quite painful (and also cause general sexual dysfunction because of limited bloodflow).

Some people seem to be more or less susceptinle to this all; I am tall, hyper-mobile, and prone to forming trigger points all over my body, yay!

Not sitting all the time, changing posture, and light stretching are your best friends in preventing this. If it gets bad past a point, those techniques won't really do anything, and, uh, you need a PT to do internal work, which is not comfortable at all but holy shit did it deliver me from weeks of misery. At that point I was ready to try anything, if you'd told me that drinking a shot of motor oil would fix it, I probably would have said "does it matter which brand? 10w30?"

As far as stretching, pidgeon-pose yoga is hands down the absolute best thing I've found for this particular concern, but you want to approach that carefully, and ideally under the eyes of an instructor -- it's not the easiest pose in the world, it will exert a strong stretch on the exact muscles which are probably driving all this, and so if you overdo it you can probably mess yourself up worse.

No way for me to see or hear it coming, would be relatively instantaneous -- works for me!

 

http://hearinglosshelp.com/blog/is-ciprofloxacin-cipro-ototoxic/
https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2014/drugs-that-harm-your-hearing.html

Before we blame the stress as the source of all of this, also realize that cipro is considered ototoxic. Try to avoid it and other ototoxic medications.

 

Basically just start stretching and yoga now for the rest of your life and avoid high stress triggers and you will be fine.