Tinnitus Got Worse for No Reason... Anything Better Than Valium?

I stopped working full time as my tinnitus was too bad, but it got worse anyway. Maybe due to stress, I don’t know but it’s worse again today. I work part time, 30 hours a week at most, and drive for about 2 hours in work with frequent breaks in between. I’d be very surprised if my tinnitus got worse from the driving. I drive a year old van so it isn’t loud.

Anyway what else could be making it worse? I am only very stressed before I sleep due to the OCD I suffer with every night before I go to bed which I’ve had for about 15 years.

 

Was your OCD formally diagnosed and what treatment are you getting?

 

I had to go to about 25 one-on-one sessions for it once but it came back eventually.

 

The best treatment for OCD is medication. Behavioral treatments, if they work, are transient and the OCD will return.

For many years it was known that high doses of clomipramine,a tricyclic antidepressant, was effective in many cases of OCD with full remission in some cases. Clomipramine is a serotonin agent. More recent treatment uses SSRIs such as sertraline (Zoloft) at doses of 300 - 400 mg daily being used, but this dose is arrived slowly. Similarly, escitalopram Lexapro, Cipralex) 80 - 100 mg has been shown to be effective in OCD. Clearly, you want to find a medication that does not worsen the tinnitus but SSRIs generally are low-risk.

Obviously, you should discuss this with your family doctor and also see a psychiatrist who would be more familiar with treating OCD.

 

It is the driving. I use 2 types of hearing protection earplugs and muffs while driving and my ears got damaged.

 

I'm sorry but you just can't say this with any certainty. Tinnitus is extremely unpredictable, often gets worse (or better) for no obvious reason, and the noise most vehicles expose you to is less than you get in many common urban environments, etc.

The fact that you did use double hearing protection while you were driving and still had a worsening, is actually more of an indication that there's something else going on, than that driving was the problem.

 

Yes I am sure. I was the one driving as my tinnitus spiked while I was driving and it never went to a previous level. I was exposed to MRI noise 4 weeks ago and I was dealing with the spike very well. But after that the driving made it worse.

 

You're not understanding what I am saying; correlation isn't causation.

 

We as humans have a tendency to look for patterns, for links. Sometimes we search for them almost desperately habitually. And sometimes - in the case of links to negative physical responses - our brain/body also works behind the scenes, automatically, to try to quickly find links to things it thinks are dangerous.

So, for instance, take food poisoning. Eat a meal of steak, potato and strawberry, get a terrible bout of what you believe is food poisoning, and some people will lock onto strawberries and never eat them again. Was it the strawberry? Maybe. Was it the steak? Maybe. Was it even food poisoning? Maybe.

But now your life is led without the joy of strawberries, forever.

This is what appears to be going on here with BrStan and his driving/tinnitus link, and this is also what linearb is fighting against when he says correlation isn't causation. Did the tinnitus increase while BrStan and gavr were driving? Yes. Does that mean driving caused it? No. It could have been the MRI from 4 weeks ago, or the increased stress at work, or the strawberries. We know that tinnitus goes up, down and all around for a multitude of reasons. The type of thinking that definitively links a T increase to driving, because it happened to increase, once, while driving, is the type of thinking that is going to drive you to an anxiety disorder.

Does that mean it *wasn't* the driving? No, it doesn't mean that either. It always *could be*. But the point is: be very wary about linking two things together difinitively after a one-time correlation between the two. That type of thinking is what nourishes superstition and OCD.

Cheers, from a fellow sufferer.

 

We're all unreliable witnesses of our own experience, and we should be very very suspicious of the narratives we put around events in our lives.

The tendency to attach narratives to things is normal but often leads to silly, untrue beliefs (see: the history of world religion).

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