Tinnitus Loudness / Distress Poll (Read Instructions First)

Instructions:
1) make sure your fingertips are dry
2) Pinch your thumb and forefinger together, and hold them three inches from your worst T ear.
3) Rub your fingers together

The question is whether this sound is louder or quieter than your T, along with how bothersome you find your T in general.

It's worth noting that prior to my original poll getting down, two people had answered
"My tinnitus is LOUDER than the rubbing sound, and I am MILDLY TO MODERATELY distressed by tinnitus", a demographic which is now not represented in the responses.

 

I feel like its worth adding in to be in a static environment with little noise. I think a lot of people's distress and volume level is based on environmental factors.

 

Can you elaborate what you mean by environment factors?

 

I mean if your environment is loud then the sound of your T can be masked.

 

Unless you have H of course.

 

If this masks your T, consider yourself very lucky as your tinnitus is next in line to having no tinnitus at all.

 

For me it does not mask it because finger rubbing == ~200hz and tinnitus == ~14000hz

 

Ummmmmmmmmm... I don't get it. Rubbing my fingers together even 1" from my ears is not very loud. If I quickly tap them together successively..."tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, etc." it is louder than the "rubbing". However, neither of those come anywhere close to matching my T volume, by a huge margin. So...?????
Maybe I'm doing something wrong...and it's pretty dry in California right now. Another drought at this rate.

Zimichael

 

What about us folks who have hearing loss?

 

I guess people with hearing loss are inherently going to be in the "louder than" category.

No, I think you're doing it right, and you're in the "louder than" category :-/ Outside of bad spikes, I am in the "quieter than" category, which totally does not keep me from being obsessed/distraught with this issue. I suspect that for me the pitch may be a lot more significant than the volume; I have all sorts of lower-frequency noises in my head, some of which are much louder than the bothersome high-frequencies, and I don't really even think of those lower-frequency noises as "tinnitus" because they don't bother me, they seem to have something to do with my pulmonary system, and I think I've had them forever.

 

Hi guys,

I thought it would be interesting if we can all compare what our tinnitus sounds like and how loud it is. If you don't know how loud it is in dB then you can share what it takes to mask it.

The audiologist told me mine is about 16 dB. I can hear it all the time in a quiet room and over the TV if the TV is at a normal volume. It's super loud at night and sounds more like medium pitch static.

 

Initially, I could hear my tinnitus even when I was inside of a car driving on a highway.

 

This is me right now.
I was getting better until another spike.