Why Does Tinnitus Bother Me So Much?

I have met many people with it and none seemed bothered. My girlfriend has it, my son, co workers, friends. They all say yeah it's loud enough to hear over daily back ground noise like mine but no one us bothered or stressed. Mine sounds mostly like that single tone sound crickets make. It drives me crazy and has taken control of my life. I am constantly rubbing my head behind my ear.
Why still after 7 years do I suffer so bad? I have tried bio feedback and it did nothing. I have tried ssri and benzo and they only make it worse, I have tried smoking cannabis, and eating it. Helps the anxiety but makes it louder and the next day or 2 I get a spike.
Anyways, I know of no one who suffers everyone seems at peace with it but no matter what I just can't. Any advice.

 

7 years thats long. There must be something to get your focus of the t. Maybe you still angry that you cant do things because of the t or something. I cant go to clubs antmymore at first i was angry but i cant change it. You still can do much things !!!

 

You are not alone with this experience. Many members have said the same thing, myself included during the struggling time. I have a lady family friend who is know to have fiery temper but somehow she accepts her loud T well without the depression, anger, anxiety and sleeplessness. You may think her T is mild. But she told me she often couldn't hear what people were saying to her due to her loud ringing. She even joked that once her T was so loud that she couldn't hear the siren of a approaching fire truck coming to her apartment due to a false fire alarm. Yet despite this, she seems to embrace it all w/o any negative emotional suffering or trauma like me. I guess we have different DNAs. Lol.

Here is the success story of Jade, a lady truck driver who suffered badly initially from her super loud T, only to find out later than 70% of her colleagues also have T but no one suffer like her. With that realization, she somehow manages to turn around her reaction to T. I wish I could do that when the fiery lady friend first told me she's not suffering from her loud T. Lol. Here is Jades's story:
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/6-months-tinnitus-still-going-strong-but-so-am-i.3226/

I guess this strange phenomenon is described as the 'herding' instinct. The more herding instinct, the more likely a person will flow along with life and not put up so much painful resistance to T as us, who are refusing to be 'herded' by T. We are like the valiant wild horses refusing to be tamed, like we are resisting T and refusing to be shackled and roped by T. Give ourselves some credit. We are the valiant warriors of T resistance. Perhaps we need to change our strategy to play a smarter 'war game' with T.

That is why I have learned to change my approach to positivity, to adopt the AAA approach - Accept, Adjust, and Adapt or Accommodate. After that life is much easier and I begin to habituate to my ultra high pitch T. I learn from a wise war veteran, who once posted 'I am a soldier and I fight for a living. But when it comes to tinnitus, I have learned to accommodate it instead of fighting it'. To have this wise 'non-fighting' advise coming from a fighting man has opened my eyes and helped me changed my strategy, from my painful & negative emotional resistance, to flowing with T & life with a positive attitude - the positivity approach. I try to bring positivity to the NOW, the moment right in front of us which we can still control to turn it a positive moment. Let the future be the future. It is not yet a reality. Let the past be the past. It is history and we can't do anything to change it. The only thing we can change and make a difference is the NOW. Make it a positive moment. Do enough of that and our life tends to be more positive and more enjoyable, despite T.

Think of our life like a deep ocean with rough surface turbulence like waves & storms, but deep down it is calm and full of life-thriving forces to support the vitality of the life forms of the ocean as a whole. We need that calmness of the deep despite the vicissitudes of life by staying positive. With positivity and some strategies from others and some of my own, I turn around my suffering, from darkness to light and I wrote my success story as below. Check it out if you have time. Also check out the most read success story on TT by IWLM, who is back to silence after 40 years of T with a simple but effective method. It may help you. God bless your recovery.

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/from-darkness-to-light-how-i-recovered-from-tinnitus-hyperacusis.3148/

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/back-to-silence.7172/

 

Crickets ! Yes that's exactly how mine sounds too
When I walk past real cricket sounds in summer I always smile - my T is in the trees !

@LostInNorcal
How did you get T ?

 

Yes! Give ourselves some credit! Nothing WRONG with being an acutely sensitive sort of person (which can be part of the reason the tinnitus affects us so much). There are tremendous gifts in being sensitive.

 

@billie48 I do believe tinnitus can make a zen master of you!

 

I LOVE the way you think, feel, and express yourself. Your writing and views have helped me tremendously - thank you!!!

 

And ... you are one of the kindest people. God bless YOU.

 

I have wondered the same thing. Is it a matter of volume/frequency/etc. Or is it just differences in the way people process sound?

Were you bothered by noises other people could ignore before you got tinnitus?
How did you get it, and are you able to mask it?

 

Thank you @Path Maker for the kind words. I, like other contributing members here are offering our collective experience and hopefully some advise of wisdom learned from others. It is worth our effort to see that others are being benefited. You have been very helpful too in helping the newer sufferers and I salute you for your kindness and effort. God bless.

 

Thanks for all the responses. I honestly don't know how I got it. It happened during a stressful time in my life. Lost my job moved my wife and step kids across the country to start over, so while living with my parents I find out my wife is pregnant, then couldn't get a job, so I went to enlist in the army and stopped my Xanax cold turkey then shortly after it started a day before New Years 2008. Not sure if it was stress, the Xanax, previous exposure to loud noises.

I am having a hard time right now, use to have good days and bad, now I have bad days and less bad days but no good days. I lost my job in auto body repair because my boss said I wore hearing protection too much and called it a safety hazard. Anyways.....fun....

 

Believe me it is the f*cking benzo! These drugs should be banned from the market! I have been dealing GAD for the last 6 years but I have no health issues related to it until touch a benzo. Now, I'm in trouble. But it is so sad to see that you still have T after 7 years of your c/t w/d. It vanishes all hope in me. I know I will be like that. Believe me the T your loved ones have is nothing compared to us. SSRI, benzo induced T is something else. It is 50% sound, 50% sensation. The buzzing head, electrical storm, super high frequency hissing is something can drive a persin crazy. I wish for someone to find a solution to this. At least a great reduction.

 

Wouldn't have helped certainly. That said, ICU patients on ventilators get bathed in Midazolam (another benzo, and a potent one), yet tinnitus has never been raised as a known side effect of ICU stays in any research I've seen. Many get big doses over days/weeks, sometimes months, and it often gets stopped cold-turkey, with a few days of wall climbing before they come out. I must admit though, I wonder if anyone has even known to study it. It would be interesting.

 

Speaking from personal experience, I think some people are so bothered by tinnitus because: 1) they're annoyed by unwanted noises in general (barking dogs and neighbors' loud music drive me up a wall); and 2) tinnitus triggers our "fight or flight" response, which is exactly the wrong response. We can't get away from tinnitus, and we can't do anything to fight it effectively. So our brains go into a fight-or-flight tailspin, which makes the condition worse and - I think - helps cause the changes to brain structure that make tinnitus chronic.

A couple things have helped me a lot. One is mindfulness meditation, and the other is the Back to Silence method (https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/back-to-silence.7172/) that @I who love music wrote about. Both of these stop the "fight or flight" emotional response and move the reaction into the thinking part of the brain: the person is now in control, not the tinnitus. I knew I'd turned the corner when my response to tinnitus was boredom...

 

I agree that part of it is the type of people we are. For example, before T, if I was trying to read in a quiet room, I would ALWAYS be annoyed by a ticking clock. I would walk up to the clock and take out the batteries so that I could read without being disturbed. With T I can't do that ...

 

Same here. I would sleep with earplugs in even in a quiet place. Now I "sleep" with this fucking dog whistle in my head.

 

Same here. I would always work/sleep with silence (I'd wear noise cancelling headphones at work for example) as sound would distract me and prevent me from focusing.

 

I was one of those people that didn't like silence, always music or TV on in the background. LOVED loud music, clubs, concerts etc. But having said that, I hate the sounds that my ears/brain make, it's not really comparable.

 

It makes me crazy that you can't turn it off. I just want a break from it. The constant sound with no way the escape is what gets me.

 

"My girlfriend has it, my son, co workers, friends" hmmm, what are the chances of that?

 

Because some of us are obsessive...including me...

When I drank in a bar in Thailand (hopefully I can again someday..), I always needed the fan on me, coldest beer, particular seat ect...

Obsessed, additionally, I'm an IT guy and deal with insanely anal stuff for work, so for me this is very hard, I'm a control freak...

 

@CDNThailand, interestingly enough, I was only obsessive when I needed to be. Most of the time I was a chilled, relaxed dude that enjoyed taking breaks, meditating (mindfulness), and so on.

 

Interesting..

 

Seems a lot of people with T are IT people.

I didn't get mine from IT though. It was a powerful alarm external sounder.

 

I think how it affects you also depends on your introversion/extroversion spectrum. I am an extreme introvert, so loved basking in my own thoughts to complete silence or a quiet nature setting. I think the first two months was the hardest, realizing that I might never have silence again; that I would have to share nature with a high-pitched whine, might never read by a crackling fire without the constant tone of my heartbeat in my ears.

Five months in I've adapted a lot, plus the T has gone down to being louder than a fog horn to below conversation level. I can actually read a book in a quiet room and not notice the T for a while, like a ticking clock you learn to ignore.

It still saddens me, but I try to put it in the same category of my reading glasses and aches and pains in my body as it ages. None of us ever stay in a constant state of health, and while I think T is probably one of the hardest changes to accept, you have to adapt.

I once watched a documentary about a guy who had full paralysis (not actor Christopher Reed, but someone like him who was in full health and after an accident could only move his head). For him to adapt, he thought himself "not human" any more. He thought of himself as something different, and with that mindset was able to function in a completely alternate mindset. I don't think T sufferers have to go that extreme, but I think it can provide inspiration.

 

Can you send me the link to that story?

About the silence thing, it's been absolutely proven that over 90% of normal people put in a quiet room for over 5 minutes, they will hear T.

Additionally, silence is NOT a normal sound environment, complete silence is a result of our sterile civilization with sound proof urban infrastructures.

In nature there is always some sound, and if too quiet it's usually because of impeding disaster or approaching predators.

So do I miss the silence? Nope, not at all, actually I have always preferred sleeping with white noise

 

Ohhh I'd have to disagree with silence not being normal in nature. There were MANY time where, in my time living in Nova Scotia, where it was completely wind still and silent. The only time a noise would be heard is ones feet cracking and crunching sticks and leafs. Standing there and not hearing anything at all was kind of odd, but there were definitely were many times where it was so.

Now, it's probably easier to deal with tinnitus if one was to sleep outside, where the wind is blowing, birds chirping, coyotes howling, etc, instead of inside where, once the windows are closed, its fairly silent.

 

Are you thinking of Christopher Reeve?