Was recommended to make this post and felt i should do it before i forget. I am more active on reddit.com/r/tinnitus , but have logged onto here and like this forum a lot as it has more people, it's more personal, and has more activity.
I got my tinnitus on February 12 2017 somewhere in the quiet, dark, night time in my room as i was on my phone browsing reddit. I came across a thread about Hearing Damage. It talked about protecting your ears and if you don't you might go deaf or suffer from tinnitus. I was intrigued with what tinnitus was. I had never even heard of this word before. (Sounded like a persistent itch.) So i began to research it. Tinnitus - noun - "the perception of noise or ringing in the ears. A common problem, tinnitus affects about 1 in 5 people." And in that moment i foolish decided to open pandora's box and at night in my quiet room i listened intensely for any sound. And there it was a brief ringing. It was quite shocking to learn something about my body that i had never known before, like i discovered i had a third arm or something. I'm a really curious and investigative person and i pick and pry at everything. I'm the guy that always picked at my scabs.
Now if you go online and read around on the internet. Here on tinnitustalk, or reddit, or youtube, or actionhearingloss, or just about any forum where they talk about tinnitus you'll come across a comment by some random person. "I didn't know what tinnitus was before this post and now that i've learned about it, i think i've got it and it's freaking me out." I've screenshotted and saved about a hundred of these type of comments and chatted with a bunch of people on reddit that gave themselves tinnitus this way. It's really weird what games the brain plays. (i'm actually gonna compile all of those comments and make a post on reddit about dehabituating yourself into getting tinnitus)
But anyways in the past i did listen to loud music on my headphones. Not all that often. Never went to concerts, shot guns, operated heavy machinery, no flu, no head injury, no scubadiving, etc. But i was in a pretty depressed state at the time and was dealing with stress. Low pay, Repetitive dull tasks at my job, Student loans, Girlfriend yelling at me, money troubles, boredom, etc. I felt worthless, unappreciated, forgotten, undervalued, people treated me like shit. I also don't really have many friends anymore. I also like to hike and go out and do things and every weekend wanted to hike, but i never did. There was always this mental block. I could never get myself out of the house and resigned myself to just loafing around on the computer and then it was monday... "next weekend i always said" And i always used to eat pre-made food. Frozen dinners, cans of whatever, stuff from a restaurant, whatever (don't think i was extremely unhealthy i wasnt eating hungryman tv dinners, i was eating trader joes) On top of that i was going on an international trip and i had to drive two hours after work to some city to buy an apple watch for my girlfriends father then two hours back to my house, pack, and then find a way to go 2 hours to the airport. I was beyond stressed.
However during the trip i didn't notice tinnitus. I was having a great time. Having fun. Each day i was doing things and out and about. Maybe i did feel it a little bit, but nothing too bothersome and i forgot it soon enough. Things got worse when i came back home to the good ole' USA and back to the daily grind and boring same old same old. That's when i started realizing my tinnitus and it only took a few days before it totally ran me over like a freight train.
High pitch squealing in both ears. With a high pitch constantly changing tone in the middle of my head. It felt like brainzaps. Reading about this online was even worse. People saying it's permanent, people killing themselves, people writhing in pain online, people saying it never goes away. It drove my anxiety through the roof to the point where i was bedridden, panicked, i could barely walk, and i regularly bawled my eyes out. I masked with binaural beats and began purchasing a ton of supplements and foods (magnesium, b12, gingko biloba, melatonin, Cog10, multivitamin, chamomile tea, pineapple) and took them daily. I bought sound protection headphones and wore them everywhere. I couldn't believe my life was gonna be like this forever and i thought my quality of life immediately nosedived. How could i not see this coming??? Why didn't i protect my hearing??? What did i do to myself??? The worst part is the lack of sleep. I could go to sleep easily. Just staying asleep was impossible. I would wake every 2 hours. And i did this for a week straight. The lack of REM sleep made me into a zombie. I read somewhere that you have about a few months before brain plasticity makes this permanent so i became desperate. I started doing weird and stupid stuff that i am embarrassed to even mention here. I tried standing on my head, holding my breath for as long as in the swimming pool, submerging my hands in boiling water and then into ice, i had my friend punch me in the face, i read laser therapy works and i have an action figure that has a led light on it so i ripped that off and put it on the outside of my ear. I also stopped jerking off (i used to do it about twice a day like on the wolf of wall street). I think i did have hyperacusis too, flushing a toilet was too loud and painful. Plates clinking together were too loud, car driving by was too loud. Maybe i just wanted to protect my hearing further and was overly cautious, maybe i had hyperacusis i don't know.
The worst thing is i didn't tell anybody. I suffered in silence. I thought it would go away by sleeping it off and if i told anyone they would think less of me. Like i'm a broken human being. That i should be pitied and everytime they thought of me it'd be "oh what a sad story". I got a lot of relief when i eventually worked up the personal strength and mentioned it to my dad. Turns out my dad has tinnitus too. He had it for awhile and just learned to live with it. "i can hear it right now, doesn't bother me" he said.
After that I did see a doctor who did a few checkups and basically just printed off a packed about tinnitus and sent me on my way without saying much about it. I saw an audiologist and did a hearing test and affirmed i had perfect hearing and said "it's a shame there's no cure". I got an MRI done and everything turned out fine.
I'd like to say something worked for me and cured my tinnitus, but i can't really say. Who knows? All i know is eventually the brain zaps and high pitched sound in my head disappeared one day. The my left ear was fine and silent another day. Then the high pitch squeal in my right ear went turned into a hiss like a radiator. Then another day it turned into some weird mechanical sound that felt like it was coming out of my mouth. (you know how those guys that smoked and have the machine to talk with?) That's how i felt at a minor scale. Tinnitus was basically at a .5 one day so i thought woo hoo! and i listened to music on my headphones at a moderate level and uhoh immediately loud squealing noise in my right ear again...
I went back to being bedridden, depressed, and loathing in my self misery. I felt upset at my hubris and that i listened to music on my headphones and got this tinnitus back. Why had i been so foolish???? What the hell is wrong with me???? So i took those sennheiser headphones that i once spent about $300 on and buried it in a hole in the yard. The cause of my tinnitus when i first got it and now again. I hated them so much. I would have destroyed my smartphone too, but i kinda needed it...
It was like that [bedridden] for about 2 weeks. Then again it slowly got better. The volume dropped. It stopped bothering me. I got better sleep. I started to jog. I went on hikes. I started focusing on programming and my hobbies. I read success stories online and accounts of people saying it went away. I heard a story about a family friend having his tinnitus disappear. I read about all the tinnitus related and hearing loss related research. I did some research of my own and learned a lot of Neuroscience researchers studying tinnitus actually suffered from tinnitus themselves. I felt happy at that, and happy that my tinnitus was subsiding, and happy that i was happy. My tinnitus died down and returned into that weird mechanical sound that felt like it came from my mouth. Seriously i felt like if i opened my mouth the tinnitus got louder. And i would gulp a lot and my throat got irritated.
And then one day i noticed silence. Everything was quiet. Well it was just me alone and nothing electrical was running and no loud neighbors or barking dogs in the distance. I didn't hear any ringing or hissing or buzzing. I tried to find my tinnitus. I liked it, but it was kinda weird. People normally say that if their silence returned they would cry tears of joy and just lay down and relax. When silence returned after the initial gratitude... i just felt bored at the lack of stimulation. Then i went on a jog and bought ingredients and made fried rice.
So what is this like 2 months? 2 months and tinnitus is gone. At my worst it was a 7/10 high pitch squeal in both ears with a varying high pitched squeal and brainzaps in the middle of my head. I wanted to make this post earlier but i didn't want to gloat and then karma strikes and i get tinnitus again. Hell i might even get tinnitus again. I pray i don't though.
Maybe i'll be back here in the future, maybe i won't. I kinda feel like i want to move past this chapter in my life and go enjoy this 2nd lease on life. Many of the other people i talked to on reddit have basically done this. I feel like on tinnitustalk once you're done with tinnitus you just disappear. On reddit if someone overcomes tinnitus either through habituation or it goes away they're still active on reddit probably. They just don't talk about tinnitus anymore and just focus on recent news and their hobbies. When i felt bad about tinnitus, i wanted to message them, but i felt it would be best to just let them be. Good reminders of people silently beating tinnitus. Maybe their story isn't on some success stories section or posted anywhere else online, but they did succeed.
Oh i'm 24, male, i don't smoke drink or do drugs. healthy weight but a little thin. My exercise now consists of jogging on weekdays and hiking on the weekend. In the past i didn't exercise at all beyond walking around. I eat a balanced diet and am not vegan or vegetarian. I do sit on my but for 8 hours for my job.
Some other symptoms were longlasting headaches, sleep that didn't recharge me, my right ear kept feeling wet on the inside, sometimes everything would go silent for a moment then a loud sound would emit from my ear, my face + neck + head + brain would feel tight and constricted.
I also kinda hate my previous family doctor. I went swimming about half a year ago and afterwards my ear felt itchy and like something was one the inside. Paid $15 copay for him to look in my ear say nothing is there and tell me to angle the shower head water to inside my ear. Didn't even really care or talk to me about hearing health. Couldn't bother 5 minutes.
Anyways that's all i can think about now. Thanks for reading.
I got my tinnitus on February 12 2017 somewhere in the quiet, dark, night time in my room as i was on my phone browsing reddit. I came across a thread about Hearing Damage. It talked about protecting your ears and if you don't you might go deaf or suffer from tinnitus. I was intrigued with what tinnitus was. I had never even heard of this word before. (Sounded like a persistent itch.) So i began to research it. Tinnitus - noun - "the perception of noise or ringing in the ears. A common problem, tinnitus affects about 1 in 5 people." And in that moment i foolish decided to open pandora's box and at night in my quiet room i listened intensely for any sound. And there it was a brief ringing. It was quite shocking to learn something about my body that i had never known before, like i discovered i had a third arm or something. I'm a really curious and investigative person and i pick and pry at everything. I'm the guy that always picked at my scabs.
Now if you go online and read around on the internet. Here on tinnitustalk, or reddit, or youtube, or actionhearingloss, or just about any forum where they talk about tinnitus you'll come across a comment by some random person. "I didn't know what tinnitus was before this post and now that i've learned about it, i think i've got it and it's freaking me out." I've screenshotted and saved about a hundred of these type of comments and chatted with a bunch of people on reddit that gave themselves tinnitus this way. It's really weird what games the brain plays. (i'm actually gonna compile all of those comments and make a post on reddit about dehabituating yourself into getting tinnitus)
But anyways in the past i did listen to loud music on my headphones. Not all that often. Never went to concerts, shot guns, operated heavy machinery, no flu, no head injury, no scubadiving, etc. But i was in a pretty depressed state at the time and was dealing with stress. Low pay, Repetitive dull tasks at my job, Student loans, Girlfriend yelling at me, money troubles, boredom, etc. I felt worthless, unappreciated, forgotten, undervalued, people treated me like shit. I also don't really have many friends anymore. I also like to hike and go out and do things and every weekend wanted to hike, but i never did. There was always this mental block. I could never get myself out of the house and resigned myself to just loafing around on the computer and then it was monday... "next weekend i always said" And i always used to eat pre-made food. Frozen dinners, cans of whatever, stuff from a restaurant, whatever (don't think i was extremely unhealthy i wasnt eating hungryman tv dinners, i was eating trader joes) On top of that i was going on an international trip and i had to drive two hours after work to some city to buy an apple watch for my girlfriends father then two hours back to my house, pack, and then find a way to go 2 hours to the airport. I was beyond stressed.
However during the trip i didn't notice tinnitus. I was having a great time. Having fun. Each day i was doing things and out and about. Maybe i did feel it a little bit, but nothing too bothersome and i forgot it soon enough. Things got worse when i came back home to the good ole' USA and back to the daily grind and boring same old same old. That's when i started realizing my tinnitus and it only took a few days before it totally ran me over like a freight train.
High pitch squealing in both ears. With a high pitch constantly changing tone in the middle of my head. It felt like brainzaps. Reading about this online was even worse. People saying it's permanent, people killing themselves, people writhing in pain online, people saying it never goes away. It drove my anxiety through the roof to the point where i was bedridden, panicked, i could barely walk, and i regularly bawled my eyes out. I masked with binaural beats and began purchasing a ton of supplements and foods (magnesium, b12, gingko biloba, melatonin, Cog10, multivitamin, chamomile tea, pineapple) and took them daily. I bought sound protection headphones and wore them everywhere. I couldn't believe my life was gonna be like this forever and i thought my quality of life immediately nosedived. How could i not see this coming??? Why didn't i protect my hearing??? What did i do to myself??? The worst part is the lack of sleep. I could go to sleep easily. Just staying asleep was impossible. I would wake every 2 hours. And i did this for a week straight. The lack of REM sleep made me into a zombie. I read somewhere that you have about a few months before brain plasticity makes this permanent so i became desperate. I started doing weird and stupid stuff that i am embarrassed to even mention here. I tried standing on my head, holding my breath for as long as in the swimming pool, submerging my hands in boiling water and then into ice, i had my friend punch me in the face, i read laser therapy works and i have an action figure that has a led light on it so i ripped that off and put it on the outside of my ear. I also stopped jerking off (i used to do it about twice a day like on the wolf of wall street). I think i did have hyperacusis too, flushing a toilet was too loud and painful. Plates clinking together were too loud, car driving by was too loud. Maybe i just wanted to protect my hearing further and was overly cautious, maybe i had hyperacusis i don't know.
The worst thing is i didn't tell anybody. I suffered in silence. I thought it would go away by sleeping it off and if i told anyone they would think less of me. Like i'm a broken human being. That i should be pitied and everytime they thought of me it'd be "oh what a sad story". I got a lot of relief when i eventually worked up the personal strength and mentioned it to my dad. Turns out my dad has tinnitus too. He had it for awhile and just learned to live with it. "i can hear it right now, doesn't bother me" he said.
After that I did see a doctor who did a few checkups and basically just printed off a packed about tinnitus and sent me on my way without saying much about it. I saw an audiologist and did a hearing test and affirmed i had perfect hearing and said "it's a shame there's no cure". I got an MRI done and everything turned out fine.
I'd like to say something worked for me and cured my tinnitus, but i can't really say. Who knows? All i know is eventually the brain zaps and high pitched sound in my head disappeared one day. The my left ear was fine and silent another day. Then the high pitch squeal in my right ear went turned into a hiss like a radiator. Then another day it turned into some weird mechanical sound that felt like it was coming out of my mouth. (you know how those guys that smoked and have the machine to talk with?) That's how i felt at a minor scale. Tinnitus was basically at a .5 one day so i thought woo hoo! and i listened to music on my headphones at a moderate level and uhoh immediately loud squealing noise in my right ear again...
I went back to being bedridden, depressed, and loathing in my self misery. I felt upset at my hubris and that i listened to music on my headphones and got this tinnitus back. Why had i been so foolish???? What the hell is wrong with me???? So i took those sennheiser headphones that i once spent about $300 on and buried it in a hole in the yard. The cause of my tinnitus when i first got it and now again. I hated them so much. I would have destroyed my smartphone too, but i kinda needed it...
It was like that [bedridden] for about 2 weeks. Then again it slowly got better. The volume dropped. It stopped bothering me. I got better sleep. I started to jog. I went on hikes. I started focusing on programming and my hobbies. I read success stories online and accounts of people saying it went away. I heard a story about a family friend having his tinnitus disappear. I read about all the tinnitus related and hearing loss related research. I did some research of my own and learned a lot of Neuroscience researchers studying tinnitus actually suffered from tinnitus themselves. I felt happy at that, and happy that my tinnitus was subsiding, and happy that i was happy. My tinnitus died down and returned into that weird mechanical sound that felt like it came from my mouth. Seriously i felt like if i opened my mouth the tinnitus got louder. And i would gulp a lot and my throat got irritated.
And then one day i noticed silence. Everything was quiet. Well it was just me alone and nothing electrical was running and no loud neighbors or barking dogs in the distance. I didn't hear any ringing or hissing or buzzing. I tried to find my tinnitus. I liked it, but it was kinda weird. People normally say that if their silence returned they would cry tears of joy and just lay down and relax. When silence returned after the initial gratitude... i just felt bored at the lack of stimulation. Then i went on a jog and bought ingredients and made fried rice.
So what is this like 2 months? 2 months and tinnitus is gone. At my worst it was a 7/10 high pitch squeal in both ears with a varying high pitched squeal and brainzaps in the middle of my head. I wanted to make this post earlier but i didn't want to gloat and then karma strikes and i get tinnitus again. Hell i might even get tinnitus again. I pray i don't though.
Maybe i'll be back here in the future, maybe i won't. I kinda feel like i want to move past this chapter in my life and go enjoy this 2nd lease on life. Many of the other people i talked to on reddit have basically done this. I feel like on tinnitustalk once you're done with tinnitus you just disappear. On reddit if someone overcomes tinnitus either through habituation or it goes away they're still active on reddit probably. They just don't talk about tinnitus anymore and just focus on recent news and their hobbies. When i felt bad about tinnitus, i wanted to message them, but i felt it would be best to just let them be. Good reminders of people silently beating tinnitus. Maybe their story isn't on some success stories section or posted anywhere else online, but they did succeed.
Oh i'm 24, male, i don't smoke drink or do drugs. healthy weight but a little thin. My exercise now consists of jogging on weekdays and hiking on the weekend. In the past i didn't exercise at all beyond walking around. I eat a balanced diet and am not vegan or vegetarian. I do sit on my but for 8 hours for my job.
Some other symptoms were longlasting headaches, sleep that didn't recharge me, my right ear kept feeling wet on the inside, sometimes everything would go silent for a moment then a loud sound would emit from my ear, my face + neck + head + brain would feel tight and constricted.
I also kinda hate my previous family doctor. I went swimming about half a year ago and afterwards my ear felt itchy and like something was one the inside. Paid $15 copay for him to look in my ear say nothing is there and tell me to angle the shower head water to inside my ear. Didn't even really care or talk to me about hearing health. Couldn't bother 5 minutes.
Anyways that's all i can think about now. Thanks for reading.
Member
But we did talk about it in reddit so I have nothing more to say x)
