Seems Like There Are Many Types of Tinnitus

For some people, yea. Bad thoughts can change the function of the brain. I’ll paste an old post of mine that gets right to the point:

Tinnitus is known to be associated with deeper processing centres of the brain. It's theorised that once signals travel from the ear to the auditory cortex, caudate and putamen, they then make their way to other regions of the brain where more sophisticated processing takes place. This involves memory, and your brain interpreting the meaning of the sound, whilst giving it emotional significance. There are various studies that have been carried out on the brain of people with tinnitus vs people without using MEGs and EEGs. What's usually apparent, is that the tinnitus brains have other areas activated, with neurons firing in synch with the auditory cortex. It's like a complex web of connections. Many believe that the way we deal with tinnitus (especially early on) has ramifications on how the brain learns to deal with the problem. If the amygdala attaches relevance to it, it's likely our emotions will also be caught up in it, creating a heightened perception.

Our behaviour can be an important factor in how the problem gets handled. Some of the overprotection, and avoidance practices, attach significant weight to the tinnitus signal in your subconsciousness. The brain is smart, and will usually learn to ignore it if you don't become overly anxious about it. Loud noise is a common trigger, but the way we deal with the aftermath can lead to further problems if we let it get out of control.

You can seek out more information about this online. Another area of research implicates a faulty gating (filtering) system (which I’ve read about many times in New Scientist magazine), which is jointly connected with chronic pain disorder. I’ll post a excerpt and a couple of links below, but I recommend further research and reading:

“Tinnitus and chronic pain are sensory-perceptual disorders associated with negative affect and high impact on well-being and behavior. It is now becoming increasingly clear that higher cognitive and affective brain systems are centrally involved in the pathology of both disorders. We propose that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens are part of a central 'gatekeeping' system in both sensory modalities, a system which evaluates the relevance and affective value of sensory stimuli and controls information flow via descending pathways. If this frontostriatal system is compromised, long-lasting disturbances are the result. Parallels in both systems are striking and mutually informative, and progress in understanding central gating mechanisms might provide a new impetus to the therapy of tinnitus and chronic pain.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26412095/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21220097/?i=2&from=/26412095/related

I’ll add even more to this as well. I’ll post two excerpts below:

Baigi and colleagues (2011) published an interesting study on stress and tinnitus. They looked at 12,166 people, of which 2,024 had tinnitus. They wanted to find out which factor was more important – noise or stress – in moving someone from a situation where they just notice their tinnitus, to a situation where tinnitus is extremely bothersome. What they found is that while both noise and stress had an influence, stress was the most important factor for the transition from mild to severe tinnitus. The authors concluded that stress management strategies should be included in hearing conservation programs, especially for individuals with mild tinnitus who report a high stress load.

This finding aligns with the other studies mentioned earlier that found activity in the thalamic reticular nucleus and in the basal ganglia can be highly impacted by stress.


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5318420/


Although the physiological mechanisms are not clear, it has been proposed that alteration in the balance of excitation and inhibition either within the caudate or in its connections to auditory cortex modulates this permissiveness (Calabresi et al., 2000; Goubard et al., 2011). The striatal gating model is complementary to other central nervous system hypotheses, including those that posit tinnitus is primarily an expectation mismatch within the auditory system (primary auditory cortex (A1); Eggermont and Roberts, 2004; Roberts et al., 2013) or is driven by abnormal auditory-limbic interactions [i.e., nucleus accumbens (NA); Leaver et al., 2011; Seydell-Greenwald et al., 2012]. While invasive direct electrical stimulation studies of the dorsal striatum in movement disorder patients with comorbid tinnitus provide support for a causal role of the basal ganglia in auditory phantom perception, to date no non-invasive neuroimaging study has directly tested the physiologically based striatal gating model in the more common subpopulation of chronic tinnitus patients without movement disorder.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4623204/#!po=3.67647

Our emotional processing can become mixed in with our tinnitus. Let’s just say stress and anxiety are bad for tinnitus.