Tinnitus Started in the Middle of the Night...

[VincentWinters]

....and it hasn't really stopped. That was about 5 days ago. I did hear a very loud, uncomfortable screeching sound, to do with my gym changing room's piping (I endured for about 5 minutes before figuring out what the problem was and turning the tap on so I could get changed in piece), earlier that evening.

It's a kind of hissing sound that turns into fairly high pitch if I really concentrate on it or when I'm in silence. Sometimes it seems very loud other times I barely notice it, indeed I woke up this morning and couldn't hear it at all and wondered if it was gone. It also seems to mostly be in one ear. I have an appointment tomorrow (finally) to get the Dr to examine my ears and up my dose of anti anxiety meds. I've done a lot of reading around and whilst I'm much more hopeful that I'll learn to live with it (I even managed to sleep with out background noise last night) it still sucks that there aren't really any treatments out there (seriously how long do we think it will be?). I just hope that it goes away because its really an infection or that I 'habituate' soon, or that some one finds this miracle cure quick. White noise is a poor substitute for silence.

 

[Bill Bauer]

Most likely your T will eventually go away (or at least fade). Just make sure to protect your ears from moderate sounds like that of a vacuum cleaner or a blender.

Check out
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/spontaneous-recovery-stats-over-70-recover-3-studies.21441/

 

[Kolisar]

Hi @VincentWinters , welcome.

@Bill Bauer wrote the following post discussing studies that show a fairly high recovery rate from tinnitus ( https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/spontaneous-recovery-stats-over-70-recover-3-studies.21441/ )

The fact that you often "barely notice it", and that you "woke up this morning and couldn't hear it at all" are good signs (I am not a doctor, btw). and to me indicate that you have a great change of recovery or, at the very least, habituation.

For some great general information on Tinnitus, search out posts by @Michael Leigh , he is extremely knowledgable and has a talent for conveying that knowledge. I would suggest starting with the following of his posts:

habituation
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/tinnitus-a-personal-view.18668/
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/headphones-and-tinnitus.12062/
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/tinnitus-and-the-negative-mindset.23705/


Hang in there, it will get better.

 

[Kolisar]

Most likely your T will eventually go away (or at least fade). Just make sure to protect your ears from moderate sounds like that of a vacuum cleaner or a blender.

Check out
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/spontaneous-recovery-stats-over-70-recover-3-studies.21441/

@Bill Bauer we really have to start coordinating our posts, this is not the first time it toke me too long to write my response referencing your post to have you post it seconds ahead of me

 

[Greg Sacramento]

@VincentWinters You probably have somatic tinnitus as you state that it seems to mostly be in one ear. You mention your gym. If you were working out and had sore, tight or twisted muscles, then your tinnitus may have been caused from somatic (muscle) and auditory pathways within your central nervous system as the pipe noise being the reactor.

This is similar to a dental procedure where a patient may have his neck off balance causing muscle spasms when the dentist is drilling. There's a lot mechanical reasons that can play into this. If you have a sore neck, then this may be it. There has been incidences where sport players in a loud stadium have receive somatic tinnitus from playing with a sore neck. Somatic tinnitus is common for those with neck problems including whiplash.

The only thing that seems to help me is Vitamin C. If your muscles were tender, then things may improve. Usually somatic sounds don't fully set in until hours after an incident. As your volume moves up and down during the day, then that can relate to neck, jaw or back posture which can also cause a sore throat.

When laying in bed, if the tinnitus switches sides, depending on what side that you are sleeping on, then it's joints, veins and muscles of the neck, jaw or back.

My recent tinnitus which is somatic tinnitus was caused by bending my neck at the dentist. My first tinnitus was caused by getting my ears syringed. What didn't help is that the person doing the syringing was tilting my neck and head.

 

[VincentWinters]

What a change a couple of days makes (for the worse). I'm seriously considering swallowing all my zopeclone. I don't want to die but the depression and anxiety the tinintus have sparked off is immense i can hardly get out of bed. Its been a week today and i cant imagine how i can fight the anxiety AND tinnitus. The two feed off of each other. Literally t night I wrote the above post i had to use Zopeclone to help me sleep because the T started getting louder ( my SSRIs have started kicking back in i think. I took them straight away to deal with the anxiety and now i read they might make it all worse). I had cinnarzine too. The DR barely looked at my ears, basically said tinnitus was in my head (duh) and refered me to the british tinitus website and told me to listen to music at night but not "rap" music. I told him i was feeling suicidal with anxiety, he upped my dose to 150mg of sertraline. That was it, he may refer me for an ENT if things arent better in a couple of weeks.(!!) I am literally at my wits end

 

[maltese]

What a change a couple of days makes (for the worse). I'm seriously considering swallowing all my zopeclone. I don't want to die but the depression and anxiety the tinintus have sparked off is immense i can hardly get out of bed. Its been a week today and i cant imagine how i can fight the anxiety AND tinnitus. The two feed off of each other. Literally t night I wrote the above post i had to use Zopeclone to help me sleep because the T started getting louder ( my SSRIs have started kicking back in i think. I took them straight away to deal with the anxiety and now i read they might make it all worse). I had cinnarzine too. The DR barely looked at my ears, basically said tinnitus was in my head (duh) and refered me to the british tinitus website and told me to listen to music at night but not "rap" music. I told him i was feeling suicidal with anxiety, he upped my dose to 150mg of sertraline. That was it, he may refer me for an ENT if things arent better in a couple of weeks.(!!) I am literally at my wits end

It gets better with time HANG IN THERE.

Go for a walk, leave the house. Be around people.

 

[billie48]

What a change a couple of days makes (for the worse). I'm seriously considering swallowing all my zopeclone. I don't want to die but the depression and anxiety the tinintus have sparked off is immense i can hardly get out of bed. Its been a week today and i cant imagine how i can fight the anxiety AND tinnitus. The two feed off of each other. Literally t night I wrote the above post i had to use Zopeclone to help me sleep because the T started getting louder ( my SSRIs have started kicking back in i think. I took them straight away to deal with the anxiety and now i read they might make it all worse). I had cinnarzine too. The DR barely looked at my ears, basically said tinnitus was in my head (duh) and refered me to the british tinitus website and told me to listen to music at night but not "rap" music. I told him i was feeling suicidal with anxiety, he upped my dose to 150mg of sertraline. That was it, he may refer me for an ENT if things arent better in a couple of weeks.(!!) I am literally at my wits end

I agree you need to give your body some time to deal with this new and alien sensation of T. Your T is so new you can't rule out that it will fade or subside in loudness. New T is known to be unstable and you will have days of calm and days of mad ringing. Try to hang in there when it spikes. We have all gone through those days of helplessness and hopelessness and can empathize what you are going through now. The initial months can be tough but it will pass. Try to read up the success stories (in Knowledge Base) and see if you can learn some wisdom and strategies there. A few years back I was overwhelmed by my ultra high pitch dog whistle T. As if that wasn't enough, severe hyperacusis soon joined in the misery. H turned all normal sounds piercingly hurtful as if the ears got drilled by every normal sound, including even the voices of conversations. I tried to wear earplugs to protect from severe H but that would leave T the only dominant scream in the ears when all outside sounds were blocked. So you can imagine the sufferings combined from both T & H. I was floored by relentless anxiety and panic attacks from T & H, being that I was someone with prior condition of anxiety and panic disorder plus PTSD. Like you and many new sufferers, dark thought of ending it all often crossed the tired and stressed out mind. There seemed to be no end to the dark tunnel of life time of suffering. Luckily I didn't do anything stupid. Today I live a normal, productive and absolutely enjoyable life. I wrote my success story and share some helpful strategies which have help me turn around my suffering. For brevity, I provide the link below if you wish to check out my strategies. Don't panic nor despair. Good life can be back. You just leave to be patient to give it some time and to apply some helpful strategies. Try to read as many success stories as you can to give you some hope. Take good care. God bless.

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...w-i-recovered-from-tinnitus-hyperacusis.3148/

 

[threefirefour]

....and it hasn't really stopped. That was about 5 days ago. I did hear a very loud, uncomfortable screeching sound, to do with my gym changing room's piping (I endured for about 5 minutes before figuring out what the problem was and turning the tap on so I could get changed in piece), earlier that evening.

It's a kind of hissing sound that turns into fairly high pitch if I really concentrate on it or when I'm in silence. Sometimes it seems very loud other times I barely notice it, indeed I woke up this morning and couldn't hear it at all and wondered if it was gone. It also seems to mostly be in one ear. I have an appointment tomorrow (finally) to get the Dr to examine my ears and up my dose of anti anxiety meds. I've done a lot of reading around and whilst I'm much more hopeful that I'll learn to live with it (I even managed to sleep with out background noise last night) it still sucks that there aren't really any treatments out there (seriously how long do we think it will be?). I just hope that it goes away because its really an infection or that I 'habituate' soon, or that some one finds this miracle cure quick. White noise is a poor substitute for silence.

Since the onset (may) be that loud one time noise, then it could very well go away. I hear it goes down in 70% of cases overtime according to some stats from @Bill Bauer

 

[VincentWinters]

Thanks so much for your kind messages. I guess im just feeling so fractious. Its great tobhear your story Billie

 

[Jordy]

Hello Vincent,

I am just new here. My opinion is that it is all related to the body-mind thing. I refer you to take a look at this expirement:
In the 1953 Heller & Bergman study, the sounds described by the normally-hearing adults with no tinnitus who were placed in the soundproof room were exactly the same as the sounds typically described by individuals with severe intrusive tinnitus, ring, buzz, hum, hiss, crickets, etc. except that the folks with "no tinnitus" were never aware of them before because they were sub-audible in everyday environments. What this wonderful reliable and verifiable study showed was that the presence of tinnitus in-and-of-itself does not necessarily mean that anything is "wrong." Indeed, some degree of tinnitus is a normal physiological event, occurring in 94% of people with normal hearing.

I must say this expirement gives me hope and power that it will be gone on one day. It's all about the brains, which is in a vicious circle or fear and sound and we have to exit that circle, but that is my opinion.

 

[VincentWinters]

A weird thing happened yesterday. I was chatting with a good friend of mine about my tinnitus and he said that he'd been thinking and wondered if it was the same as what he called "the sound of silence". It turns out that when he's in silence he often notices a high pitch sound he always thought was the sound of silence ("because theres never no sound is there?" was what he said). He said he'd always had this pitch in his ears and and that if he concentrated, he could hone in on it and hear it over TV. It doesn't bug him at all, EVER. He's totally habituated to it. In fact he's one of the most cheerful people I know. I didn't tell him I thought he probably had tinnitus I was just like "oh thats interesting" (I didn't want to risk him seeing his T as a problem and therefore something that could start to bother him). It gave me great hope. I have to say that out and about today that despite thinking about it a lot I only heard it above other things a couple of times. Im at home now and the radio, set reasonably low is largely keeping it a bay. It just chimes in with the odd warble/whistle hear and there. Its so odd how it can change from that to being more like a car alarm in your head.

 

[Kingdawson]

A weird thing happened yesterday. I was chatting with a good friend of mine about my tinnitus and he said that he'd been thinking and wondered if it was the same as what he called "the sound of silence". It turns out that when he's in silence he often notices a high pitch sound he always thought was the sound of silence ("because theres never no sound is there?" was what he said). He said he'd always had this pitch in his ears and and that if he concentrated, he could hone in on it and hear it over TV. It doesn't bug him at all, EVER. He's totally habituated to it. In fact he's one of the most cheerful people I know. I didn't tell him I thought he probably had tinnitus I was just like "oh thats interesting" (I didn't want to risk him seeing his T as a problem and therefore something that could start to bother him). It gave me great hope. I have to say that out and about today that despite thinking about it a lot I only heard it above other things a couple of times. Im at home now and the radio, set reasonably low is largely keeping it a bay. It just chimes in with the odd warble/whistle hear and there. Its so odd how it can change from that to being more like a car alarm in your head.

Yep same here mate. My girlfriend and all my mates all talk about that noise they hear in complete silence if they concentrate on it. They talk about it as if its completley normal which really confuses me. They also call it "head noise". I even spoke about it with a co worker today and he laughed about it stating hes had it for as long as he can remember.

 

[jhl]

Hi @VincentWinters I was using the search bar on this website and your story matches mine almost exactly. Woke up in the middle of the night and heard the high pitched ringing. A hiss also, and high pitched when I'm focused on it. I have no hearing loss and have been to an ENT and they said I am all good. sometimes it seems loud, and sometimes it is virtually non existent. I am reaching out to you to see if yours has improved or if you have figured anything out about yours. I still don't know how I got mine even after going to doctors, and everything about your story is identical to mine.