Ding Dong Merrily in My Head
March 5, 2010 6:47 PM Subscribe
Help me cope with tinnitus.
I have been diagnosed with tinnitus caused by an "irritated nerve" ... there is no hearing loss or direct cause; they tell me that it's a nerve that's just firing when it oughtn't be. I hear a constant high-pitched whine, like the sound electricity makes. (I have been my GP, an audiologist, and an ENT, working together, and I am satisfied I received good care; I am pondering getting a second opinion but this will require 3 hours of travel and fussing with the insurance company, and I'm not particularly confident they'll have anything new to say to me.)
I was told the sound will either spontaneously disappear or it will be with me for the rest of my life.
Are there any strategies that can help me? Yoga, relaxation? (Especially anything that might encourage it to spontaneously disappear!) Do you have any recommendations for white noise machines to sleep to, that won't bother my husband too much? (And that are reliable and worth the money.) Are there white noise "songs" I can download on iTunes? Is there anything else in particular that's helped you?
It doesn't bother me much during the day as long as there's ambient noise (and music provides enough ambient noise when I'm otherwise lacking), but sleep is a real problem and quiet concentrating work can be difficult.
posted by Eyebrows McGee to health & fitness (19 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
- in reading about tinnitus I realized that for many people, the anxiety that comes with the ringing is almost worse than the noise itself. When I got diagnosed, I was worried I was going deaf, worried that I'd never sleep again, worried about what my deaf life would be like, etc etc. It was really a mess. I did a few things like keeping white noise going a lot of the time, sleeping with the fan on, knocking out almost all caffeine [and all late night caffeine] and looking into medicines that were ototoxic and avoiding them. I also got my doctor to prescribe me some lorazepam which I keep around if in fact I'm really having anxiety-related sleep issues. I don't have much of it and rarely use it, but it's great to know there's a knock-out pill if I need it. Exercise also helped with managing the anxiety.
- as far as white noise, Audacity has a "generate white noise" option. It will make a small sound file which you can play on a loop. I use it occasionally, it's helpful. I sleep with earplugs and just actually focus on the ringing and it helps me sleep because I'm no longer worried about it, I just sort of live with it. You might want to screw around with pink noise and other natural sounds [waterfalls, waves] because they can be useful as well and a little more intersting than white noise.
- showers are a great time to sort of get a rest from the ringing. I've found that to be true with swimming as well though that may be different depending on the type of tinnitus.
- It was useful to me to know that a lot of people I knew were living with this on a daily basis and not going crazy. You might want to talk to friends and family about this and see if anyone else is managing it. For whatever reason I found it useful to talk to people who had been living with it for years and were ... fine. I know this may be the exact opposite of what you're looking for, but it might be calming.
Mine ebbs and flows. It seems to be tied to my stress levels [there has been exactly one day it has woken me from a sound sleep and that was before a big trip, usually it's pretty background]. As you get more used to it, it becomes less distracting. You can check the tinnitus tag on AskMe for some more people talking about them. I've read them all and there's a lot of good advice there too.
posted by jessamyn at 7:07 PM on March 5, 2010 [4 favorites]