Tackle Tinnitus With This Ultimate Checklist

Tinnitus is a condition that impacts more than 45 million people in the US, according to the National Tinnitus Association. Rest assured, if you have it, you’re not alone. There is no cure, and it’s not always clear why some people get tinnitus. Finding ways to deal with it is the secret to living with it, for most. The ultimate checklist to tackle tinnitus is a great place to start.

Understanding Tinnitus

About one in five people have tinnitus and can hear sounds that no one else can hear. The perception of a phantom sound caused by an underlying medical problem is the medical definition of tinnitus. It’s not a sickness of itself, but a symptom, in other words.

Hearing loss is the most common reason people develop tinnitus. The brain is attempting to fill in some gaps and that’s one way of thinking of it. Your brain makes the decision as to what it needs to know after interpreting the sound it hears. As an example, your someone talking to you is just sound waves until the inner ear converts them into electrical impulses. The brain transforms the electrical signals into words that you can understand.

Sound is all around you, but you don’t “hear” it all. If the brain doesn’t think a sound is important to you, it filters it out. For instance, you don’t always hear the wind blowing. You can feel it, but the brain masks the sound of it passing by your ears because it’s not crucial that you hear it. If you were able to listen to every sound, it would be both distracting and confusing.

When someone develops certain forms of hearing loss, there are less electrical signals for the brain to interpret. The signals never arrive because of injury but the brain still expects them. When that occurs, the brain may try to generate a sound of its own to fill that space.

For tinnitus suffers, that sound is:

• Hissing
• Clicking
• Roaring
• Ringing
• Buzzing

It might be a soft, loud, low pitched, or high pitched phantom sound.

Loss of hearing is not the only reason you might have tinnitus. Here are some other possible factors:

• Head injury
• Medication
• Earwax accumulation
• Neck injury
• Poor blood flow in the neck
• Atherosclerosis
• Ear bone changes
• High blood pressure
• TMJ disorder
• Malformed capillaries
• Meniere’s disease
• Loud noises near you
• Acoustic neuroma
• Tumor in the head or neck

Although physically harmless, Anxiety and depression have been linked to tinnitus and can cause complications like difficulty sleeping and high blood pressure.

Your Ear’s Best Friend is Prevention

Prevention is how you avoid an issue like with most things. Protecting your ears decreases your risk of hearing loss later in life. Tricks to protect your hearing health include:

• Reducing the amount of time you spend wearing headphones or earbuds.
• If you have an ear infection, consult a doctor.
• Reducing long-term exposure to loud noises at work or home.

Get your hearing checked every few years, also. The test allows you to make lifestyle changes and get treatment as well as alerting you to an existing hearing loss issue.

If You do Hear The Ringing

Ringing doesn’t tell you how or why you got tinnitus, but it does tell you that you have it. A little trial and error can help you understand more.

Find out if the sound goes away after a while if you refrain from wearing headphones or earbuds.

Take a close look at your noise exposure. Were you around loud noise the night before the ringing started? For instance, did you:

• Go to a concert
• Listen to the music of TV with headphones or earbuds
• Work or sit next to an unusually loud noise
• Attend a party

The tinnitus is most likely short-term if you answered yes to any of these situations.

If The Tinnitus Doesn’t Get Better

Getting an ear exam would be the next thing to do. Some potential causes your physician will look for are:

• Ear wax
• Inflammation
• Stress levels
• Infection
• Ear damage

Here are some specific medications which might cause this problem too:

• Cancer Meds
• Antidepressants
• Aspirin
• Quinine medications
• Water pills
• Antibiotics

Making a change could clear up the tinnitus.

You can schedule a hearing exam if you can’t find any other apparent cause. Hearing aids can better your situation and minimize the ringing, if you do have loss of hearing, by using hearing aids.

How is Tinnitus Treated?

Because tinnitus is a side effect and not an illness, treating the cause would be the first step. If you have high blood pressure, medication will lower it, and the tinnitus should fade away.

Finding a way to control tinnitus is, for some, the only way to deal with it. White noise machines are useful. The ringing goes away when the white noise replaces the sound the brain is missing. You can also get the same result from a fan or dehumidifier.

Another strategy is tinnitus retraining. You wear a device that delivers a tone to mask the frequencies of the tinnitus. You can use this strategy to learn not to pay attention to it.

You will also want to determine ways to avoid tinnitus triggers. Start keeping a diary because tinnitus triggers are different for everyone. Write down everything before the ringing began.

• What sound did you hear?
• What were you doing?
• What did you eat or drink?

The diary will help you to find patterns. Caffeine is a well-known trigger, so if you drank a double espresso each time, you know to order something else in the future.

Your quality of life is affected by tinnitus so your best chance is finding a way to eliminate it or at least reduce its impact. To learn more about your tinnitus, schedule an appointment with a hearing care specialist today.