An emotional ailment: how tinnitus changes everything

I haven’t heard the sound of silence since I was sixteen. It’s almost difficult to remember how it felt to be enveloped in that stillness now. I, along with approximately 7.1 million other adults in the UK, have tinnitus. It’s that ringing or buzzing noise in your ears after a concert, or late night at the club. Except for roughly 13% of us, it doesn’t vanish after a few hours. It is unrelenting and for many it causes severe discomfort and psychological distress.

What is it? Although the sound of tinnitus is a very real auditory sensation, the noise has no external origin, and there isn't always an obvious underlying physical explanation either. The ringing (or buzzing, or humming) noise is the result of the brain not filtering out unimportant auditory information as it should, in response to a perceived loss or change in hearing.

My tinnitus first appeared around the time I was studying for my GCSEs at the age of sixteen, although I can’t pinpoint a specific moment when it began. At the time I had far too much going on to pay attention to this new and seemingly insignificant sensation. I was more concerned with surviving exams. I put myself under a lot of pressure - the stress would cause me to clench my jaw in my sleep so hard that it eventually became impossible for me to open my mouth more than a few centimetres. Changes to stress levels and jaw problems are common triggers for tinnitus. While I can now manage my stress much better and my jaw has fully healed, the tinnitus remains.

It may sound like a purely physical condition, but as anyone who suffers from it will tell you, it’s the emotional and mental consequences that are hardest to cope with. It can affect everything, from socialising to sleep. When I first realised that this noise wasn’t going away I really struggled. I felt like I struggled to hear my friends in conversation. It stopped me from falling asleep and I would play music or nature sounds all night in an attempt to block it out. I remember sitting on my bedroom floor trying to meditate, but being unable to focus or relax because of the irritating whining noise in my head. I broke down, terrified of the life ahead of me where I thought I would never feel at peace again. My tinnitus felt like an unbreakable obstacle to mental wellness and emotional stability.

Nowadays when I sit down to meditate, I exhale. Get comfortable. And I begin to make myself consciously aware of all the sounds around me. I start with the rush of trees, birdsong, distant traffic. And I count the high-pitched ringing in its turn. Over the years, my brain has gotten better at ignoring it, relearning to ignore and classify it as unimportant background noise. Sometimes this might be the first time I’m conscious of it that day. The biggest difference for me, though, came with letting go of the emotional baggage that the noise once brought up for me. My insides no longer tighten up, my thoughts don’t whirl off in negative spirals. I just count the sensation, next to the sound of the washing machine and ticking hands of the clock, and breathe.

I am incredibly lucky that the noise doesn’t usually intrude into my daily life or cause me distress anymore. For many sufferers, it’s unbearable. The process of coming to peace with tinnitus has been a slow and mysterious one, even to me. I can’t precisely explain how my relationship to it has evolved, but I'm now accustomed to it and the stress response it once triggered is no longer an issue.

I remember getting into bed one night and closing my eyes. The ringing was almost deafening. But suddenly, somehow, the noise was comforting, not disturbing. It was as if the tinnitus was a cocoon in which I was enfolded, just as I was cocooned in my duvet. I couldn’t hear the world, and the world couldn’t hear me. When my tinnitus is all I can hear, it means I’m alone, that I’m safe, that I can switch off. Another night I was standing on a street corner in Berlin, a city which once lived in. In my memory the night is pitch black, and the city is strangely still and silent. This seems improbable to me, so perhaps my memory has distorted reality over time, but it emphasises the strange poignancy of that moment for me. The only sound I am aware of is the ringing in my ears, but it doesn’t bother me. I stand there, breathing in the city that I love and will soon be leaving. The tinnitus grounds me in that moment, forces me to focus on the sensations of the present.

Which came first? Did these moments of clarity reprogram my perceptions, or did my attitude change over time, so slowly that it only became clear in these moments of quiet?

Tinnitus can make it harder to socialise, to focus, to sleep. Annoyingly, the more you focus on it and try to improve it, the more aware of it you become and the worse it feels. Often the best solution, counterintuitively, is to continue living life as normally as possible - easier said than done. Tinnitus is also often associated with PTSD, and in these cases the emotional and mental suffering caused by tinnitus can be severe. There is no cure, only methods of coping.

Tinnitus is not well understood, perhaps because many of those who don’t suffer from it also don’t realise the extent of the mental suffering it can inflict. I am no expert, but I hope that my experience offers a glimpse into how tinnitus is more than just a sound for those who live with it. And for the 13% who know it all too well, I hope you are encouraged to speak more about how you are affected. It can be isolating to feel that tinnitus distances you from conversations, or stops you from concentrating, or that nobody takes your suffering seriously. But there are so many people out there who understand what it's like. I may have learnt to cope fairly well with my symptoms, but anyone who is struggling should reach out to a doctor or to tinnitus charities for help. Tinnitus can have a significant disruptive impact on mental health, but it doesn’t have to. There is peace hiding in the noise.

For more information or tinnitus support (in the UK), go to the British Tinnitus Association Website: https://www.tinnitus.org.uk/