If you ask a room full of tinnitus sufferers what makes their tinnitus worse, you will probably get a lot of different answers. But stress will most likely be at the top of everyone’s list.
Stress is the one trigger that every tinnitus patient has in common.
When you live with bothersome tinnitus, the noise triggers a fight-or-flight stress response that never fully ends because the tinnitus doesn’t just magically go away.
Instead, patients can quickly find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle where their tinnitus causes stress and anxiety, which in turn can make their tinnitus worse. Any additional stress added to the mix is like dumping gasoline on a fire.
The challenge is that stress comes in many forms, and you need to consider all of them when looking to mitigate its effect on tinnitus.
Here’s a helpful way to better understand the impact that stress can have on tinnitus:
The Metal Tank Analogy
Imagine that your personal ability to manage stress is represented by a metal tank located somewhere in your brain.
The tank represents how much stress you can safely handle at any given time, and the liquid inside the tank represents your current stress level. If your stress levels rise too high and the tank overflows, you will experience the negative health impacts of acute stress, such as anxiety.
The problem is that the stress of bothersome tinnitus alone, in an otherwise perfectly healthy and stress-free person, can cause the tank to not only overflow but erupt in a dramatic, volcano-like fashion.
(And of course, there is no such thing as a perfectly healthy and stress-free person.)
Even when your tinnitus-related stress is not causing the tank to overflow, it is still likely taking up a large portion of the tank, leaving very little space for everything else.
And you have to factor in everything else too, as stress comes in many forms: work stress, relationship stress, family stress, personal challenges, and other health conditions all take up space in your tank. Even exercise is a form of stress – it’s a healthy form called eustress – but it too can fill the tank.
This means that other stressors, which normally wouldn’t bother you at all, can cause your tank to overflow and push you over the edge into a state of acute stress and anxiety.
3 Steps Forward, 2 Steps Back:
As you work to find relief from tinnitus and begin to make progress with habituation, your ability to handle other stressors will improve.
But in the short term, stress can cause a lot of day-to-day tinnitus fluctuations. And these fluctuations help to explain why the habituation process often feels like taking three steps forward, two steps back, over and over again.
It’s also why reducing stress, and calming the nervous system, is such an important part of both the habituation process overall and learning to better cope with tinnitus.
