The ringing just won’t go away. That high pitched buzz in your ear has been nagging you since yesterday morning and it still hasn’t gone away. you realize that the buzzing is tinnitus but your beginning to worry about how long it will continue.
Tinnitus can be brought on by damage to the stereocilia in your ears (they’re the tiny hairs that pick up air vibrations that your brain then converts into intelligible sound). That injury is most often the outcome of excessively loud noise. That’s why you observe tinnitus most often after, for example, attending a concert, eating at a loud restaurant, or being seated next to a roaring jet engine while you’re taking a trip.
Under Typical Scenarios, How Long Will Tinnitus Persist?
Tinnitus can’t be cured. But tinnitus normally doesn’t last forever. There will be a large number of factors that will influence how long your tinnitus will stick around, including the primary cause of your tinnitus and your general hearing health.
But if you just arrived home from a noisy day of traveling and you notice your ears buzzing, a day or two should be sufficient for you to observe your tinnitus going away. 16 to 48 hours typically is how long tinnitus will last. But it’s also not abnormal for symptoms to stick around, often for as long as two weeks. Additional exposure to loud sounds could also cause tinnitus to flare up again, essentially resetting the clock.
If tinnitus lingers and is impacting your quality of life, you need to consult a specialist.
Why is Tinnitus Sometimes Permanent?
Tinnitus is normally temporary. But sometimes it can be irreversible. When the cause is not ordinary that’s particularly true either with respect to origin or in terms of severity. Here are several examples:
- Repeated exposure: After one rock show, your ears will probably ring for a couple of days but continued subjection will lead to far worse consequences. Repeated exposure to loud sounds can lead to permanent hearing injury, including tinnitus.
- Hearing Impairment: In many cases, tinnitus and hearing loss are joined at the hip. So, no matter what causes your hearing loss, you may also end up developing (or noticing) irreversible tinnitus alongside it.
- Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): Most of the processing of sound happens in the brain. When those processors start to misfire, due to traumatic brain injury, tinnitus can be the outcome.
Permanent tinnitus is substantially less common than its more temporary counterpart. But there are still millions of Us citizens every year who are treated for lasting, or chronic, tinnitus symptoms.
How Can You Get Your Tinnitus to Subside?
It doesn’t matter if your tinnitus is short lived or long lived, you may want to get relief as soon as possible. There isn’t a cure for tinnitus but you can do certain things to minimize the symptoms (though they may last only so long):
- Find a way to cover up the sound: You can in some cases mask the sound and get a good nights sleep by utilizing some source of white noise like a fan or humidifier.
- Use earplugs (or earmuffs): The next option, if you can’t keep away from loud situations, is to use ear protection. (And, really, you should be protecting your ears whether you have tinnitus or not.)
- Avoid loud noises. Your symptoms may be prolonged or might become more intense if you continue to expose yourself to loud noises like a jet engine or rock concerts.
- Try to remain calm: perhaps it sounds a little… abstract, but remaining calm can really help keep your tinnitus in check, mostly because increased blood pressure can stimulate tinnitus flare-ups.
To be certain, if you have long lasting tinnitus, none of these techniques will cure your tinnitus. But diminishing and controlling your symptoms can be just as significant.
How Long Before Your Tinnitus Subsides?
Your tinnitus, in the majority of cases, will go away by itself. Your hearing should return to normal within 16 to 48 hours. Nevertheless, if your tinnitus lingers, you’ll want to look for a solution. The sooner you find a treatment that works, the sooner you can get relief. If you think you have hearing loss (which is often associated with tinnitus) you should get your hearing examined.