Tinnitus Night Shift

Nine years of ringing ears, a lot of reading, and what actually made the nights easier

Nine years of ringing ears, and what made the nights easier

My right ear started ringing in the spring of 2017. I was a freight conductor out of Omaha then, and I figured it was one more thing the job had handed me, like the bad knee. Thirty-one years of air horns, slack action and coupling cars at two in the morning will do that. I assumed it would fade. It didn't.

It's a high hiss, a little like an old TV left on in another room, with a thin whistle on top when I'm tired. Most days I don't notice it until somebody asks. At night, in a quiet bedroom, it's the loudest thing in the house.

This site is what I wish someone had handed me that first year. I'm not a doctor and I'm not selling a cure. I read the studies, I tried a few things on myself, and I write down what held up.

You have plenty of company

About 1 in 10
US adults had tinnitus lasting at least five minutes in the past year, around 25 million people
27%
of people with tinnitus have had it for more than 15 years
36%
say the sound is there nearly all the time

Source: NIDCD quick statistics; Bhatt and colleagues, JAMA Otolaryngology, 2016.

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders puts it at roughly one adult in ten. A 2016 analysis of a national health survey found something else that stuck with me: people who were regularly around loud noise at work were about three times as likely to report tinnitus. That matched every conductor and engineer I ever worked with. Half of us had it and nobody talked about it.

The same survey found that only about half of people with tinnitus had ever brought it up with a doctor. I was in the other half for two years.

What I've learned, in short

When to stop reading and call a doctor

Ringing that comes with a sudden drop in hearing, ringing in one ear only, a whooshing that keeps time with your pulse, or ringing after a head injury all need a doctor, not a blog. Sudden hearing loss in particular is time-sensitive. If yours is new and steady in both ears, a hearing test is still the right first step, because the result changes what helps.

If you want the mechanics first, the clearest write-up I've found on why the ear starts ringing in the first place walks through the hair cells and the brain's side of things without talking down to you.

The American Tinnitus Association also keeps a list of support groups. I went to one in Council Bluffs twice. The coffee was bad, but hearing a retired welder describe my exact problem did more for me than any pamphlet.

The three things I get asked about most

People at the union hall ask me the same three questions, so those are the three longer pieces below. Does coffee make it worse? Is there a supplement that works? And how do you sleep with it? I've tried to answer each one the way I'd want it answered: what the research says, what I did, and where I'm still not sure.

Does Coffee Make Tinnitus Worse? What a 65,000-Woman Study FoundI gave up coffee for six weeks because a pamphlet said caffeine feeds tinnitus. Then I read the actual studies. Here is what they found, with the numbers.Tinnitus Supplements: Ginkgo, Zinc, Ginseng and the Real EvidenceGinkgo, zinc, Lipo-Flavonoid, Korean red ginseng: what the clinical trials and the main US guideline say about supplements for ringing ears, with study sizes.Sleeping With Tinnitus: What Helped After Nine Years of Bad NightsWhy tinnitus gets loud at bedtime and what actually helped me sleep: sound at night, a hearing test, CBT and the numbers from the Cochrane review behind it.

Gary Tolliver worked freight trains out of Omaha for thirty-one years, the last twelve as a conductor, and his right ear started ringing in 2017. He reads the tinnitus research so he can sort the useful from the hopeful. He is not a doctor or an audiologist.