One of the most effective ways to deal with tinnitus is to educate yourself about the most common tinnitus causes and learn how to protect yourself against them. This might not help if you are already suffering from the condition, but knowing what causes it can help you avoid situations that will make your condition worse.
Extreme or Prolonged Noise Exposure
The American Tinnitus Association lists loud noise as the most common of all tinnitus causes. This can be a one-time blast of very loud noise, or it can be repeated exposure to loud noise over time. Many people assume you have to routinely expose your ear to very loud noise in order to experience tinnitus, but that is not true.
Many sufferers go to a music concert and sit too close to the sound equipment and get tinnitus. Others do simple things like operating a leaf blower and experience tinnitus. If the sound is louder than the sound of traffic rushing by on a nearby highway or closer to the ear than that, you run the risk of ending up with tinnitus. Many of these cases will be short lived and the noise will stop after a few hours or days, but it is possible to permanently damage the ear with a one-time blast of super loud noise.
You can avoid this cause of tinnitus by controlling the noise level in your natural environment. For example:
Listen to your music through a radio rather than ear buds, or at least control the volume pouring through those ear buds.
Do not sit very close to sound equipment at events using sound systems. Wear ear muffs if you might be around high noise levels.
Be careful with every day tools, especially yard tools.
Head or Neck Trauma
The American Tinnitus association lists head and neck trauma as the second most common of all tinnitus causes. Any type of accident that affects the auditory system or the ability for the ear and brain to connect can cause tinnitus. This is especially true if the trauma damages the ear on a cellular level. There are tiny hairs inside the ear that are crucial for the transportation of sound to the brain. If there is cellular damage that affects the hair or the ability of the brain to connect with the ear, hearing problems and tinnitus can be the result.
The only way to prevent this cause of tinnitus is to protect your head and neck from trauma. This is common sense and is something almost everyone does anyway, but it might include wearing a helmet when bicycling or riding a motorcycle.
Hearing Loss
Partial or complete hearing loss in one or both ears is also one of the more common tinnitus causes. This cause can happen naturally with the aging process, or it can be accident or trauma-induced. Anything that might cause hearing loss can increase the risk of experiencing long-term tinnitus.
Excessive Ear Wax
This seems like an unlikely cause of tinnitus, but it really does happen to many people every year. Do visit the review and rating page of the product or the medicine you are planning to buy for the tinnitus treatment. There are other effective solutions available too to follow. But may or may not have side-effects necessarily. Ear wax is designed to protect the inner ear from bacteria and irritation, but excess wax can become compacted inside the ear. This compaction is what leads to the noises associated with tinnitus.
The best thing you can do to avoid this cause of tinnitus is to go in for regular checkups and have the doctor look at your ears. He or she should alert you if there is too much wax and will clean it out as needed.
Medical Tinnitus Causes
There are many medical conditions that could potentially become tinnitus causes. Here are a few:
- Meniere’s disease
- TMJ disorders
- Tumors
- High blood pressure
Any disorder that affects the neck, brain, ear, or blood vessels can become a cause of tinnitus. It is much harder to avoid these tinnitus causes, as they are actually symptoms of a larger problem. You typically have to learn ways to relieve the symptoms of the tinnitus along with other symptoms of the larger medical problem.
Unknown Tinnitus Causes
Unfortunately, many people never know what caused their tinnitus. Thousands of people experience short-term tinnitus without ever knowing the cause, but there can be an unknown cause for long-term tinnitus as well. In some cases, the tinnitus causes will eventually be discovered as other medical conditions are revealed, but in many cases it is a complete mystery. Of course, there is no way to prevent or control what you don’t know is happening!