The ringing just won’t subside. It’s been over two days and you can still hear that unpleasant ringing in your ears. You know the sound is tinnitus, but you’re starting to question just how long lasting tinnitus normally is.
Tinnitus can be brought about by damage to the stereocilia in your ears (they’re the tiny hairs that pick up air vibrations which your brain then converts into intelligible sound). That injury is typically the outcome of excessively loud sound. That’s why you notice tinnitus most commonly after, as an example, attending a concert, eating at a loud restaurant, or sitting next to a roaring jet engine while you’re taking a trip.
Under Typical Circumstances, How Long Will Tinnitus Persist?
There isn’t any cure for tinnitus. But that doesn’t mean it won’t ever go away. There will be a wide variety of factors that will establish how long your tinnitus will last, like your general health and the root cause of your tinnitus.
But if you just arrived home from a noisy day of traveling and you find your ears ringing, you can usually expect your tinnitus to fade away in a day or two. 16 to 48 hours typically is how long tinnitus will persist. But it’s also not abnormal for symptoms to stick around, sometimes for as much 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 affecting your quality of life, you need to consult a specialist.
Why is Tinnitus Sometimes Permanent?
Normally, tinnitus is short-lived. But in some cases it can be long-lasting. When the root cause is not ordinary that’s especially true either in terms of origin or in terms of severity. Here are some examples:
- Repeated exposure: After one rock concert, your ears will ring for a couple of days but continued subjection will result in far more serious consequences. Frequent exposure to loud sounds can lead to permanent hearing injury, including tinnitus.
- Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): The brain is where the majority of sound is processed. When those processors start to misfire, because of traumatic brain injury, tinnitus can be the outcome.
- Hearing loss: Typically, hearing loss and tinnitus are joined at the hip. So you might end up with permanent tinnitus regardless of the cause of your hearing loss.
Permanent tinnitus is substantially less common than its more short-term counterpart. But permanent or chronic tinnitus still effects millions of Us citizens every year.
How Can You Get Your Tinnitus to go Away?
Whether your tinnitus is short term or long lived, you may want to get relief as quickly as possible. Despite the fact that there’s no cure for tinnitus, there are a few things you can do to lessen symptoms (though they will probably last only so long):
- Avoid loud noises. Your symptoms might be prolonged or might become more intense if you keep exposing yourself to loud noises such as a jet engine or rock concerts.
- Try to stay calm: perhaps it sounds a little… abstract, but higher blood pressure can lead to tinnitus episodes so staying calm can help keep your tinnitus in check.
- Use earplugs (or earmuffs): The next step, if you can’t keep away from loud situations, is to use hearing protection. (And, really, you need to be protecting your hearing whether you have tinnitus or not.)
- Find a way to mask the sound: Sometimes, using a white noise device (including a fan or humidifier) can help you cover up the noise of tinnitus and, thus, ignore the symptoms (and, you know, get a good night’s sleep in the process).
To be sure, if you have long lasting tinnitus, none of these techniques will cure your tinnitus. But diminishing and controlling your symptoms can be equally significant.
How Long Before Your Tinnitus Goes Away?
In most scenarios, though, your tinnitus will go away without you needing to do anything about it. Your hearing should go back to normal within 16 to 48 hours. Nevertheless, if your tinnitus lingers, you’ll want to seek out a solution. The sooner you discover a treatment that is effective, the sooner you can get relief. If you think you have hearing loss (which is often associated with tinnitus) you should have your hearing tested.