Tinnitus or Hearing Loss : What’s Really Getting in the Way?
Ringing, buzzing, whistling… If you live with tinnitus, you know how much these unwanted sounds can weigh on your social life. Sometimes they take up so much space that you feel like you can’t hear the people around you.
But is the tinnitus really what’s keeping you from hearing well? Not so fast, let’s untangle the two.
Tinnitus and Hearing Loss: More Connected Than You Think
Tinnitus isn’t a disease in itself: it’s a symptom of a dysfunction of the hearing system, even though the precise mechanism behind it isn’t yet fully understood. In the vast majority of cases, it stems from:
- aging of the hearing system;
- or prolonged exposure to noise.
For some people, tinnitus is the only sign of a hearing system deficit. But here’s the number worth remembering: for at least 90% of people with tinnitus, a certain level of hearing loss is also detected. It may be very slight, but it’s really there.
So What’s Really Muddling Your Conversations?
Hearing loss reduces your ability to detect certain sounds and to correctly identify speech sounds. The result: understanding becomes harder, especially in demanding communication settings (think of a family gathering at a busy restaurant).
In other words, those speech understanding difficulties come from the hearing loss, not from the tinnitus itself.
Does Tinnitus Affect Concentration?
It can, especially when it’s perceived as fairly loud: a more or less significant portion of your attention stays focused on the tinnitus. And to understand properly in a noisy environment, you need to be highly focused and attentive, even with normal hearing. Following a conversation can become downright exhausting. The key is to persevere!
The good news? Over time, your brain learns to ignore the tinnitus and focus its attention on the conversation at hand. It already does this with countless stimuli in your environment: the hum of your refrigerator, the feeling of clothes on your skin. Your brain has learned to tune them out instead of bringing them into your awareness continuously. That same gradual process, habituation, happens with tinnitus too.
Step One: Get Your Hearing Assessed
If you have tinnitus, the first step is to have your hearing assessed. Once your audiologist knows to what degree your hearing is affected, they’ll be able to suggest the right solutions to:
- better manage your tinnitus;
- make communicating with the people around you easier.
Sound familiar? Our audiologists are here to help you figure out what’s going on.
BY Andréa Bissonnette, Audiologist, Polyclinique de l’Oreille
