If you’ve ever noticed your tinnitus becoming more noticeable after a stressful day, or found yourself lying awake at night focusing on a ringing or buzzing sound, you’ll know how exhausting it can be.
You might find yourself wondering whether anxiety is making your tinnitus worse, or even whether anxiety caused it in the first place. And when the sound becomes harder to ignore, it’s natural to feel concerned about what it means.
Anxiety and tinnitus can be closely connected. Stress and worry can make tinnitus feel louder or more intrusive, even if the sound itself hasn’t changed. However, anxiety isn’t always the underlying cause. Changes in hearing, exposure to loud noise and other ear-related conditions can also play a part.
Understanding what’s contributing to your tinnitus can help you work out what to do next and find ways to make it easier to live with. In this guide, we’ll explain how anxiety and tinnitus can affect each other, what may help you manage the symptoms and how our audiologists at Harley Street Hearing can support you.
Can anxiety cause tinnitus?
Anxiety can contribute to tinnitus or make an existing ringing in the ears more noticeable. However, it isn’t necessarily the reason tinnitus started.
Some people first become aware of tinnitus during a particularly difficult time in their lives, such as bereavement, work-related stress or a period of poor sleep. Others have had tinnitus for years but find it suddenly much harder to ignore when they’re feeling anxious.
One reason for this is the way your brain processes sound and directs your attention. When you’re anxious, you may become more alert to things happening around you, including unfamiliar sensations in your body. A sound you could previously tune out, such as ringing or buzzing in your ears, may suddenly seem much more prominent.
Stress can also lead to muscle tension, tiredness and disrupted sleep, all of which may make tinnitus more difficult to manage. If this sounds familiar, it’s important to know that the tinnitus is real. Anxiety doesn’t mean you’re imagining the sound. Rather, it can influence how you experience tinnitus, how much attention you give it and how much it affects your everyday life.
How anxiety and tinnitus affect each other
Have you ever noticed how a sound seems louder when you’re concentrating on it? Your brain constantly filters the sounds around you, allowing you to focus on what’s important and pay less attention to everything else. It’s why you might stop noticing the hum of a fridge or the ticking of a clock after a while.
When you’re anxious, this filtering process can feel less effective. You may become more alert to your tinnitus, particularly if you’re worried about what it means or whether it will ever go away.
This can create a difficult cycle:
1. You notice your tinnitus and start worrying about it.
2. The worry makes you more alert to the sound.
3. The more you focus on it, the harder it becomes to ignore.
4. You become increasingly anxious, making it even more difficult to relax or sleep.
Over time, this cycle can leave you feeling as though tinnitus is taking up more and more of your attention.
Poor sleep can make things harder still. When you’re tired, you may have less energy to cope with the sound, while worrying about tinnitus at bedtime can make it difficult to switch off.
The reassuring thing is that this cycle can be interrupted. With the right support and practical coping strategies, many people find that tinnitus becomes less intrusive and has less impact on their lives, even if the sound doesn’t disappear completely.
Signs that anxiety may be affecting your tinnitus
Tinnitus affects everyone differently, and there isn’t one pattern that applies to everyone. However, you may recognise some of the following experiences:
•Your tinnitus seems more noticeable during stressful periods.
•You become particularly aware of it when the house is quiet, or you’re trying to fall asleep.
•You regularly check whether the sound is still there.
•You find it difficult to concentrate because your attention keeps returning to your tinnitus.
•You worry about what might be causing it or whether it will ever improve.
•You feel tense or on edge because you’re anticipating the sound becoming worse.
If any of these sound familiar, anxiety or stress may be influencing your experience of tinnitus. That doesn’t necessarily mean anxiety is the original cause, though. Hearing changes, exposure to loud noise, certain medications and other factors can also contribute to tinnitus. Recognising the connection between your mood and your symptoms can be a helpful first step, but it’s still worth having your hearing and ears checked to understand what else might be involved.
How to manage anxiety-related tinnitus
If anxiety is making your tinnitus harder to live with, it’s understandable to want the sound to stop. However, treatment doesn’t always need to eliminate tinnitus completely to make a meaningful difference.
Often, the aim is to reduce the attention, worry and distress surrounding the sound, so you can focus more comfortably on everyday life. Here are some approaches that may help.
1. Understand your tinnitus
Not knowing what’s causing tinnitus can be unsettling. Understanding the possible reasons for the sound and knowing what support is available can help reduce some of that uncertainty.
A tinnitus assessment can provide a clearer picture of your hearing and identify factors that may be contributing to your symptoms. It can also give you an opportunity to talk through how tinnitus affects you, including any concerns about sleep, stress or concentration.
2. Try a gentle background sound
Tinnitus can seem especially prominent when everything around you is quiet. This is particularly common at bedtime, when there are fewer sounds to draw your attention elsewhere.
Gentle background sound can help make tinnitus less noticeable. You could try soft music, a fan or the sound of running water.
There’s no need to drown out the tinnitus completely. The aim is to make your surroundings more comfortable and give your attention something else to settle on.
At Harley Street Hearing, we offer tinnitus retraining therapy, which is a structured approach. Depending on the device and programme, it can provide broad-spectrum noise or fractal tones designed to support tinnitus management.
3. Give yourself the best chance of sleeping well
When you’re tired, tinnitus can feel much harder to cope with. Unfortunately, worrying about the sound can also make it difficult to fall asleep, creating another frustrating cycle.
A regular bedtime, a relaxing wind-down routine and limiting stimulating activities before bed may help you settle more easily.
If silence makes your tinnitus more noticeable, try a gentle background sound that feels comfortable to you.
At Harley Street Hearing, we also offer Ozlo Sleepbuds, which combine passive noise isolation with masking sounds to help make tinnitus less intrusive at bedtime.
4. Find ways to ease stress
You don’t have to eliminate stress from your life to benefit from managing it differently. Regular physical activity, breathing exercises, relaxation techniques and spending time outdoors may help you feel calmer and reduce the heightened alertness that can make tinnitus more intrusive.
It can also help to make time for activities that absorb your attention, whether that’s meeting a friend, listening to music, reading or getting outside for a walk. These approaches won’t necessarily make tinnitus disappear, but they may help you feel less caught up in the sound.
Feel more in control of your tinnitus
When anxiety and tinnitus feed into each other, it can be difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. The sound may leave you feeling worried, and that worry makes it harder to ignore.
If that’s what you’ve been experiencing, it’s understandable to feel frustrated or tired of dealing with it. But tinnitus doesn’t have to dominate your day. Understanding what’s behind it, finding ways to manage the distress it causes and getting the right support can help you feel more in control.
Our clinical audiologists at Harley Street Hearing can assess your hearing, help you understand the factors that may be contributing to your tinnitus, and talk you through the options available to you. Book a tinnitus assessment today to take the first step towards understanding your tinnitus and finding a way forward that works for you.
