Covid 19 And It's Affect On Tinnitus

Tinnitus and COVID is a topic that many people ask me about in my practice, and I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the relationship between COVID and tinnitus.

And we have to start out by explaining that there's one fact that we know about tinnitus: stress increases tinnitus bother; relaxation decreases tinnitus bother.

Okay, so anything that stresses us out runs the risk of kind of pulling our strings a little bit tight, and we can kind of get anxious and wrapped around it, and we can get stuck.

Okay, and so when COVID came on the scene, I mean, the entire world was anxious. You know, even the best of the best didn't know what it was. And we were washing groceries, we were wearing masks, not wearing a mask, and COVID, as a pandemic, has really wrapped the world around feeling much more anxious.

Okay, and so that stress of having COVID, and any illness on the body, the body can feel stressed. But then when the body recovers, that stress is reduced.

Now, there's this erroneous connection because when somebody has COVID, all of a sudden everybody's like, "Oh gosh, how do you feel now? How do you feel now? How do you feel now?" And the doctors are like, "Okay, what are you feeling now?" You know, and you check in with your body and you say, "Well, gosh, you know, I'm noticing that—God, breathing's a little harder. And God, I'm feeling a little bit dizzy. And oh my God, what's that sound? Oh my God, is that tinnitus? Oh my God, COVID caused my tinnitus!"

And so the misunderstanding that we have here is that we need to talk about the difference between causation and correlation.

Okay, so COVID doesn't necessarily cause tinnitus, but the stress of having COVID can certainly be correlated with the onset of tinnitus and certainly the bother of tinnitus.

And so while, you know, anytime we get sick, we run the risk of maybe damaging some hair cells in our ear, especially if there's a high fever, COVID is just stressful on the body as a whole. And the brain can erroneously connect fear and COVID with the onset of tinnitus.

And then what happens is the mind gets locked and loaded on it and says, "Oh no, this is because of tinnitus. Oh my God, if only I hadn't contracted this. Oh my God, the doctors don't know what they're doing. And I read there's no cure for tinnitus."

And all of a sudden, you know, the anxiety comes into play.

And so I think that people have to be very careful understanding the difference between causation and correlation.

Now we know that hearing loss, stress, and an amazing personality—one that can get locked and loaded on something and wants to, you know, stay locked and loaded until they figure it out—um, that kind of person, anytime they become overly stressed, and certainly an illness like COVID or any kind of illness can bring an immense amount of stress to the body, that person is vulnerable at that moment to make erroneous connections between other body sensations and, you know, can make an erroneous connection between COVID causing that problem.

And so this is largely what's happening with COVID and tinnitus: that yes, there is a correlation. I mean, anytime, again, that the body gets stressed, you run the risk of, you know, creating the stressful environment plus hearing loss plus an amazing personality to shift you into the bothersome category of tinnitus.

When in fact, when that stressor of the illness goes away, that erroneous connection between that illness and tinnitus can keep tinnitus locked and loaded and keep it lingering long after COVID has gone through your body.

This is true of any illness.

And so, you know, so again, we have to be specific about what causes tinnitus. Initially, it starts with hearing loss, but then we have to have sufficient stress, or too much stress, and then this amazing personality. And these are the three things.

But what ends up happening is we try to find out, "Why did this happen?" Especially when we don't understand what causes it, and we start to point fingers.

And this is what happens, and it kind of can make sense that, "Oh gosh, I got COVID, and that's when tinnitus started."

But it's an erroneous causal connection. It is not an erroneous correlational connection, but it is an erroneous causal connection.

And so when we start, you know, as humans, we're meaning-making creatures, and we need to understand facts. And, you know, disinformation and false information, what have you, can shoot us into amazing amounts of anxiety.

And here, where we're trying to reduce anxiety, we need to start to see that yes, there's a correlation between COVID, or any illness, or any stress, and the arrival of bothersome tinnitus.

We have to also understand that when that stress is relieved, we also can disengage tinnitus from the fear, put this benign body sensation where it belongs, which we can then habituate to.