Ben spent thousands trying to fix ringing in his ears. Now he’s at peace with the noise

On an unseasonably warm afternoon in August 2022, Ben Niznik sat inside his car and quietly cried to his mum on the phone.

The 35-year-old coal miner and photographer, who lives in Maitland, NSW, had just been to see an ear, nose and throat specialist (ENT) for help with the debilitating and ongoing ringing in his ears – a noise he described as a symphony of high-pitched cicada chirps mixed with screeching train brakes.

Niznik developed the ringing when he was 19 years old, after spending much of his adolescence listening to “blaring music” on his phone and cheap earphones. However, the noise had recently worsened after a COVID-19 infection.

The specialist checked his ears, pressing the cool tip of an otoscope inside his eardrum and peering inside, before delivering his diagnosis in a matter-of-fact tone.

“The ENT told me I’d just have to learn to live with it,” Niznik said. “He compared it to quicksand – the more you resist it, the worse it gets.”

The 10-minute appointment finished, and $250 later, Niznik left feeling defeated.

“Mum rang and asked me how the appointment went, and I just started crying,” he said. “I was a 35-year-old man, I’m hard-working, and I wasn’t emotional like that. But it was just so overwhelming and the helplessness and that loss of hope was really crushing at the time.”

Niznik said he spent the next 18 months barely working and forked out nearly $10,000 on medical appointments and treatments to try to alleviate his symptoms.

He is one of thousands of Australians living with tinnitus – characterised by phantom ringing or buzzing in the ears. Tinnitus and hearing loss conditions are stereotypically associated with old age, but studies have shown an increased prevalence among young people.

Ben Niznik has experienced constant ringing in his ears for more than a decade.Credit: Dean Sewell

In its 2020 Making a noise about hearing report, Hearing Australia’s research division, the National Acoustic Laboratories, said 60 per cent of young Australians experienced ringing in the ears at least sometimes.

Additional research indicates 14.1 per cent of teenagers and young adults may be at risk from leisure noise exposure, with the main sources of hearing risk coming from personal listening devices. With no cure and minimal awareness about the condition, tinnitus is leaving young Australians, in some ways, suffering in silence.

What is tinnitus, and why is it affecting young people?

Melbourne audiologist Dr Ben Altidis said there were about 10,000 reasons someone could have tinnitus, but it was important to describe it as a symptom not a disease or syndrome.

“The majority of us have primary tinnitus,” he said. “We all have these tiny hair cells and we start to lose them from the day we are born, so usually by the age of 60, we’ve lost around 30 per cent, which is when we see recordable hearing loss due to natural deterioration of our hearing.

“These little hair cells stop unwanted sounds reaching the brain, so when we lose them, you start to get ringing, buzzing and hissing noises.”

The founder of Acute Hearing Clinics has spent more than 35 years in the industry and has seen a gradual increase in the number of young adults with tinnitus and hearing loss. He attributed the rise to noise exposure and a lack of education on hearing protection.

“We see a lot of young adults in our clinics who haven’t really protected their hearing … the messages around hearing protection don’t seem to be getting through to them any more, which is pretty sad.”

A 2017 study found 63 per cent of Australians aged 11 to 35 experienced tinnitus in some form, while people with higher levels of accumulated noise exposure were more likely to experience tinnitus more often.

In our increasingly noisy society, headphones and earphones have become an omnipresent accessory. We wear them at the gym, on the commute to work and at the office, and some even use them to fall asleep.

Dr Caitlin Bar is chief executive of Soundfair, a not-for-profit Australian organisation that focuses on hearing health and equality. Barr noted headphones themselves were not problematic, but rather it was the “overall volume and duration people listened to”.

“As a society, our average daily exposure to noise across all of our lives is higher,” she said. “We are pretty much constantly surrounded by sound … therefore opportunities for our ears to rest are less. There are studies where they’ve measured people’s lifetime exposure to noise, and for too many, by age 30, it’s above what it should be for their lifetime.

“It’s unsurprising that we would then be noticing an increase in tinnitus because it’s the earliest sign of hearing damage.”

Barr would like to see more awareness of hearing protection for young people and also more research into tinnitus.

“It [tinnitus] is invisible and not taken seriously,” she said. “For that reason, it’s been dismissed by various healthcare professionals and there is still so much we don’t know about it.”

Silence, cicadas and tuning out the noise

Lily Tomasic can barely remember what silence sounds like.

The 24-year-old Sydney building design co-ordinator has had tinnitus since she was a teenager, but the ringing became significantly louder when she turned 18.

Lily Tomasic, 24, believes noise exposure and stress both probably contributed to her tinnitus. Credit: Oscar Colman

“I don’t really think I can say what silence is,” she said. “I’ll be on holidays and my partner will comment on how everything is so peaceful and relaxing, but I’m not really enjoying it because it’s not peaceful in my head.”

Tomasic is not sure what caused her tinnitus, but says noise exposure and stress were probable factors.

“I used to play a lot of loud music in my ears, but a lot of people were doing that back then in my age group,” she said. “I think it could be a combination of factors. When I was 16, I used to listen to music with a loud volume, which was probably pretty stupid.”

A specialist diagnosed Tomasic with hearing loss when she was 19, and she has worn hearing aids ever since, which help make the high-pitched ringing noises less noticeable.

She feels more at ease with her tinnitus now, and will always wear earplugs to concerts and festivals. But she says the ringing can sometimes flare up with stress.

“It [the ringing] comes on a lot when it’s very quiet and when I start feeling stressed, and then it just gets louder and louder,” she said.

Tomasic wears hearing aids, which help make her tinnitus less noticeable.Credit: Oscar Colman

While there is no cure for tinnitus, many specialists encourage patients to engage in psychological therapy to help them get used to and accept the ringing in their ears.

Myriam Westcott, director of DWM Audiology, uses tinnitus retraining therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy and other mindfulness strategies to help her patients manage their tinnitus.

An audiologist with more than 40 years’ experience, Westcott said stress could often aggravate a patient’s experience of tinnitus.

“We’ve always considered tinnitus to be the consequence of a change of hearing, but we now have a much greater recognition that tinnitus can also be caused or aggravated as a result of muscular stress and tension held in the head, neck and jaw,” she said.

“The stress of tinnitus can be very intense because it’s tapping into a survival mechanism that’s almost bewildering and frightening to people. So my role as a therapist is to explore those pathways in my patients and explain it back to them, to actually deconstruct why they’re so distressed.”

Westcott works with her patients to help “tune out” their tinnitus and teach the brain to recognise the ringing as non-threatening. She cites the example of people who live on noisy streets or near an airport or railway line.

“It’s not that those people don’t hear the sound that would annoy almost everyone else, it’s that they hear those sounds so often,” she said. “Their brain just gets bored with the sounds. They lose their importance. Tinnitus retraining therapy is about helping the brain feel safer.”

Westcott wanted young people to be aware of hearing protection but did not want to provoke unnecessary fear and anxiety about noise.

“Yes, we’ve got to be careful of loud noises,” she said. “But we do live in a world that has noise, and the ear was designed to hear it and the brain designed to receive. It’s important to find that middle ground.”

Making peace with tinnitus

Eighteen months after his ENT appointment, Ben Niznik now considers himself fully recovered from tinnitus. The ringing is still there, it’s still constant, but he’s at peace with the noise.

He has a tinnitus counsellor and audiologist he sees regularly and also follows three tinnitus YouTube channels that focus on positivity and resilience.

Niznik has now come to terms with his tinnitus.Credit: Dean Sewell

When asked if he mourned the loss of silence, he paused.

“No, I think that’s a big way to stay stuck in tinnitus … because we never really hear silence, do we – there’s always a train or car or cicada in the background.”

“You basically have to make peace with tinnitus to get peace. And that can take a long time. I think a lot of people experience regret, they think, ‘I shouldn’t have done this when I was younger’ or ‘it’s all my fault’, but then you’ll stay stuck.

“You can’t be angry at yourself for living … but you can take precautions and measures to look after yourself moving forward.”

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