Am I suffering from TMJ?

It has been a horrible 3 months of extreme tinnitus but in the last week, ever since I started practicing yoga, things have subsided considerably.

Here are my previous posts:

Earlier my tinnitus used to be of varying/very high intensities and varied from a broad noise to a single tone, everything being mentally painful.

Now it has reduced a lot. What I do find out now is that, there has been a sense of fullness and and urge to pop and click something in my left ear all the time.

No amount of blowing through the nose helps, but controlled breathing through the nose and throat somewhat pressurizes and clicks it.

A lot of shrill sounds were very intolerable. Shrill horn sounds some 15m away and separated by couple of walls and trees would still manage to make me feel painful.

The pain is hard to describe. It would feel like those sounds are amplified inside the brain and felt very distorted and unpleasant. After hearing a shrill horn and getting excited,

the nearby frequencies would also start to pain in a similar way. But after a while of rest/chewing, it would start to return to normal for the other frequenceies.

Honestly, that experience was painful. I couldn't stand kids/sharp female voices, my dogs barking. I was very tolerant of the same just 3 months before that and now I have got more tolerant to the same.

For two months I used to feel that every sound felt like dominant in my right ear, especially the very low rumbles. Just a couple of days ago, after a few

days of yoga and some walk in the sun, the left ear popped for the first time in two months. And after that I have had two more pops. It still hasn't completely returned to normal,

but it is way better than it used to be a week ago. Stretching/Rotating my left shoulders/collar bones is helping a lot.

Also I noticed that after starting yoga, that I don't clench my teeth as hard as I used to. Audiogram I took a week ago showed perfect hearing in my right ear (15db across the range), and left ear was fine till 4 khz, then a sudden dip at 6khz and then back to nearly normal at 8khz (some slight high frequency loss).

What I also felt at that time that no other measurements showed was that the very low rumbles were almost absent from my left ear for the last 2 months. Now they are coming back (and while I haven't taken audiogram, I can believe that 6Khz is also returning a little, by analysing insect sounds and s,f,c based sounds).

I can also tell that my tinnitus at that time of audiogram was a combination of white noise + a singletone in my left ear (probably 6khz).

Another thing I noticed is that, earlier a week ago all horn noises felt outright painful and like piercing my brain, but now almost all of that has subsided, but the very shrill ones cause a similar blockage to my ears and takes some controlled deep breaths to relax. Earlier I always felt that after a horn sound, at that side of the ear that got the sound, the throat and nose would become dry, air wont pass properly and ears would get blocked. Now it is similar effect but much more controlled, and I can see what is happening in particular order.

First my shoulder/collar bone gets a reflex. Then my jaw, then I can find the nerve/skin around my cheek (of that side shrink a little). I can also find that, after an ear gets pressure and somewhat pops when doing these, I was able to feel saliva/bubbles in the upper jaw in that side.

Also I realized now that, in the last 3 months, there were 2 other instances where the left ear popped and both were when I was eating crab (controlled biting). And then it clogged back after a shrill sound.

For anyone wondering how I get exposed to shrill sound so often, I live in India and honking is a very casual habit here. Right now there is a very specific frequency (somewhere is 2.5-4Khz I guess) that causes this disturbance. That frequency range used to be very wide some 15 days ago (probably 500hz to 4khz).

Earlier Experiences in the last 3 months:

Tinnitus started 3 days after I got a severe wheeze. Just the day before tinnitus I heard a continuous bike horn go nearby.

My office has a 4Khz alarm (God that is so terrible) and my tinnitus spiked up whenever I heard that alarm. It would go of like 10 times a day, and in two months I would have had

anywhere between 200-500 impacts out of which some 20-30 were very close impacts, as close as 0.5m from the alarm. The distant impacts were like about 7-10m away. I dont know of the loudness, but it could have been anywhere

between 86 to 99db measured 1metre away. I used to get tinnitus for 3 days after a close exposure and during that time, even a glass falling down would fell terrible. The same is case with any shrill sound heard for a long time.

During this time I had experimented with so many things that gave me only temporary relief, until I figured out yoga.

1. Pinching nose and blowing out. Once I Closed by right nose and blew hard and I believe that could have caused some disturbance in my left ear.

2. Steam inhalation (after yogasana, it is starting to help better)

2. Valsalva maneuvuer.

3. Ginka Bilboa extract for two weeks.

At last I tried saline nose drops which helped much better than all the above, then I started nasonex. Both which relieved a lot but still having my left ear not popping out. And it popped out a little only after trying yoga for 3-4 days.

I did MRI, the results were normal apart from small bone inflammation in my left nose due to wheeze. I took VEMP and results were normal.

Also something I noticed was, if there was something I saw that induced fear/sexual thoughts, say when watching television or when working, my tinnitus spiked up and tolerance reduced. Staying away from work and filling my mind with peace/happy thoughts void of pressure, going to park walking barefoot on grass and avoiding phones/laptops for the most part for the last one week did help a lot. I did notice that my tinnitus kind of increased when smiling but it felt pleasant and not bothersome.

Is it that I'm suffering from TMJ and my nerves got overexcited and that controlled breathing was bringing them back to normal? I first tried pranayama. Then something heaviness in my brain told pull your brain down, I then tried padangusthasana. In a similar intuition, I tried adho mukha svasana, and then Trikonasana.

Only the first one I was asking my body to do it. The rest, by body itself intuitively forced me to position to them. I noticed that I could feel blood circulation in my left arm, near the left portion of my bottom spine. And some nerve popping in my left tricep, left leg similar muscle. That was what encouraged me to stretch my left arm and it certainly helps.

1 like, 5 replies