I'm 35, I very suddenly got tinnitus about a year ago. Like, I remember one day I didn't have it, and when I woke up the next morning I did. I went to an ENT hoping that it would be an earwax impaction or something, but nope. I got a hearing test, thinking maybe I'm getting older and it's a side effect of that, but nope, my hearing was actually slightly better than average for someone my age. I got an MRI thinking it might be a tumor but nope, no tumors in my head that the MRI could see [1]. At this point I think the medical consensus for my tinnitus is "shrug".

Mine fortunately isn't that bad; it's in my left ear, and about 95% of the time I can ignore it. It sounds almost exactly like the high-pitch squeal that CRTs make when you have them on without any input. The biggest thing for me now is that I can't really deal with "silence" anymore. I pretty much always have YouTube running, or some music playing, or some audio of rainstorms of thunderstorms going, because otherwise the squeal can be maddening. Fortunately, in 2026 it's never been easier to find a nearly infinite supply of ambient noise, so I can deal with it.

I'm extremely lucky that it doesn't appear to have disrupted my sleep much. I know some people have had their tinnitus ruin their sleep and I am in the happy few where that isn't an issue. I can go to sleep with the noise in my left ear and it doesn't take much longer than it did before I got the tinnitus.

I'd much rather it not be there, and I was really hoping it would go away after a few months, but after a year I suspect that it's something I am just going to have to live with for the rest of my life. I'm 35 now, and hopefully I got another fifty years or so left, so for the large majority of my life it's just going to be something I'm stuck with. I've just kind of come to terms with it.

[1] I mean, in net it's probably good that there aren't observable tumors in my head. At least I don't think I have brain cancer.

Tinnitus Is Connected to Sleep