What Everyone Needs To Know About Temporary Hyperacusis

Most of have seen something like it in the movies.  On the screen the hero’s world slows down and becomes loud and distorted.  A drop of water splashes in the sink with a deafening roar.  Another person speaks to him and it sounds like the noise inside a wind tunnel.  In hyperacusis, things may not slow down, but sounds certainly do become overly exaggerated.  This may not seem important to you.  After all, only a fraction of the population suffers from permanent hyperacusis.  Temporary hyperacusis, though, can happen to anyone.

You may be exposed to an extremely loud sound.  Maybe you’re just too close when fireworks explode or too near the speakers at a music concert.  Maybe your ears will hurt for a minute and then everything will be fine.  Sometimes it isn’t that easy.  Sometimes you can develop temporary hyperacusis. 

This happens when everyday sounds begin to appear abnormally noticeable.  They get increasingly louder and louder.  It doesn’t go away in just a minute.  You may live with this new hearing sensitivity for weeks to come.  Then, gradually or just as quickly as it came on, it can go away.

It has been shown that people can be induced to develop temporary hyperacusis by exposing them to low frequencies at high levels.  Also, a person can be put in a chamber to illustrate the affects of sound deprivation.  In the chamber there will be a very low level of sound.  Hearing sensitivity always increases.  All the sounds a person hears at that point will sound too loud to them, and 94 percent of them will also develop temporary tinnitus ( a buzzing in the ears).  This in turn, lowers the highest level of sound a person finds comfortable.

There is also a kind of temporary hyperacusis called reactive hyperacusis which is sort of a recurring and remitting type.  In other words, the person will have the disorder for a couple of weeks, and it will go away for awhile only to return, and so on.  This type is usually brought on by exposure to loud noises.

In children, temporary hypercusis, for a long time, was thought to be the only type of hypercusis that existed.  Now we know that some children do have permanent hypercusis, but there are still children who have temporary hypercusis.

What’s more, temporary hypercusis can develop into the permanent kind very easily.  This could happen especially when the person begins to avoid sound by isolating himself or herself or by wearing earplugs or earmuffs constantly.  Thus that person will begin the process of self habituation to lower thresholds for sound.  While this circumstance doesn’t happen to everyone, temporary hypercusis happens more often than you might think.