Yes. This is pretty typical for my patients, too. There’s not really any link between consumption of caffeine and tinnitus. However, anything that makes you feel bad will make tinnitus worse, so that includes caffeine withdrawal. As you feel better tinnitus gets better too. Similarly, drinking alcohol will typically make your tinnitus worse the next day. This isn’t necessarily a reason to avoid having a glass of wine with friends if that’s what you enjoy, it’s just the same as expecting to have to manage a hangover the next day–louder tinnitus is just a new part of being hungover and you manage it almost the same.
I still expect your tinnitus to calm down. But it takes a long time, particularly the first time you have a bad episode. I don’t say that to upset you, but so that every day when you wake up and your tinnitus is still bad you don’t think, “Does this mean it’s going to be like this forever?” It doesn’t mean that. To try to give you a bit of a trajectory, when mine first hit it was very loud and very upsetting for probably four months. Then it became just very annoying for another maybe 4-6 months. Then for two years it was still intermittently bothersome, but it was very manageable and once in a while it would seem to disappear completely for a while before I noticed it again. Probably by around the four or five year mark I was almost never noticing it. All that to say that even if your tinnitus is still bad weeks from now, that doesn’t mean that it will always be bad. But also, it probably WILL be bad for a while so you need to identify strategies that you can put into place now to help manage your emotional reaction to it. Additionally, it’s important to know that tinnitus gets loud in reaction to things that make you feel bad so that you can identify that it’s not actually something happening in the ear when it gets loud, instead you can say, “Oh, I see, it’s louder because I’m sick, it’s louder because I’m very tired, it’s louder because I’m upset.” All temporary states that the tinnitus will likely fluctuate with.
But yeah, it’s an indicator that damage was done now, not really an indicator that damage is still happening. It’s just a noise in your head. You kind of have to try to make friends with it.
An audiologist could help.