Stress-Induced / Psychosomatic Tinnitus

Last updated: August 2026

This is my own explanation—from years of research and from what I experienced myself with this method during my CFS phase in 2013. I never had stress-induced tinnitus. Not a standard medical explanation.

Back then, I too was in a state that pushed me to the edge. In 2013, psychosomatic stress overstimulated my nervous system so severely that I suffered from extreme physical problems in everyday life—including severe symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). For more than a year, I was effectively confined to bed.

I was so desperate that I was willing to try anything. What helped me back then was neither a medication nor conventional therapy, but working with an alternative health practitioner and lecturer named Michael Prgomet, who has spent more than 30 years working with the very mechanisms discussed on this page.

It was his work that finally helped me gradually resolve these deep-seated inner tensions. And that personal experience is exactly why I am writing this article—not because I am quoting a medical textbook, but because I felt firsthand just how much inner pressure exists in the nervous system without a person being aware of it in everyday life.

Today I can say: stress-induced tinnitus is no mystery, and it is not imaginary either. It is the audible consequence of a persistent electrical state in the brain, triggered by conflicts that were never truly resolved. When you understand what is happening, you also understand why the tone is there—and what you can do yourself.

How Emotional Conflicts Create Stress in the Nervous System

Stress-induced tinnitus is the type most people understand the least—and in my estimation, it affects only a smaller proportion of people with tinnitus. But it exists, and it works completely differently from noise-induced tinnitus.

Many people know that the brain runs on electricity. But hardly anyone thinks in everyday life about how this electrical activity relates to phenomena such as tinnitus. Yet this knowledge is by no means new: as early as the 1990s, researchers at specialized epilepsy centers used extremely rare, highly complex measuring devices (such as so-called MEG scanners) to make precisely this visible: measurements there clearly show active tension fields in certain brain regions when unresolved conflicts are present.

When more serious inner conflicts persist, they generate continuous electrical activity in certain areas of the brain. The mechanism behind this is as follows: If we repress an emotion—for example out of fear, grief, guilt, or anger—our conscious mind disconnects from it. We seemingly no longer feel the conflict in everyday life, but the affected area of the brain remains fully active outside conscious awareness. It becomes autonomous.

The person I learned this from is Michael Prgomet—an alternative health practitioner and lecturer who has been working on precisely these mechanisms for over 30 years. His work helped me resolve my own conflicts in 2013 and bring my nervous system back into balance.

That is why I am sharing his approach to tinnitus originating in the brain here, based on my own very positive experience. He refers to these phenomena as electrostatic tension fields: overactive, autonomous nerve centers that constantly draw current like small islands of energy and send electrical stimuli into neural pathways. Depending on which pathways are affected, this manifests as completely different symptoms—from the stomach to the ear. This is not a general recommendation—I am only sharing what helped me personally.

What These Tension Fields Actually Are—and How They Form

To give a concrete sense of them, I want to explain briefly what is actually meant by these tension fields. This is not about a huge electrical thunderstorm inside the head, but about very small, locally confined states of electrical tension between nerve cells—stress patterns located exactly where the original conflict was wired into the nervous system.

Here is the background: When we have an intense, distressing experience, our brain stores more than the memory of it. It stores the entire response package—the emotion, the situation, and, above all, the physical response triggered at that moment. The nervous system effectively remembers: “In this kind of situation, this exact protective program runs.”

A simple example makes this tangible: Imagine someone going through an extremely stressful situation—a sense of losing control and of being powerless, perhaps even something like fear for their life. At that moment, the body launches a particular response pattern: the left shoulder blade contracts sharply, breathing changes, and the heart races. The situation passes, the person survives it, and the shoulder relaxes again. The person consciously thinks: “Made it.”

But the nervous system has stored the entire package: This kind of situation = danger = launch this exact protective program, including the shoulder response.

Half a year later, a situation arises that is not identical but is similar at its core—for example, intense pressure from being evaluated at work, a domineering boss, or the feeling of being powerless. The person may not consciously understand why, but suddenly the left shoulder blade tightens again. Within milliseconds. Exactly the same response as before.

This is not imaginary, nor is it “just sensitivity.” This is the old, stored stress pattern reactivated by a matching trigger—and in the process, it actually reactivates the same neural pathway to the shoulder blade.

This is how to picture these tension fields: They remain relatively fixed in place—where the original response pattern was wired into the nervous system at the time. They do not wander randomly through the brain. But their activity can fluctuate sharply: Sometimes they are barely perceptible; at other times, triggers, lack of sleep, exhaustion, or intense inner strain activate them strongly enough to produce noticeable responses.

How These Fields Can Also Stimulate Neighboring Neural Pathways

Now comes the crucial point: If a tension field like this becomes active enough, it does not just affect itself—it can also actually stimulate neighboring or connected neural pathways. And not only in the sense that they become “more sensitive,” but in the sense that they actually begin firing too.

This happens through several pathways at the same time:

First, through fixed neural connections. Areas of the brain are highly interconnected. When a stress network activates, it can automatically activate pathways connected to the heart, breathing, gut, muscles, blood vessels, or sensory processing.

Second, through chemical messengers. Highly active nerve cells release signaling molecules that do not always stay neatly at a single synapse. They can also reach and affect surrounding cells.

Third, through glial cells and inflammatory signaling molecules. If an area is chronically irritated, certain support cells in the brain (microglia, astrocytes) can put the surrounding nerve tissue into a more active state.

Fourth, through small electrical field effects. When many nerve cells in a small area are active simultaneously and in synchrony, local electrical fields arise. These fields are small—but they are real, and they can actually push neighboring cells over the threshold so that those cells fire too.

You can picture this electrical mechanism roughly as a small Van de Graaff sphere in the nervous system (only as an image, of course—the actual voltages are much lower than those of a real high-voltage sphere, but the operating principle is the same): as long as the conflict is only slightly active, not much happens. But when a trigger is added—or several factors act together, such as lack of sleep, exhaustion, and intense inner tension—the field charges up further. Eventually, the voltage is high enough, and it discharges like a small bolt of lightning onto a neighboring, sensitive neural pathway. And that pathway then fires too.

Depending on which nerve center is also activated in the process, completely different symptoms arise: shoulder tension, stomach pressure, a racing heart, pressure in the jaw, skin reactions, pain—or an internal sound if auditory-processing pathways are drawn in.

The Scientific Proof: Electrical Stimulation Produces Sounds

Historical experiments

As early as the 1950s, researchers such as Wilder Penfield in Montreal conducted experiments in which patients’ brains were electrically stimulated. Many of them heard tones, music, or voices even though no acoustic source was present. These experiments provided the proof: when certain areas of the brain or auditory nerves are electrically stimulated, a sound arises—even without a sound source.

This very principle also applies to stress-induced tinnitus. Except that here, the stimulation is triggered not from outside by electrodes, but from within by persistent electrical activity resulting from unresolved conflicts.

Why Stress Can Trigger Tinnitus

The difference between external and internal stress

Many people automatically associate stress with external pressures—such as work, family, or everyday life. But this situational stress is usually not the cause of this type of tinnitus. The crucial factor is the internal, stored stress that persists in the nervous system because of unresolved emotional conflicts and continually generates electrical activity.

These chronic conflicts generate persistent inner tension that is constantly running in the background, but at varying levels of intensity. Some of these tension fields are barely perceptible; others are permanently active and powerful. These differences determine how strongly the conflict manifests physically or emotionally. These persistent inner tensions can be divided roughly into two stages:

1. 01Dormant conflicts
2. 02Strongly charged conflicts

Stage 1: dormant conflicts

At this first stage, the conflict is chronically active, but the stored neural current from the negative emotion is too weak to continuously trigger noticeable physical responses. Only when a trigger is added—such as a thought, a situation, a smell, or a particular person—does the conflict become more strongly activated. This briefly raises the tension so much that it discharges and triggers physical symptoms, for example stomach cramps, muscle tension, or even tinnitus.

Stage 2: strongly charged conflicts

These conflicts are chronically active and so highly charged that they repeatedly discharge spontaneously even without a trigger. The stored neural current is so intense that the affected area—to return to the image described at the beginning—keeps charging up electrostatically like a Van de Graaff sphere. Because this energy cannot simply dissipate into nothing, it seeks an outlet and discharges like a small bolt of lightning onto neighboring, sensitive neural pathways (purely by chance, depending on which pathways are nearby). These discharges can occur in the auditory system and overstimulate the auditory-processing nerve centers there. The result is persistent tinnitus.

Even these highly charged conflicts can change in intensity, however. If another trigger activates them again—such as emotional strain, stressful situations, or particular thoughts—the discharges temporarily become noticeably stronger. This explains why people with tinnitus sometimes notice fluctuations in its loudness or intensity even though the underlying conflict remains chronically present.

These mechanisms explain why many people with tinnitus report that it becomes quieter on vacation or during stress-free periods: The trigger is no longer present, the conflict is no longer being fed, and the tension in the system drops—the discharges become less frequent and weaker. When the triggering situations return (for example the workplace, particular people, or pressure to perform), the stored tension rises again and symptoms flare up.

The Van de Graaff principle inside the head

The following image helps make this phenomenon clear at a glance: Imagine a particular area of the brain as a small, statically charged metal sphere. As long as the conflict remains active, it keeps charging up. Eventually, the voltage becomes so high that it suddenly discharges onto the nearest conductive point—a spark jumping to a neighboring neural pathway.

Normal Psychosomatic Responses vs. Pathological Chronic Overstimulation

Everyone has psychosomatic responses—that is entirely normal and not an illness. From an evolutionary perspective, the psychosomatic response is actually our oldest learning-and-warning mechanism (an instinct). It is meant to keep us from making the same mistake twice or remaining in situations that are not good for us. When someone is startled, their pulse rises, their muscles tense, and their breathing quickens. These are healthy protective reflexes of the nervous system.

It becomes pathological when these stimulation loops no longer switch off because unresolved conflicts or constant mental strain keep generating current in the background. A state of chronic overexcitation then develops. And depending on which neural pathways are affected, different symptoms appear—stomach problems, back pain, or tinnitus.

Duration is a crucial clue: when a symptom persists even without acute stress, chronic abnormal electrical activity in the nervous system is usually present.

Energy, Nutrients, and the Inner Filter

Why a stable body protects the nervous system

The main focus is on reducing inner conflicts or resolving them completely—that is the lever. Sleep, nourishment, and a stable body provide support. An exhausted nervous system reacts more strongly to inner tension; one that is well supplied can regulate it better.

The brain—the top control center of our nervous system—does most of this regulatory work. Two areas play a central role here in processing stimuli: the thalamus and the prefrontal cortex.

The thalamus acts like a regulator and distributor for physical and emotional stimuli. Its job is to sort and meter the multitude of incoming signals—whether sounds, pain, or emotions. It determines how strongly these impulses enter conscious awareness. Some of the stimuli are dampened, while others pass through more directly, depending on how active or sensitive the nervous system is at that moment. However, it is not an absolute blocker: If the stimuli themselves are very strong or persistently active—for example because of damaged hair cells or chronically overstimulated nerve centers in the brain—even a healthy thalamus cannot suppress them completely, but can only dampen them. Its role is therefore to meter the transmission of stimuli and thereby soften the perception of tinnitus—it is not a switch that can simply turn the tone off completely.

By contrast, the prefrontal cortex is not a filter but the evaluation and control area: It assesses how these stimuli are classified emotionally and regulates how strongly a person responds to them.

Both areas are extremely energy-hungry. When energy, nutrients, or sleep are lacking, the thalamus allows more stimuli through and the prefrontal cortex loses control. The result: The stimuli (such as tinnitus) are perceived as louder, more intrusive, and more emotionally distressing.

A stable physical state is therefore the most important protective shield for our nervous system. Sufficient physical energy, B vitamins, healthy fats, proteins, minerals (such as magnesium and zinc), carbohydrates, and oxygen are not mere additions, but essential building blocks. They perform two key functions in the nervous system to stabilize this signal processing:

1. The outer insulation (myelin sheaths)

These nutrients—first and foremost B vitamins, essential minerals, and certain healthy fats and proteins—are absolutely necessary to form and actively compact the myelin sheaths. These are the protective insulating layers around our neural pathways. When they are intact, electrical stimuli travel cleanly and evenly. When these essential building materials are lacking, the layers become thinner, the nerves become more reactive to stimuli, and even small impulses suddenly feel restless and loud. Well-insulated nerves are exactly what we colloquially call “nerves of steel”—they withstand internal and external stimuli significantly better.

2. The internal power supply (ATP and ion pumps)

But the best outer layer is useless if the electrochemical balance inside the nerve is not right. This is where the B vitamins come into play above all. They are crucially involved in energy production (ATP). This energy powers the so-called ion pumps—tiny motors in the cell membrane that exchange sodium and potassium and thereby maintain the nerve cell’s baseline electrical voltage. When ATP is in short supply, the pumps fall out of rhythm and the nerve remains trapped in a state of mild constant activity. Enormous amounts of ATP are also precisely what our two most important control centers—the thalamus and the prefrontal cortex—absolutely need in order to function flawlessly. Without sufficient energy, their ability to filter and regulate collapses, and tinnitus enters conscious awareness unchecked.

In addition, minerals such as magnesium and zinc act like natural dampers in this electrical system. If they are lacking, the nerves fire more quickly and tend toward overexcitation under sustained psychological strain.

All these physiological processes interlock: If the nervous system is adequately supplied and energetically stable, the signals travel in a more orderly way, and sleep usually improves in the process. Deep sleep, in turn, allows the body to regenerate better at night—the filter in the brain recovers and the entire system noticeably returns to balance.

Why Exercise Helps—but Doesn’t Cure It

Exercise can help channel excess energy and tension away from overactive neural pathways. When someone sweats, the nervous system uses energy that would otherwise remain trapped in these stress fields. This lowers the intensity of the stimuli, and tinnitus seems quieter.

However, exercise does not resolve the underlying conflict. It addresses the symptoms, not the cause. The actual source of stress—the unresolved conflict—remains. Even so, physical activity is valuable because it reduces stimulus overload and stabilizes the nervous system.

The art is to activate energy in the right places and discharge it from the wrong ones—in other words, to create a balance between building energy up and discharging it.

The Big Picture

Both pathways—noise and stress—end at the same point: in overstimulated nerves involved in auditory processing. With noise, the false signal comes from the ear; with stress, it comes from the conflict focus in the brain.

One possible path to improvement under this model is to bring the underlying conflict into conscious awareness and resolve it at the root (for example with Michael Prgomet’s method). Prgomet calls this process conflict resolution or trauma resolution; in his approach, the actual reprocessing takes place predominantly during sleep and in dreams. According to his practical experience, no such tension field simply arises out of nowhere. As a rule, for each of these unresolved conflicts, there is a specific situation in the past that originally started this program. If this original situation is reprocessed in the nervous system—in other words, if the actual trigger is reprocessed—the brain can dial the persistent electrostatic current back down.

At the same time, it helps tremendously to strengthen the body during this phase. The body’s condition determines how strongly stimuli are transmitted in the meantime. A weakened system transmits them; a stable system buffers them.

However, in my estimation, supporting one’s lifestyle or body with dietary supplements or special programs is not essential for improving stress-induced tinnitus. Working through inner conflicts remains the crucial factor. Keeping the body well supplied and adapting one’s lifestyle can, however, make this process noticeably easier—they have a regulating and stabilizing effect and help the nervous system return to balance.

The goal: Redirect energy deliberately—boost it in the right place and discharge it from the wrong one. This restores balance—and where the thunderstorm once raged inside the head, calm can finally return.

So What Can Be Done About Stress-Induced Tinnitus?

On a separate page, I describe what can be done specifically to counter stress-induced tinnitus. There, I explain which steps, in my view—and based on the methods my alternative health practitioner has used in his practice to work with stress-induced tinnitus for over 30 years—may be most effective in addressing these inner tension fields. If the underlying emotional conflict is resolved, then, under this model, electrical activity in the affected area can decrease—and with it, as I have witnessed in Prgomet’s practice, so can the tinnitus.

Further Questions & FAQ

And of course, a few questions are bound to remain unanswered—so I created an FAQ subpage that I am currently building step by step.

Important note