Alcohol may be the best but it is temporary and not a good end.

There are many other ways to reduce stress without chemicals.

Things like tinnitus may seem to come on suddenly but it is probably the
gradual breakdown of systems in your body somehow or somewhere. It is not
understood at this time. You may never get rid of your tinnitus but you will
learn to ignore it and it may reduce later and also when you learn to ignore
it.

Many other people here should advice you about getting oood and proper
medical help ASAP to eleiminate the nastier possibilities and sometimes to
"cure" it early.

Just remember tinnitus can't hurt you, only you can hurt you from tinnitus.
It's like this. If somebody insults you and you didn't hear them you suffer
none. Only if you listen and get all bent out of shape does it make you
suffer.

Best of luck. Keep talking

T began to really plague me about 1 month ago (altho I've had a slight
amount my entire adult life). From the many hours I've spent googling, there
seem to be three aspects to tinnitus- the initial bio-mechanical problem
that sets it off (loud noise, tmj, allergies, ear infection, whatever), the
secondary anxiety problem when the brain views it as a "threat" and becomes
hypervigilant to it, and lastly stress which causes the brain to "turn up
the volume" and hear all sounds, including tinnitus, more readily. And a lot
of the time, it seems that the inital set-off or the thing that causes it to
re-emerge is something like jaw clenching or TMJ problems. If that is the
problem in your case, alchohol undoubtably addresses all the causes
simultaneously, e.g. jaw clenching, hypervigilance, and stress. The other
thing that seems to be very sucessful, probably for the same reasons, is
drug treatment with Xanax, or Amityptiline. I'ver been waiting to try those
for a time when the woozyness won't interfere too much with what I do for a
living (software engineering) which requires me to be in top form :-)
Good luck,

Tom S.

It's how you go about dealing with it that really matters William.
The ENT you see will most likely not find a specific cause for your
tinnitus that he can treat directly, and will therefore be left with
only being able to treat the symptom. This course of action usually
starts with a prescription for something like Xanax. If that doesn't
do the trick to help you cope chemically, then the prescribed
medications will probably progresses to antidepressants and even
antiseizure drugs.

What I would suggest in the meantime, is that you do some research into
what is commonly known as "habituation" or TRT (Tinnitus Retraining
Therapy). Use those keywords in both searching through the Google
archives of this newsgroup and the internet, and add also the name
Pawel J. Jastreboff. Dr. Jastreboff is the one who engineered the
concept of habituation, and his descriptions explanations of how it
works helped me to accept the concept and put it into practice.
Habituation is where you learn to become oblivious to the ringing, so
that you don't have to resort to any other means of reducing or
essentially eliminating the symptom, or more properly the effect it has
on you.
Let me give you one of many analogies on how that works per se. I
usually have a long drive home from work due to "rush hour
traffic", and I like listening to the radio during the commute. What
I don't like is listening to commercials, so I do a lot of station
switching. However, a lot of times I will involuntarily tune out
what's on the radio, because I'm preoccupied thinking about
something. I'll snap out of it and realize that I've been listening
to a long commercial run without really hearing it, or worse yet that I
missed most of a song that I really like which doesn't get played
that often.
Habituation is like that, you begin to become oblivious to the ringing.
It's still there, but you stop hearing it. You most likely won't
need "maskers" and or expensive formal Tinnitus Retraining Therapy
to achieve this. Usually this is something one can master without any
"hoodo voodoo" being involved.
I also recommend following Elly Byrne's resources. I found that using
therapeutic pillows (memory foam or latex) at night and assuming better
posture during the day helped a lot. Another big help was getting as
much sleep as possible. I'm trying to also train myself into getting
enough sleep, by making it my main hobby so to speak.
The more you research the subject of tinnitus and how to deal with it,
the more of an "expert" you'll become. Keep seeking out the cause
of the tinnitus, because it could be caused by something serious. But
in the meantime you can try taming that ringing. Good luck to you!