When I head to bed and my London flat finally falls silent, I can still hear a whistling sound and a deep hum. It isn’t the fridge (I shut the kitchen door), it isn’t the central heating (I don’t turn it on overnight) and the laptop is unplugged. The noise is coming from inside my head.

One person in 10 suffers from tinnitus, but it isn’t limited to elderly sufferers — powerful headphones and thunderous rock gigs are leaving more and more young people with badly damaged hearing.

My hearing, at the age of 25, offers a cautionary tale to the iPod generation.

Tinnitus is not a disease or an illness but an enigmatic condition: the causes are unclear and there is no cure. The delicate hairs that line your ear canal and vibrate in response to sound waves are easily destroyed by exposure to even the briefest of loud noises.

The term tinnitus — from the Latin tinnire, “to ring” — refers to noises in the ear or the head that have no external source, usually resulting from damage caused by loud noises but also triggered by ear infections, allergies, head injuries or simply ageing.

Barbra Streisand, Pete Townshend and the rapper Will.I.Am suffer from tinnitus, almost certainly caused by careers spent beside amplifiers and long sessions in music studios. Young people, though, are equally at risk, says Tony Kay, an audiologist at the Aintree University Hospital in Liverpool.

“The sound at rock concerts can reach up to 100 decibels,” Kay says. “In the UK, it’s mandatory to wear ear protection in industry if noise levels reach 85 decibels. My ideal would be for music venues to have earplugs in a vending machine like a condom machine. So many people in their thirties or forties say they wish they had been told to protect their hearing 20 years earlier.”

Marie Gretton, 24, was an aspiring music journalist when two years ago she woke up after a gig at the Shed in Leicester with a ringing in her ears that has still not gone away. “I thought I was going mad,” she says. “It was only when my friend said that she couldn’t hear a noise that I realised the high-pitched whining was coming from my left ear, sounding like a buzzer going off. It’s like having a mosquito stuck in my head. The doctor told me to stop going to gigs and pick a different career... I just sat down and cried. That’s what you get for standing right next to the speakers at a gig.”

Among the worst culprits for causing damage are “in-ear” or “bud” headphones that push right into the ear and funnel sound straight down the ear canal with no absorption or deflection.

In recent years, music producers have also been employing a technique called “peak limiting”, which artificially enhances a track. The effect is to even out the peaks and the troughs and compress everything to make it sound louder.

As a music reviewer for The Times, I have noted that rock gigs are getting louder as emerging bands keen to impress tend to crank up the sound system.

Luckily, it was a couple of years ago that I first noticed the damage I was doing to my ears with blaring headphones, songwriting sessions and weekly rock gigs, and I took steps to protect my hearing that I should have taken years earlier.

My first experience of tinnitus was one many will have shared: the moment when you rest your head on the pillow after a night in the front row at a fantastic Clock Opera gig or dancey club night and the throbbing hum of the music is still ringing in your ears. The initial moment of concern was when I could hear this noise after a night on the sofa reading a book.

here is no treatment as such for tinnitus, only techniques to “manage” the buzzing noise. Sufferers have to learn to live with the humming and try to drown it out, focusing on the hubbub of daily life until the tinnitus seems to fade into the background.

Many of the suggested methods are similar to stress-management techniques, such as learning to calm your breathing and relax before going to bed — when tinnitus tends to cause the most distress.

I have just spent a week without my MP3 player headphones in an unprecedented move for someone who spends his days attempting to stay up to date with the dozens of albums sent by new bands every week. It has been a revelation. I’ve heard sounds that I had forgotten existed, such as footsteps and the bells of cyclists who are about to run me over. And it is reassuring to know that my ears are taking a well-earned rest.