I don’t know if this is a clue, but I can do muscle movements in my head/face/jaw to make the tinnitus worse (only as I make the movements, immediately reverting back to “normal” tinnitus as soon as I relax).
Some examples:
- jutting my jaw forwards
- moving my ears back with my face muscles
- pushing downward on the top of my head with my hands
Another possible clue: this has been true since I can remember — even as a child, well before I developed tinnitus. I always thought this was normal, until mentioning it to others, and it seems no one I know shares this experience.
This, to me, suggests that (my flavor of tinnitus, at least) may be due to physical/muscle related causes, and not necessarily associated with hearing damage or neurological. Or that I was “destined” to get tinnitus at some point, as if I was born with some defect that others weren’t.
Or, it could just be that there is something else unrelated with how my muscles are connected to my hearing that cause the same tinnitus (e.g. same frequency), and that the persistent tinnitus actually is hearing damage.
I’ve not looked into it much, and have really only mentioned this to my doctor (who mostly blew it off as irrelevant), and others in my family. But thought I’d share here in case anybody experienced something similar, and may have insight into what causes this “muscle-related tinnitus”, and if it’s somehow connected or unrelated to the persistent tinnitus.
Yes, this is called somatic tinnitus and is actually quite common. Like you, I had this since I was a little child and thought this was normal. Only when I first heard of tinnitus as a juvenile, I realized that this is what I had.
There have been small studies regarding somatic tinnitus, see for instance
For modifying tinnitus loudness, the most common is that it increases when clenching the jaw. In the above paper, the cerebral blood flow was measured with PET, and for people with somatic tinnitus, when clenching their jaw, in addition to the sensory-motor areas, the auditory cortex became activated as well. However, the underlying reason is unknown.
In my case, I had pretty severe hearing loss as a little child because of liquid in my middle ear. Due to that, I continuously had my mouth open so that I could hear at least a little bit through the eustachian tubes, and I guess this might have influenced the interactions between these brain regions. But who knows. In the end, my parents realized what's going on and I got tympanostomy tubes, and I'm hearing fine now. Of course I don't know if the tinnitus really comes from that, because I cannot remember (I must have been around 3 years old).
It seems like some cases of tinnitus may be due to tight muscles, too. I don't usually suffer it, but when I do, I've noticed that sometimes massaging the back of the head or jaw can make it just go away. I doubt this works for everyone or for every cause, but it's simple enough to be worth trying to see if it does anything helpful.
This sounds like the tmj type. Probably most common type I've heard for muscular related, and even some ENTs will know about it
Grinding teeth at night is a common influencing factor, many other causes for tight tmj muscle
Scm area and neck-shoulder is a slightly lesser known but common category I've heard of where muscle s can influence tinnitus. I've heard forward neck posture and less developed core / & core breathing can be common influence for this kind, but similarly there many are other causes/influences. It also iirc stretches more than one muscle in the neck to shoulder that's common.
When learning more about these things, I liked a lot
1) "A multidisciplinary European guideline for tinnitus: diagnostics, assessment, and treatment"
2) Tufts eye and ear tinnitus seminar (video series from several years back)
Probably a few other resources, but those seem like the best to advertise on HN. There is extensive information elsewhere but more filtering required. E.g, some of the forums have great posts, but also a lot of other posts less great for general topic intro.
Sympathy and love, though, if anyone reading is having a hard time right now w/tinnitus. It can be difficult at times and in some circumstances. Id also like to note if you do have tinnitus and don't want to read more, that's ok too! For some people reading is the last thing they really need, and that's ok
Interesting. I can “play my eardrums”, which I describe as the ability to consciously control something in my ears that causes a loud fluttering, ringing sound that is something like wind entering my ear canals combined with a bell.
After some research I’ve found some people can control something called the “tensor tympani” and generate sounds described as a “roar” but being a subjective experience I am not certain this is exactly what I am doing.
I can do that and have tinnitus and they aren't remotely the same. I usually use the ear rumble as a real world mute option. Someone talking tome and IDK? ear rumble. The tinnitus is always there.
Ear rumbling is not the same as tinnitus. I can make my ear rumble, and I also have tinnitus (constant ringing or high pitched frequency sound). At least I assume, I have never bothered getting it diagnosed by a doctor because I can easily ignore it and have for many years, I only notice it when not focusing on anything else and I happen to pay attention to it.
I assumed tinnitus was mostly caused by damaging the little hairs that sense sound becoming damaged from loud sounds and not working anymore, which I would have done with headphone use in my teens/early 20s.
This actually relieves my tinnitus for a short period of time. Humming as loud as I can with my Eustachian tubes open would cause my tinnitus to either disappear or be imperceptible for about 3-5 seconds. It's such a relief that when my tinnitus gets really bad, I'll find I need to do it several times.
I've been able to do it my whole life, chatgpt tells me it's this:
Hearing a crackling sound when you flex your ears is quite common. This noise typically results from the movement of small muscles around your ear, particularly the tensor tympani muscle in your middle ear. These muscles contract to dampen certain sounds, like chewing, but can also be voluntarily or involuntarily activated when you move your ears. This action can cause a vibration or movement of the eardrum, leading to the crackling sound. It's usually harmless, but if you experience pain, discomfort, or any other symptoms, it's advisable to consult a healthcare professional.
I have had the same thing my whole life that I can remember but no tinnitus. If I clench my jaw enough I get that roaring rumble. I assumed it was normal.
To add another personal experience to that: I can do that as well, and for me it will make my tinnitus louder. It is very low pitched but more or less stable around 340Hz, and thus actually musically relevant to me as it gives me some kind of active, makeshift absolute pitch.
Yeah, I also use it for that. I've asked people the question, "can you click your ears"? Of course, they don't understand me, because it's such a vague question. I started asking, "can you relieve your ear pressure without moving anything else", and most people answer no. One person who dived, answered "yes, of course!" like it's something all people can.
I can do that, as well, and it has a practical purpose when going hiking in the mountains or scuba diving. But nobody I've talked to about it understand what I mean, and I can't even explain what the technique is; I'm tensing of some muscles, certainly, but I can't explain how and which ones they are.
I learned to do it by isolating what made my ears pop when I yawn. I explain it as “kinda like yawning without opening your mouth” which seems to work.
This is how I explain it. When I first started scuba diving and explained to the instructor that it wasn't an issue to pop my ears, he was kind of horrified and was like no don't yawn underwater to do that. He didn't seem to understand, no matter how many times I explained it, that I can do it without actually yawning. You just like... mimic the start of a yawn. And then can continue it into a full actual yawn if you want to.
If it helps, I'm reasonably sure it's the soft palate muscles. To cause the effect you're describing, I visualize tensing a muscle that runs directly from one ear to the other, through the middle of my skull.
It's one of those things where trying to describe it to someone who physically can't do it or doesn't know how to may make them question your judgment and/or sanity.
I don't have tinnitus nor "ear rumble", and I can't visibly wiggle my ears -- but I can reliably equalize air pressure (eg in airplanes or car rides with altitude changes) by inducing a yawn (via swallowing-like action in my upper throat) and/or moving my jaw side to side.
Frenzel is not done by controlling the muscles in the ear. It's done by controlling your epiglottis and your tongue and push air against a blocked nose. So while it's hands free, it's not the same.[1]
With controlling the muscles in the ear, one can do it without a nose clip. It's called BTV (or VTO sometimes in English)[2], and instead of forcing air in to open the eustachian tube, you just open it by muscles.
That second link is a gold mine. Thank you so much for sharing.
I've known how to do the basic BTV/VTO for many years, but it wasn't quite enough for me to equalize pressure while diving (without descending very slowly, I suppose). Just a few minutes with the techniques on that page has already improved my ability dramatically.
Cool, hope it will be of use! I freedived for years before trying scuba, so for scuba I have no issues. With the head up and all air going there, my VTO is good enough.
But for freediving with the air going towards the stomach and much faster descent it's still a bit tricky. One thing is if I'm not equalizing quickly enough, no amount of force I can muster will open the tubes again without actually doing a more classic pinch nose technique. Doing a classic equalize you will often "overblow" air in and can descend a bit before needing to equalize again. But with VTO you're only equalizing to a perfect balance so will need to make sure to keep equalizing to not get under pressure. But of course not as much hassle hands free, I try to just do click-click-click continuously, almost every kick down to remind myself to keep it open. But yeah, if I get too much under-pressure I'm not able to open it again hands free.
I also feel head angle matters a lot, so trying to not bend the neck too much to look down, but instead swim down while looking "straight ahead" instead of where you're actually going helps for me.
I used to scuba dive, and yes - can "click my ears" while breathing freely through my nose and/or mouth. We were taught to use Valsalva when feeling pressure during ascent/descent, and after a while I found I was able to just use the right muscles voluntarily instead.
That only allows you to increase the pressure in your inner ear, but not decrease like opening them does. For example, it would be useful while an airplane is descending, but it wouldn't help while ascending.
There is, however, a simple trick anyone can do to equalize the pressure both ways: swallow. Works wonders with babies and toddlers.
I think it's two different things. When using it to equalize ears hands free, it's the tensor veli palatini (tvp) you're contracting to open the eustachian tube.
Of course, one might not be able to distinguish what muscles one is contracting, so it might be that most people actually tense both the tvp and the tympani at the same time, getting both the roaring sound from the tympani and the clicking sound from the tvp when the tubes open. Hence it's two different, but connected, things.
tensor tympani rumble = deep continuous rumbling sound you may hear when yawning
Eustachian tube clicking = a single slightly wet click you hear when you move your soft palate to block off your nasal cavity from your throat (via the tensor veli palatini muscle)
That is interesting. I assumed everyone could hear that. I can hear the sound (roar, ocean, wind) when I move my jaw forward but I can also just directly control it without moving anything else. It’s a muscle I can feel myself controlling and contracting in my inner ear.
I'm not sure if it's the same, but if I listen to pure noise (to sleep or something) I can somewhat adjust my hearing to focus on certain frequency bands in the uniform noise making me to hear a ringing sound in the noise. I can adjust the pitch and it will stay at the pitch until I change it.
So with this I can play a melody with the ringing noise. Sometimes I do this until I fall asleep. :-)
yeah i think i do the same thing as you with my ears. a flutter is probably the best description of it i had thought of it as clapping or clicking my ears but that is to sharp a sound to really describe it
I’m wondering if this is something different, or if it’s a more intense level of the other thing. I’m able to pop my ears without any apparent tensioning of my jaw or a yawn reflex. But I can do it while also making the rushing sound or not.
Yeah, it's two different muscles for the rumbling vs clicking. Tensor veli palatini opens the eustachian tube and makes a click. The rumbling is from the tympani.
I'm pretty sure that's the tensor tympani. I also think your description sounds closer to what I do. For me it sounds like wind, but only lower frequencies.
> - Its terribly unbearable. Not suicidal level but very close to it.
I feel that, it sucks. For me it started with like a "blocked" feeling, now I'm at the point where it's constant static which makes it impossible to sleep on my side, sometimes my left ear goes "deaf" momentarily and a sharp ring starts and it makes me "zone out" but ends after 15-30s
Lemme guess, somewhat narrow palate, slightly recessed jaw. Unable to breathe exclusively through the nose during high intensity workout. Possible indications of sleep apnea.
If they're detecting nerve damage, it's happening from nerve compression. Tinnitus being a manifestation of the compressed nerve.
I would bet money rapid palatal expansion with a proper midpalatal suture split would cure you.
Had braces for years, they removed 4 molars, was horrible, now my smile is too narrow, breathing bad, got TMJ, tongue too big for mouth, recessed chin look worse etc.
Why is it that orthodontics used this method? I can see locally it's still only some dentists that seem to use palate expansion when it's seemingly easier, prettier, quicker, healthier etc. than teeth removal + braces?
Thinking about removing my retainers and having a palate expansion done instead as you recommend as i seriously feel like i'm never really getting enough air during sports, sleep etc.
It doesn't. If you have tinnitus caused by any one or more of the other issues, you likely have sleep apnea on top of it.
Enlarged tonsils themselves are indicative of poor nasal breathing. If you have them completely removed you'll suffer from greatly reduced immune response. You have a fighting chance with intracapsular. Palate expansion through a good Ortho is still probably way better.
Exact same experience here! particularly, if I move my jaw backwards with my jaw muscles, the tinnitus would get worse. Never better, though. I do feel the same sometimes, that doctors are not listening hard enough to what we are saying. I've been suffering tinnitus for 20 years now, and it seems to be getting even worse. I really hope a viable treatment is found in my lifetime. It would improve my quality of life so much!
To this list I'd add pulling the jaw backward/inward.
Moving the jaw forward and then to the right has the biggest effect for me, causing the ringing on the left ear to increase. It's asymmetric in that moving the jaw to the front left has only a very small effect on the right ear.
I have tinnitus I mean my ears ring constantly but I've never been diagnosed officially. It seems to be a middle C tone.
For years I clenched my jaw and grind my teeth mostly at night to the point of damaging my teeth. I wore a guard and then didn't now again back at it due to jaw pain. The guard helps a bit mainly from damage when asleep and seems to protect my jaw joints.
My point being even if my jaw is totally relaxed there is a hum from the muscles in my jaw. It's like a 60Hz hum musicians hear from AC interference in speakers. I have to wonder if it's part of the constant noise I hear in my ears.
I also get BPPV too it's severe sudden vertigo it may be related to my clench and tinnitus. It's just random no clue what causes it. I can't even walk and have to lay down and not even close my eyes just pick a spot and stare. I had to do that for 12 hours one time my worst time.
Interesting, I have issues with jaw clenching and a damaged TMJ. I seem to always notice the (incorrect) position of my jaw, and when this is in a worse position the clenching increases and with that my tinnitus.
I always assumed the softer bones around my ears get deformed because of this which in turn causes me to be affected by tinnitus.
Honestly the thing that helped best was meditation. I tried guards, even a specialized one to realign my jaw slowly, but I feel those are just symptom relievers.
I also should have added as a child I had constant ear aches. This was before the time of tubes being inserted for drainage. But also my Dad smoked so it may have been partly due to that. Once the bars here banned smoking and overall smoking in public was more controlled I noticed a big drop in any sinus and ear issues, finally! I never smoked but it was the 1970s and 1980s I got more than enough just second hand. Many factors I think can cause ear and hearing problems smoke, sinus, jaw clench, stress.
I have quite significant hearing loss these days, which has been tied back to having Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, relating to connective tissue development, which in part could impact areas that result in certain types of tinnitus developing.
Worse thing about tinnitus and hearing loss is that the more your hearing goes, the louder the tinnitus gets. Haven't heard proper silence in over a decade. Bit of a nightmare sometimes!
> pushing downward on the top of my head with my hands
Have you tried pulling up to make it less noticeable? I’ve long suspected my neck muscles had something to do with making tinnitus worse. Or, like you said, maybe there is a correlation or interaction with head & neck muscles that isn’t causal but nonetheless seems to affect the symptoms. Cervical traction, i.e. a device that pulls up on your head, sometimes seems to help me, as does neck stretching & relaxation. Make sure to consult a doctor or physical therapist about cervical traction, it’s easy to overdo it without guidance.
I think an inversion table might help my tinnitus slightly maybe but not much… it mostly helps and puts tension on the lower back, and a lot less on the neck. Inversion, or lumbar traction, seem to help with sciatica. (And yeah, that’s another one where it seems like there’s an interaction between muscles and nerves.)
I've seen this called Somatosensory Tinnitus [0], and it's what I have as well. Stretching my neck & clearing my ears of wax pretty much resolves it every time, or at least helps a lot.
I only have it on the left side, and my TMJ lines up marginally worse on that side, so it's probably related.
I have exactly the same thing. Most tinnitus is caused damage to the hair cells in the cochlea from loud noises for extended periods of time (as is mine). My theory is that the brain basically turns up the gain to compensate for the poor performance of the sensor. I think tinnitus is basically interference, or cross-talk from other nervous processes that normally are low level background.
Last time I went for a hearing test the doctor asked me if I had been in an explosion (not to my knowledge).
It sounds like mine is the same flavor.
And it's getting worse in the last couple of years. I even did MRI scan at some point, but it didn't reveal anything.
Recently a neurologist recommend transcranial electrical stimulation. Seems that it helps in some cases. Have to look around if someone is performing that here.
Very interesting. Jutting my jaw forward makes a very obvious loud squeal at what sounds like a lower frequency than my normal background tinnitus. I never noticed that before.
I do clench my teeth a lot from anxiety and get muscle pain in the sides of my face on occasion. I wonder if that’s related.
What I’ve always found interesting is that I can’t describe the sound. It’s high pitched, but I’ve never found a frequency of tone that matches or even comes close to the tinnitus.
I would imagine the signals my brain receives from the damaged nerves is very complex. Not white noise, but probably the equivalent of a tone with lots of specific harmonics.
As for my experience, it’s been an issue for so long it doesn’t generally affect me. It’s always there and I can’t ignore it, but it doesn’t disrupt my life, other than having generally not great hearing.
Works for me too. Never noticed it would do it before though. I’ve had very mild tinnitus for as long as I can remember. But I mostly only hear it when it’s quiet around so I’m lucky in that sense I guess.
I have this too, and in fact I can recall that tinnitus first came to me after it felt like something in my ear physically shifted, in a period of my life where I was not listening to loud music or going to loud concerts or otherwise being around loud noise. I should note I've had numerous ear problems in the past (including multiple colestiatomas), and I used to be able to manipulate it with a q-tip or popping my ears. (Don't do that! I regret it)
The head massage technique I've had some friends send me to temporarily alleviate symptoms never worked.
This is exactly the same as mine. I never found any with this situation. Even if someone claims to have tinnitus, it's a different variation.
My feeling is, for a lack of better word, grateful, (definitely not a good thing for your or me) that I finally found someone the same as mine.
Next time I ever want to see a doctor again for this (not helpful btw, they don't really have cure or seem to understand my situation), I will just show your comment!
I have found that if I meditate and “focus” on the area where my inner ear/behind my ear is eventually I can quiet the tinnitus some or even completely. I’ve been able to reproduce it three or four different times. I imagine the nerve endings shrinking, receding, or calming down, and it causes some relief. Could be psychosomatic but it is repeatable and the effect lasts
Yes, there are reports of trigger points in the jaw muscles being at least partially responsible for tinnitus (see e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self-T... which, if you have any muscle related pains, will likely blow your mind.) I have exactly the same experience as you. I also get jaw induced headaches from biting my nails etc and my impression is that it is associated with an increase in my tinnitus.
Probably a related mechanism, but I can also sometimes hear my eye muscles working. It only happens if I'm sick or otherwise feeling under the weather, but moving my eyes rapidly is then associated with a swoosh-like auditory impression. I haven't heard anyone else experiencing this so far.
It's fascinating how many people have various versions of these problems and a bunch of their own theories about it. And how many of them are frustrated by orthodontistry for not helping or causing it or making it worse.
For me, with tinnitus in one ear (buzzing), what helps is moving (and stretching) the jaw downwards and sideways away from that ear. The jaw bone on the side with tinnitus also makes a low cracking noise every time I make this move. Keeping my jaw in that weird position (downwards and sideways) turns off the buzzing many a times. But it’s temporary. It’s also not easy to keep the jaw in that tensed position for a long time. On the other hand, keeping my jaws relaxed does not make it better or worse.
I’d love to know if there are any videos of exercises that could help reduce or cure this form of tinnitus.
I was curious and tried 'jutting my jaw forwards' and got a very loud whine in my ears. I've had ringing in my ears before but never diagnosed with tinnitus, now I'm worried...
As a child my teeth were corrected by pulling my lower jaw back with elastic bands. Not only do I have a weak chin because of this, but in hindsight I think my tinnitus might be related to this as well.
I have major distrust of orthodontics as a practice. I see it as chiropractic for teeth. I have permanent damage to one side of my jaw (TMJ) as a result of braces. They not only put unlevel bite blocks in, they did an extraction before putting my braces on. There is literature pointing to this as a common cause of TMJ issues.
I was told that the clicking sounds are just due to gas in the joint by a TMJ specialist, but I can literally feel my jaw jut to one side, so I'm convinced the bone is damaged.
I had braces as a kid and something always seemed off intuitively about how they "fixed" my teeth.
Also got TMJ, recessed chin, and i've never felt my breathing has been very good afterwards, like my whole face became too narrow after removing 4 molars making me just a bit less attractive.
And after deep diving orthodontics i'm pretty fucking mad. It seems there are way better methods that keep both aesthetics and a more natural breathing - ie. a little palate expansion to make space for your teeth instead of removing teeth and having braces for years.
It's even quicker, like what the actual!
I still have retainers on, and i'm considering having them removed and having rapid palate expansion done as others in this thread recommends. As they also point out, i also have a hard time breathing correctly during sports, and have been worrying over sleep apnea.
Yes, me too. An ENT also told me that my tinnitus was muslce-related and I got huge relief (low tones totally disappeared) from some good physiotherapy and osteopathy. (See my other comment)
I've had the unfortunate "superpower" of living with central sensitization and hyperalgesia - a hypersensitivity to pain - for the last ~10 years.
Not everyone's nervous system works this way but for a significant portion of the population there is the capacity of the nerves to refer pain to other parts of the body, whether in the nerves themselves or signalling in the brain region itself cascading or both.
There also seems to be a lack of understanding or consideration that merely normal pressures on nerves, with subtle levels of additional pressure, will actually cause a pain signal or sensitization of that nerve line (either or both directions) to occur.
What you state could be a clue to pain somewhere in your body. It could be tooth pain, it could be jaw pain, it could be bite-alignment pain, e.g. where your jaw position and bite with teeth is causing pressure on nerves that it doesn't expect or want.
It could also instead be a hypersensitivity to sound you have, and so those nerve line(s) are amped up - so then anything connected or in close proximity to it will then
From my experience with pain, 99.999% of doctors have no real understanding of pain, and there's a whole body of work waiting to be written and to start being taught closer to properly; and the rest of them still only have a fairly niche but not holistic understanding.
There is a book called "Hearing Equals Behaviour: Updated and Expanded" that dives into a sound therapy developed 70+ years ago in France, called Berard AIT [Auditory Integration Training], for where you can do a non-standard audiogram to check for imbalances in the hearing - for which at certain frequencies you can with accuracy predict a set of behaviours that person will likely have. If such imbalances show up in these special audiograms then it's either a sign of damage or a sign of how the brain is processing audio-sensory signals, and which may been interfered with - proper development disrupted - if say you had painful ear infections as a child who's brain is rapidly developing, and now where your brain is abnormally associating sound as pain. Berard AIT can get rid of tinnitus, depending on its cause, essentially giving the brain an opportunity to recalibrate.
Did you ever have ear infections as a child, and do you remember if they were painful at all?
Same here. Mine is basically directly correlated with bite pressure. When I'm chewing sometimes I can literally hear the ringing going "wah, wah, wah" in time with my chewing. And if I grit my teeth I can make it get much louder than its baseline. Same if I open my jaw quite wide (sometimes this helps?). I've ground my teeth my whole life. And I can definitely point at one or two concerts that probably did some significant damage.
I’ve an issue similar to yours, playing with my jaws especially yawning seems to increase the whistle while I’m doing it, then it come back to normal. I can hear it almost onyl at night and only in the right ear. Sometimes when I yawn a lot I can dismiss it totally (at least for that night)
What the hell is this?
I also did a hearing test and I’ve no problem.
I have the exact same experience. I believe it's called "somatic tinnitus" and I've had it for as long as I can remember.
Every now and then I get ringing in my ears that fade out quickly, which is normal. I always thought that was the sort of constant ringing people had when they talk about tinnitus, and the one you describe is a different class of tinnitus.
Yes it's somatic tinnitus. I can make mine go away for a few hours, sometimes a whole day by loosening up my SCM muscles and popping my neck. Other times it backfires and gets worse. Very annoying, but the ability to have SOME control over it makes things less depressing at least.
Same here! Mine is in one ear, mild, started with a sinus infection and changes depending on whether I have a cold or not.
I initially assumed it was caused by babies / children - we have three and they are loud. Plus my kids have screamed directly into my ears on occasion (and been punished for it).
This is interesting in terms of tinnitus that can be brought on after a car accident, or a concussion. And maybe as a derivative of the former, TMJ.
A muscle related tinnitus seems entirely plausible to me in addition to any potential nerve related tinnitus tied to, for example, listening to loud music.
Interesting.. moving muscles does nothing for me. But then again I was born with tinnitus. I actually didn't know until much later in life that a constant multi-tone ringing in your ears is NOT normal - that was simply my reality so I assumed it was the same for everyone.
> I don’t know if this is a clue, but I can do muscle movements in my head/face/jaw to make the tinnitus worse (only as I make the movements, immediately reverting back to “normal” tinnitus as soon as I relax).
> pushing downward on the top of my head with my hands
I've never tried or noticed this before until you mentioned it, but this makes my tinitus noticeably worse. It's not really louder, but seems to add "harmonics".
I have had tinnitus for about 7 or 8 years now in varying intensities and somehow have never thought to do this as an extended exercise (a good 30 seconds of massaging just now).
I'm not gonna say I heard silence for the first time in years or anything, but I just heard something relatively close, for just a short little while.
The audiologist I saw when this all first started also assumed it was stress and/or blood pressure and/or modern way of life issues, as she couldn't find anything physically wrong with my ears.
It can have to do with allergies. However, it might be something else if it has recently worsened or become more noticeable. Has it always been the same?
I recently bought a couple of audiomoths for monitoring or tracking birds passing through my area. It records up to 192kHz I think so it can pick up ultrasonic chirps from bats. Anyway while passing the recorded data into Audacity to search for bird calls I was able to finally nail down the bandwidth where my tinnitus overwhelms all other signal and to begin to understand the depth of my work-related hearing loss. I use the low and high pass filters to extract the signals across discrete frequencies and then track the level of gain I need to apply in order to be able to hear the calls that are in each extracted band. This is quite useful for me as before I knew that there are sounds I cannot hear unless there is almost no background noise but I had no idea where they were spectrally or just how much hearing loss I had in each band.
I could potentially use this information to design a hearing aid that boosts sounds in the affected bands so that I can hear them. I am not sure I can inverse filter the tinnitus-related noise since it is random intensity though a notch filter could be an option since it is narrow band.
I hope the tinnitus discovery thing in this article ends up being useful.
The frequency response of a healthy ear isn't flat across all audible frequencies, so you'd need to reference normal hearing to determine the extent of damage rather than just looking at minimum audible db at various frequencies.
>I am not sure I can inverse filter the tinnitus-related noise since it is random intensity though a notch filter could be an option since it is narrow band.
Are you talking about basically using active noise canceling to silence tinitus? I don't think that's possible.
>The frequency response of a healthy ear isn't flat across all audible frequencies, so you'd need to reference normal hearing...
Isn't the normal frequency response of a healthy ear dependent on the shape of the ear cartilage and the configuration of the ear canal and the ear drum? It would be different for every individual. Kinda like how Mom could always hear everything we did and said after bedtime while Dad, without even using his selective hearing, wouldn't even know we were still awake.
>Are you talking about basically using active noise canceling to silence tinitus?
Yes. Model the tinnitus and design the inverse filter based on the bandwidth and inject that inverse filter to become an active subtraction of the tinnitus response. I know it probably isn't possible because the noise is variable and originates in the brain instead of external to the ear so it is not easily quantifiable therefore the inverse operator will not be exact, optimum, or anything else. However, if you can model the signal then you should be able to design the inverse operator. Since the signal is just a band-limited input there is no reason why you can't dink around until you have a close enough model to be able to design the inverse filter which you would then inject as an external input thru an earpiece or some other sound generator.
I'm a geophysicist with hearing problems, not an audiologist or otolaryngologist. It sounds reasonable to me. We deal with convolution/deconvolution and other signal processing as a regular part of the job process.
>Isn't the normal frequency response of a healthy ear dependent on the shape of the ear cartilage and the configuration of the ear canal and the ear drum? It would be different for every individual
Yes, there's some individual variation, but human ears are all generally roughly the same structure, so there are known baselines for how they work. There's about 40 dB difference in minimum audible threshold between 50 Hz and 5 kHz. Same with near the top end of the hearing range, though where exactly that lies is more subject to individual variation (and age)
>so it is not easily quantifiable therefore the inverse operator will not be exact, optimum, or anything else. However, if you can model the signal then you should be able to design the inverse operator.
It's not originating from actual sound, so I think the approach fundamentally doesn't apply. Active noise canceling relies on destructive interference to actually physically remove the sound before it is perceived. Once you have the nerve signal, I think there simply isn't an anti-sound that would result in some other nerve signal that adds up to perceived silence.
I've definitely read anecdotes about people with tinnitus listening to noise to reduce it. It may not be the same effect as destructive interference but it seems like there's something at work there.
As I understand it, for certain types of tinnitus, listening to a sound of the right frequency may temporarily suppress the tinnitus for some time afterwards. But the triggering sound is still audible, so it's not like noise canceling.
That reminds me of the old crt tv my parents had for ages in their room that i could hear from the other side of the house but they couldn't that made the most awful high pitch whine. and as the screen would go black in some sort of sleep mode but it kept making that horrible noise with the only indicator that is was on still other than the noise, that apparently only i and dogs could hear, was the color of a small dim recessed led. they got rid of it a about three years ago but whenever i would visit I'd hear it as soon as the door opened and it would drive me nuts till i got the chance to turn it off.
Most children can hear very high frequencies and it usually causes them discomfort. For a while it was actually used as a deterrent for loitering youth in the Netherlands (the "mosquito device"), which was terrible for me: as an adult I can not only still hear that, but it's almost unbearable.
Very old CRT monitors can have a similar effect, but they are usually not that loud. A friend once tried to test it using one of those "silent" ringtones for kids and I nearly destroyed his phone, without meaning to react so strongly.
Many years later a niece was able to ask an expert about this and he told her it's probably "cochlear hyperacusis", something that can make you overly sensitive to certain sounds or frequencies.
I do not have any other hearing issues, except for a single 20 second burst of tinnitus that will start loud and quickly taper off completely, which only happens maybe once every 6 months or so.
I am in my 30s and still hear frequency's over 16.5 kHz. I cant stand the high frequencies they are like auditory needles in my ears still. I know they say adults dont hears them but is that actually the case for most adults? I mean I have done enough it seems like I should have the hearing damage needed loud music on headphones, been in rock concert mosh pits, fired guns without hearing protection, fireworks, fired homemade cannons without hearing protection. But still hear everything fine
15.625KHz to be exact. I can hear this sound quite well, to the point where I prefer not to be in the same building as any CRT that emits it.
There are those that don't, mainly newer models I assume. I think it has to do with the exact shape of the waveform that drives the (horizontal part of the) deflection yoke. Some of them are noisier than others.
Same. As a child, I could be reading a book at one end of the house and I would experience discomfort (experienced as a slightly painful "pressure" in my ears) when the television, which was 4 rooms away, was powered on. My family didn't believe that I could tell, because to them it was silent. So they challenged me to a double blind test, and were surprised to find that yes, it really was the TV that was bothering me.
Related, we did a hearing range test in a high school science class. I could detect the tone generator at a frequency well beyond what anyone else in my class could pick up. I couldn't hear it as a sound anymore after a certain point, but could still feel it as an uncomfortable "pressure" inside my ears.
One of the power supplies I own makes a high-pitched whining sound from its fan. It's the most terrible, obnoxious sound, but I somehow don't mind it. It blends into the background after living in it for years. Still, when it goes away, there is nearly unparalleled silence.
Took me a while to realise that I could hear those, but also that I have tinnitus at the same level. For quite a while I assumed someone had turned one on nearby, until it dawned on me that no, I also have tinnitus
Hearing aids are much better than most earbuds, especially with regard to power consumption. I have tinnitus, mild hearing loss, but wear cheapish Costco hearing aids as earbud replacement and the hope my tinnitus won't progress.
It's a great idea - and a more detailed diagnosis compared to what some professionals do. I had no idea audiomoths were a thing by the way! Will look into that.
I'm really liking these audiomoths. Broadband recording at high fidelity with long, unattended recording possible. I'm trying to see whether I can identify individual crows among a family of pecan-stealers active in my area. I almost have them accustomed to checking my porch for raw peanuts as part of their regular rotation. I probably need cameras to be able match the bird to the call and identify individual birds and I don't yet have that but I will in time. For now I am getting familiar with all the normal noises out here and the frequencies they occupy so that I can visually separate bird calls at various frequencies from ambulances, airplanes, helicopters, automobiles, barking dogs, etc so I can spend more time analyzing interesting signals from the birds out here.
If you have time to acquire a new hobby, an audiomoth is a great tool.
If you have Apple devices: There’s a free app called “Mimi - Hearing Test” that works together with Apple AirPods and allows you to test your hearing of different frequencies. From the results you can create a profile which you can then set in the iPhone’s accessibility settings so it will adjust the audio output of the AirPods accordingly.
Most people having a peeep tone tinnitus including myself can experience complete silence for a few seconds (up to 30) by listening to a tone at the specific frequency of their Tinnitus.
This is called residual inhibition.
You can Google "tinnitus residual inhibition" and find many papers about it.
Benzodiazepines work also very well in some cases, when taking them I have no Tinnitus at all, but that's ABSOLUTELY NOT a viable long term solution because of the long term negative effects.
I am not sure about this paper, but what I've read and believe the most is that the Tinnitus is caused by neurons in the brain, that have lost nerve input signals from the ear (due to hearing loss, nerve damage etc..), and start to emit parasite signals.
Benzodiazepines reduce the brain activity thus reducing/silencing the tinnitus. Residual inhibition seems to work by stimulating the region where the hearing loss has occurred, the neurons responsible for the Tinnitus all the sudden get stimulated and stop emitting noise signals for a few dozens of seconds then resume. But so far there is still a lot of research to be done and we are decades away from a cure that is SAFE enough. Benzos work but are just not worth it, this is like fighting back pain with opoids.
Until then I think it is best to protect our hearing, you can buy custom made earplugs which are comfortable to wear, last about 5 years and cost around 200 USD. I use them when I am in loud environments like on an air plane, train, at a bar etc...
Also it is best not be in completely silent environment as this is where you will notice the Tinnitus.
When listening to music with headphones it is important to take regular breaks and not to push the volume too high to give your ears some rest.
Edit: Last advice, don't try to listen to your tinnitus, but focus on other noises/sounds, if you are listening to the Tinnitus you are telling your brain that the signal is important, when you should be telling it, that it isn't.
My tinnitus has a very recent onset. So far it’s pretty mild but I expect it to get much worse. Your advise is the most practical, at least for mild cases: baby the ever living shit out of your hearing (I have spent decades in the underground metal scene and didn’t wear ear plugs until the past 5 or so years. What a colossally stupid thing to do. Please: if you’re young, remember you are not invincible, you’re merely borrowing heavily from future you) and avoid complete silence. I’ve also noticed that it will occasionally hit me hard in bursts. When that happens, I can make like I’m covering my ears with my palms and tap my finger tips on the back of my head for a few seconds and the roar will die down. Doesn’t go away permanently but so far it provides a little relief from those painful stabs.
Agree. I also made poor choices, drumming as a kid without hearing protection. By time I was in high school I already had tinnitus. Since then I’ve also babied my hearing (earplugs at concerts, playing music in headphones as quietly as possible or avoiding headphones), it’s fortunately stayed about the same over the ensuing years.
Given how spread tinnitus is, I wish there were more campaigns to help to spread awareness. Funny thing, ghe first gike I remember developing tinnitus, was following a evening where the fully pressurized soda stream bottle was not fully closes, so it emmitted this wheezing sound all evening, high pitched. I was too tired to figure out the source, or even if it was real up until the next morning.
Same story here. I'm pretty young and I'm quite concerned about it as I age, but since I stopped drumming about 10 years ago, it hasn't progressed at all.
Well if tinnituses arises from the brain not having an input, then it seems like the proper way to fix it is to restore the input. Now restoring damage to the nerve or those little hairs inside the ear, I'm sure that's tricky, but it also seems like it should be quite doable if you just throw resources at it.
Mammals cannot restore hearing, but other animals such as Chicken can.
A few years ago there was a drug called FX-322 that was able to regenerate inner ear hair cells in guinea pigs, it made it into human trials, but was unable to improve hearing, meaning that the cells were probably not functional.
It was shown in a couple of papers that we can restore hair cells in mammals. Damaged hair cells are the root cause for the majority of people with hearing loss & tinnitus. The most promising path seems to use so called supporting cells in the inner ear and convert them into hair cells. Researchers are getting closer and closer every year. I think we are now at a point where it's not a question of if but rather when.
Here is a quote from one of the leading scientist in the field:
What is needed to help make HRP goals happen?
Frankly, funding to keep our research moving forward. A postdoctoral fellow with five to six years of training starts out on a modest salary of about $45,000, plus $12,000 in benefits. So that’s $57,000 before they even pick up a test tube in the lab. Each person will typically use between $15,000- $20,000 a year in supplies and chemicals. Simply maintaining a single cage of mice for one year costs $210, and my lab can use between 300-500 cages of mice for our experiments! HHF and its donors have been extremely generous in their support, however with additional funding the output from the consortium could be significantly greater and accelerate the pace to a cure.
Overall the field of hearing restoration still only receives tiny amounts of funding (<200 Mio). The research is in a vacuum phase. It's not proven out enough for Big Pharma to come. Relying on small government grants makes it difficult to get the research to a stage where it's attractive enough for Big Pharma.
Best bet at this point is probably when a former big tech executives would get hearing loss/tinnitus and then decides to put real money behind the problem. Bryan Johnson who created the Blueprint program has hearing loss but I guess he is not wealthy enough to make a difference.
EDIT (to put numbers into perspective):
The size of the problem:
Sensorineural hearing loss disables over 360 million people worldwide. Irrespective of its cause and severity, hearing loss can have a large impact on people’s health and well-being. The treatment of hearing loss is currently limited to the use of hearing aids or devices surgically implanted in the middle or inner ear. These devices often perform poorly in noisy environments and can be very costly. It has been estimated that the costs of untreated hearing loss are €213 billion in Europe alone each year.
The funding (EU):
An international consortium of 7 partners has been awarded a €5,8 million European Commission Horizon 2020 grant to develop and test a new drug to treat hearing loss caused by the loss of sensory hair cells.
I tried the YouTube video and was slightly alarmed to discover that I appear to be deaf above about 13.5KHz. I wondered if it might be the frequency response of my laptop speakers, but according to this site [0] it's pretty flat up to 20KHz.
It didn't make the tinitius go away, but perhaps subdued it slightly. Hard to say.
But if as one of the other posters suggests tinnitus is a neurological response to lack of input, deafness in higher frequencies tallies. Like others though, jutting my jaw forward makes the tinnitus louder, so not sure how that interaction works for something originated in the brain.
Something I haven't seen mentioned here is _very_ occasional short periods (seconds) of apparent deafness, typically at night, in a quiet room, and only when very tired or sleep deprived. I say apparent because since it's quiet, it's hard to know if it's the tinnitus momentarily stopping, or all sound; and the presence of sound may prevent it from happening.
> Most people having a peeep tone tinnitus including myself can experience complete silence for a few seconds (up to 30) by listening to a tone at the specific frequency of their Tinnitus.
What "works for me" but your kilometrage may vary...
i listen to LOTS of white noise. All night when i sleep, when i'm out and about and might normally listen to music, and sometimes just randomly throughout the day.
For whatever reason, listening to white noise over long periods seems to tone down the volume of my beeping, _sometimes_ to the point where i have blessed silence for several days at a time (recently a full 2 weeks, though that was a new record in my 13-ish years of beeping).
Whether or not the white noise _genuinely_ plays a factor is difficult to say, but it's been my experience, the past three or four years, that the volume of The Beep and the duration of the rare Quiet Periods seems to be affected by how how much white noise i listen to.
(Sidebar: "quiet" is never quite silent, but The Beep sometimes (thankfully) fades to the point where i have to actively listen to hear it, exactly as it was when this all started out around 2010.)
(Sidebar: though the tone of my beep is near-constant, wavering only very slightly, the volume varies wildly, from minor background noise to headache-inducing and concentration-shattering.)
That said: "white noise" is a generic term here. i often get better results with what my phone's white noise app call "pink noise" or "blue noise" - they're just different frequencies of the same style of noise.
Edit: FWIW, i've heard from two other tinnitus sufferers that white noise has a similar effect on them. That doesn't mean that it definitely helps, but it seems to help for some of us.
My tinnitus, both the one that's always present and the one I can provoke with my jaw muscles, is not a single-pitched tone but more like band-limited noise. I did a hearing test and we tried to match it to various frequencies. None of the models they had really fit, but the best one was a sort of moderately-wise noise.
Heh. I felt it so strongly that I built my own subwoofer. I get noise complaints if I set it anywhere near half volume. At least a transducer really helps, and doesn't often result in complaints.
I've always assumed the tinnitus arises from some sort of AGC, automatic gain control, in the auditory system, such that when something is damaged and the signal disappears, the brain will just turn up the gain until the noise is about the level it expects the signal to be.
At least my experience with AGC is that it's useless because times of silence ends up just being filled with noise... "audio system tinnitus..."
I've got multiple tones in both ears. Most of the time I don't notice it but sometimes... well it's hard not to panic when you realize you can't escape it. I would very much like to experience life without the ringing again before I kick the bucket. I'd honestly probably cry.
I've had it for as long as I can remember, I suspect it's been there since birth. As a small child, I thought it was normal and that it was what the Simon & Garfunkel song "The Sound of Silence" was talking about. Anyway, I think I may be lucky in that I've never experienced not having it, so it doesn't bother me at all. It's just there.
Same here. The sound's always been there and it's the only thing I can control my attention towards perfectly. Kind of like how you can't not think about pink elephants but through a lifetime of practice I can do it with this one specific thing.
Facts. I used to take a lot for granted. Now I not only have tinnitus, but also muscularskeletal and digestion issues. I'd love to go back to being healthy again, but sometimes you're dealt a shit hand. And you never know what will happen tomorrow that will change the rest of your life.
It's almost always been there for me if a room is too quiet, but somehow it just doesn't bother me no matter how much I notice or think about it. It's just there.
I don't think I have tinnitus, but I made a bad choice of power supply for some of my audio equipment, and it emits an annoying whine from one of its fans. Which is bad because this is supposed to be audio equipment.
It's a MEAN WELL industrial power supply, brand new. I needed 12 volts DC to power a "car" amplifier, but it's not easy to get 50 amps of that from the wall. My guess is it's built for industrial automation, not audio equipment, but it's not like the other option of repurposed server PSUs would have been any quieter.
Removing the fan may or may not be relatively safe depending on how much airflow a 12 inch sub can push through a ported enclosure when it's running anywhere near full enough power to actually heat up the power supply.
I have tinnitus. I had brain surgery to remove an acoustic schwannoma. The doctor said that I would lose all hearing in the ear due to the unavoidable damage to the acoustic nerve.
Well, at least that will get rid of the tinnitus, I thought.
No such luck! I still have tinnitus.
As such I think there may be more to tinnitus than undetected nerve damage.
It isn’t clear cut though: I have some hearing in that ear after all (to the surprise of the doctor). But the tinnitus came back (or never went away) before any hearing returned.
You are not the only one, in fact removing acoustic nerve is known not to fix the tinnitus / sometimes making it worse. The research has has shown so far that it appears the Tinnitus is coming from within the brain, neurons that have lost the input signal from the acoustic nerve aren't stimulated anymore and in response start to emit noise signals on their own.
I have the same tumor on the auditory nerve on both sides (NF2). Had surgery on one side. Lost full hearing on that side (so auditory nerve almost fully severed). Always had tinnitus but after surgery it's gotten much worse on that side. Not unbearable but a constant source of noise. I can see there being some sort of connection between the nerve and tinnitus.
My dad had one of those. They used to be called acoustic neuromas. He lost hearing in one ear because of the lack of microneurosurgey at the time and the way it was wrapped around CN 8.
>It’s been a longstanding idea that these symptoms, known as tinnitus, arise as a result of a maladaptive plasticity of the brain. In other words, the brain tries to compensate for the loss of hearing by increasing its activity, resulting in the perception of a phantom sound, tinnitus.
I can't say I buy that. I've got tinnitus. Also sometimes my brain has a loss of input as I can't see, hear of feel something and it's nothing like tinnitus.
It seems more likely to me that it's a problem with the gizmo that converts mechanical movement into electrical impulses. It consists of a string like thing, the tip link, between two hairs that pulls on an ion channel in a nerve cell wall to let ions in and trigger the nerve to give a sound signal. (pic here, fig 1 if you scroll down https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674%2809%2901170-2)
When you get an over loud sound it probably yanks that thing too hard leaving the ion channel stuck open some how or something along those lines.
The produced by the brain aspect as never washed with me too. My tinnitus started right after a severe sinus infection that spread to my ears. I was so blocked up an needing some sleep that I did a nasal wash and was to forceful in blowing my nose (my ears popped). Since then tinnitus has been there everyday, whereas 35 years before never even knew it was a thing.
The theory isn’t that it’s caused by the brain alone, but rather it’s like the fandom limb pain sensation after an amputation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb
The difference is your auditory nerve doesn’t directly carry touch signals so you hear sounds instead of say an itch.
I’ve had tinnitus and its cousin hyperacusis for about 7 years. When I first got them from a particularly loud nightclub, I had rolling panic attacks and insomnia for about the first three weeks, but then they died down to a tolerable background level.
Something brought it back in the past couple months and triggered the same reaction again.. it’s not clear what the trigger was this time, but it’s like my brain needs time to re-train itself to ignore it as background noise. It’s an emotionally exhausting process that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
The only advice I can offer to people here is to treat tinnitus like any other serious injury (which it is): take time to let your body heal, don’t push yourself too hard, don’t come down on yourself for how you got it, and don’t judge yourself for any feelings it might bring out. Get help if it’s making you depressed.
There are definitely some helpful coping strategies that people have highlighted here, particularly white noise (look into notch filtering as well), and everyone needs to find the approach that works best for them. Allow yourself to grieve; you’ve lost something - the sound of silence (at least what you used to think of as silence - most humans never experience true -inf dB). It’s easier to move on if you come to terms with it from that angle, rather than continually trying to make it “go away”.
Happened when I was 17 at a concert. Too loud. Brain seemed to just stuff it away and emotionally I was fine (because I was young and dumb).
“Came back” when I was in early 30s and devastated me for about 3-5 months with anxiety and insomnia. I used CBT to basically ignore it and my brain did its thing pushing it to the background and lowering the volume.
Came back again at age 40…same deal (but not nearly as bad since I’d seen the movie before) and lo and behold…brain stuffed it away again.
Now I just accept that it’s a part of life. Will come back probably and I’ll deal with it.
When I had an episode of especially loud tinnitus, I discovered I could get some psychosocial relief by playing a song chorus in my head ( I can't hear much on that ear) over and over and imagining the tinnitus is part of the music.
I have tinnitus which I managed to cure(almost. In complete silence I still can hear a teapot-like sound but the original single tone high volume sound is no more).
Turns out it’s about my neck. I religiously paid attention to my neck position and fixed my posture, and as a result, my tinnitus gradually disappeared.
If I sit in a bad position or sometimes do some weird move, my tinnitus can return but I immediately start a neck massage and fix my posture, and it goes away. Sometimes it can be very severe and lower volume version remains, but it goes away the next day.
I think it happened because I used to move my head forward when sitting in front of a screen. There are chiropractors, who claim to fix tinnitus by fixing the head position and say that it’s associated with some nerve in the neck.
IIRC, when I was trying to mask the sound with the shower I noticed that it's not working when the water is cold or when I'm not comfortably under it. Then I had a few days of road trip without the laptop and noticed improvement when I was driving, sitting up straight.
So I decided to work on this and bought a keyboard and a mouse and made myself a rule that I will always use the laptop with a stand or external display so I don't lean over the laptop and sit straight up the way it is ergonomically recommended, pretty much like it says on articles like this: https://healthandbalance.com.au/workstation-desk-posture-erg...
I also begin doing neck exercises, recommended to me by an orthopedist(I got some neck pain for a few days, the orthopedist gave me a couple of movement I should do regularly to increase the straight of my neck muscles, I will leave links to the leaflets of the movements). I also did the push the chin to push your head back movement because although I didn't have clinically severe situation with my head moving forward I noticed that on my old photos my head wasn't leaning forward that much.
After a week or so after I started sitting right, my tinnitus begin to improve rapidly. I even began sleeping the orthopedically correct way and avoiding any stress positions. After some time I tried experimenting stress positions, like using the laptop the way I used to and the tinnitus returned in full force until I fix the posture and do some massages. After a year or two the tinnitus was almost completely gone and stress positions don't immediately bring it back anymore so I can use laptop again but if I'm not careful and overdo it, get carried away and lean into the screen it returns.
Oh it's nothing formal, I just try to avoid any stress to my spine. That is, I don't sleep in strange positions that I used to sleep and I changed my bed to a stiffer one because the old one was deforming too much by my weight and this was causing my sleeping position to be slightly curved.
I also looked around the internet for recommendations but they all converge the idea that you shouldn't be forcing your spine to stay in a curved position beyond the natural curve for too long.
2) It says this is exercise for strengthening the muscles. Each of these should be repeated 3 times.
a) Put your hands on your forehead, try to move your head forward as you push back against it with your hands. Do this for 10 seconds and release.
b) The same but this time to back
c) The same but to the sides
d) Hold your head with your hands, one on the forehead and one on the back of your head. Try to rotate your head but stop it with your hands, do this for 10 seconds in both directions.
e) You hold your hands in the shown positions and push against, one hand pushes against the other. The illustration is not very clear but basically you start from the lower position and go higher. After the push, you do the same but this time you hold your hands and stretch.
3) Is for preserving your ability to move. You repeat each one 5 times.
a) You look left by rotating your head, wait 3 seconds the look forward. Then do the same to the other direction.
b) You lean your head until your chin touches your chest and wait 3 seconds, then look straight again but don't push it too much. Then the same but to the back.
c) The same idea but to the sides. Try to lean your head until your ear touches your shoulder but don't push it too much.
d) You rotate your head as much as you can, wait 3 seconds and go back. Then to the other direction. Don't push it too much. Do this 3 times but it's not recommended for old people.
e) Lift your shoulders up and try to get them close to each other at the back. Hold 3 seconds, then go back to the starting position. Do this 10 times.
For me it's about tightness in the SCM (Sternocleidomastoid muscle) and scalene muscles. If I can successfully get them to loosen up through some heat and massage, I can make my neck pop (very loudly in fact, sometimes it makes my arm go numb for a second) and whamo, tinnitus gone. It returns as soon as the neck stiffness/tightness comes back though.
It can also be a symptom of brain cancer. My aunt passed away last year after suffering from severe tinnitus for two years, and not a single doctor suggested and MRI, they all pretty much gave her magnesium supplements and drugs to treat the symptom (tinnitus) rather than actually thinking outside the box and suggesting an MRI to be sure (which is almost free in my country). Even I nearly suggested she does it very early on but thought I wouldn't know better than doctors.
Eventually, other symptoms started appearing and only then did they do an MRI, and lo and behold, a tumor was found at the base of her skull and right behind her sinus cavity, it was pressing against her auditory nerve and was the cause of all the tinnitus. The tumor was basically untreatable via surgery and it was too late for chemo.
That was my first thought when developed tinnitus, tumor or something pressing in there. In my case it was actually related to labyrinthitis, I did get an MRI and it was my first one, oh man did I get anxious inside the tube, I feel like it's good therapy for learning how to relax hehe. Anyways, Sometimes the tinnitus loudness gets worse and sometimes get's quiet, I still haven't detected what makes it change. However! recently after getting Covid It's been louder more often which tells me maybe my nervous system was affected, idk
Can't wait. With me it is ups-and-downs, at times it's great for months at a stretch and sometimes it is so bad I can't listen to music (or play).
There are many different forms of tinnitus and usually some mechanism or cure operates only on a fraction of all cases so I'm hoping that this is as broad as possible. Note to younger self: stay away from loud concerts.
>Note to younger self: stay away from loud concerts.
Or try those "concert earplugs." They reduce the overall sound level while better preserving high and mid sounds. It also reduces the booming sound ('occlusion effect') when talking.
I paid $15 for a pair recently, but experimentation shows it's mostly just silicone earplugs with a hole through the center and a small mesh screen.
Removing the fancy "audio filter" and stuffing a tiny (tiny!) wisp of cotton in the hole seems to do the same thing, honestly. You can probably reproduce these using 30¢ HF silicone earplugs if you find a way to "drill" a hole through them...
Sorry to hear. You’re not alone and I’m constantly surprised to learn how many people I know are dealing with hearing concerns once I started talking about mine more.
My note to younger self is similar: get great earplugs and use them diligently.
A note of caution regarding earplugs: they can introduce infection, which in turn (I suspect) may play a role in triggering or causing tinnitus. It probably depends on individual predisposition and climate (to me it happened in hot humid environment), but I recommend caution.
I wish I could use earplugs (or IEM headphones with good sound isolation) a lot of the time, but I found out the hard way (after infection subsided I have intermittent tinnitus as well).
Have you been on antibiotics since you had it? If so, did it make it any worse?
I have a slight case of tinnitus and need to do a 2 week round of neomycin. Doctor says it shouldn't make it worse since it's a short course, but I'm still concerned/anxious about it.
It's been with me for 20+ years now, originally triggered by a concert in Paradiso in Amsterdam that I got free tickets to on account of repairing a bunch of cabling under the stage. The next day there was a really loud buzz on top of everything else that only slowly went away. After that it periodically recurred, usually right after exposure to some loud noise (especially: grinder, that one does it every time). I do what I can with ear protection to keep what I've got (which is a slowly losing battle), without any sound around me there is this very high pitched whine and with some low level masking sound that becomes manageable.
But e5 on the piano played loud is an instant trigger, that particular frequency is really not working for me. Never made any link with antibiotics but if I ever have to do a cure I'll be sure to pay attention. What mechanism are you concerned about? Is this a well known thing?
Do you have an audiologist regularly look at your ears? Obstruction and buildup can make tinnitus worse.
I find I really should wear earplugs way more often than I think. Putting dishes away, shoveling snow, scraping ice, even just running a sink. For everyday wear I cut down cheap foam plugs to ~half length (and reduce the depth of insertion), and I also wash them beforehand/periodically with plant-based soap. This removes additives in the foam which I find can cause skin irritation and reduce breathability.
> Do you have an audiologist regularly look at your ears?
I did in the past, haven't in years so thank you for the reminder, I really should do that. I think in part it is because I've simply given up on ever seeing an improvement, just a very slow rearguard fight.
I think it's less of a concern for someone like you where it was brought on by loud noise vs someone like me where it's likely due to an imbalanced microbiome where taking antibiotics could potentially damage your microbiome further, leading to worsening tinnitus.
You should be okay. I've found a couple of studies that have looked at groups of patients in the hundreds, with no worsening of hearing loss (and presumably, no worsening of tinnitus) [1][2]. Caveat is that both studies were done in kids, since they get more ear infections in general. Also, "topical ear drop medications containing gentamycin or neomycin do not appear to be ototoxic in humans unless the tympanic membrane (ear drum) is perforated" [3].
I've had Tinnitus since I was 14 (when I went to a concert and stood in front of the speakers).
A couple of pieces of advice to people who might be struggling with their tinnitus:
1. You need to learn to cope with it - once you're used to it, it will mostly fade into the background and be manageable. Accepting that it'll never be silent again was very difficult, but that's the only thing hat helped me feel better in the end.
2. Wear ear plugs when it gets too loud! It's too easy to get irreversible damage to your hearing, and that's the only thing you can really do - prevent it.
Curiously, yesterday I woke up at night because the tinnitus had gotten louder again - stupidly, I played drums the other day at a jam session without earplugs. I could punch myself for that one, and see it as (yet another) wakeup call to be more careful.
Prolonged exposure to loud sounds, short extremely loud sounds (explosions), ototoxic drugs (some antibiotics, chemo..) and substances (toluene..) and viral infections that spread into inner ear can all cause cochlear damage and therefore tinnitus.
Covid vaccines do sometimes lead to increased tinnitus symptoms. But you can’t draw any conclusions from that, because getting COVID often leads to increased tinnitus. I’m not sure whether it’s known yet, but it very well may be that on balance there are fewer cases of tinnitus associated with the vaccine than with the virus. Also, BTW, flu vaccines and catching the flu both have reports of tinnitus increase. My theory: any inflammation event may be likely to increase tinnitus symptoms.
What difference does it make if covid causes it? Most people took the vaccine, pretty much everybody got covid anyway. The vaccine was voluntary (with a lot of unethical coercion).
What do you mean what difference does it make? Isn’t it clear that you cannot attribute tinnitus to the covid vaccine, if the covid virus (or any virus, or any vaccine) causes tinnitus as much or more often than the vaccine does?
If the per-capita rate of onset tinnitus symptoms when getting the vaccine is lower than the rate of onset tinnitus when catching covid, then the vaccine isn’t just not implicated, it’s effectively helpful at reducing tinnitus, as a byproduct of reducing cases and/or severity of covid illness.
Pretty much everyone got covid anyway. The vaccine was an unnecessary intervention that didn't do anything to stop covid and caused harm to many people. Just admit you were conned into taking it.
Haven't you noticed, after smearing, slandering and discriminating against those who chose not to take it, there is very little interest in following up with comparisons between the two groups? You would have expected scientists to be really interested in comparing the groups considering it was done under Trump's operation warp speed, and used a novel technology never before approved for human use. Instead the vaccine free are ignored. Tells me all I need to know.
I haven’t had covid, as far as I know. Of course I saw the recommendations to get the vaccine, but I didn’t see any smearing or slandering or conning, I don’t know what you’re referring to. The company I work for did allow vaccinated people to return to work before unvaccinated people, and to me that seemed like a prudent choice at the time, but the vaccine requirement was dropped at my work a long time ago. I’m sorry that your choice had unfairly negative consequences for you, especially if you felt bullied.
Please keep in mind that it doesn’t really matter if a lot of vaccinated people still got covid later. That was expected, because the ‘vaccine’ was not a covid cure. If the spread was slowed and the symptoms were reduced significantly, then the vaccine was successful. There has been lots of science on the unvaccinated, and it found that they died and were hospitalized from covid at much higher rates than vaccinated people. I believe there is plenty of science still happening on the secondary effects of the vaccine, so being unaware of it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. I’m not aware of “harm to many people” who took the vaccine. What harm are you referring to, and how many people were harmed, exactly? Did that harm happen less often or more often than to people who got covid? Just like with tinnitus, you can’t take anecdotes out of context when it happens to someone vaccinated if you don’t compare it to people who weren’t vaccinated.
BTW, while the covid vaccine was an untested vaccine at first (like all vaccines before trials), it did go through trials and it was not untested technology. mRNA therapies had been used in other non-covid trials for a decade, and tested against other infectious diseases for several years before the covid vaccine was developed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7956899/
Think about it: at this point, we have more data on the effects of the covid vaccine than almost any other vaccine or drug in all of human history. Concerns about it being untested did maybe make sense in March of 2020, but it has now been thoroughly tested and so those concerns don’t make that much sense to hold on to anymore, right?
So I take it you weren’t very interested in talking about tinnitus?
And yes it does matter that people caught covid after as we were promised the opposite. Some people lost everything as a result of the totalitarian lockdowns so we could wait on the savior of a vaccine that turned out to b a complete failure. Some people lost their lives to the useless "vaccine".
No mRNA product had ever been approved for human us despite the decades of research. Why not?
And these "vaccines" caused tinnitus in many people, so it is relevant.
You’re talking about tabloid journalism?? The CNN link has no smearing, slandering or discrimination. It simply recommends the vaccine and says there are consequences to not taking it, which is true. It certainly has a lean toward recommending the vaccine, and it’s true that there could be consequences to taking it. That’s just a bit of bias, not slander or smear. Do you have personal experience that’s making you upset about the Covid vaccine?
Yes the vaccine might be relevant to tinnitus, and like I said Covid and the flu and catching a cold has also lead to many many people saying those things caused tinnitus. Claiming the vaccine itself is the direct cause of the tinnitus is unjustified and therefore misleading. If the cause is inflammation, then anything that causes inflammation can lead to tinnitus, whether it’s a vaccine or catching a flu or hitting your head. The tinnitus may have nothing to do with the Covid vaccine specifically, it may be nothing more than a byproduct of activating your immune system.
I got vaccinated three times (with Pfizer). No ill effects on my hearing/tinnitus (I was monitoring it). Then I got COVID (Omicron), was quite sick for several days (lost smell) and it seems the tinnitus worsened a bit in one ear. So... your mileage may vary, as with everything.
They do make the tinnitus more noticeable for sure! By blocking out sounds which would otherwise “mask” the tinnitus, it can become noticeable if it’s otherwise pretty quiet. But in conditions where you really need earplugs I think you still won’t really notice it that much when wearing earplugs (very loud situations).
Some speculation in this thread about the causes of tinnitus. There are several, including hearing loss, which (as someone here points out) possibly produces tinnitus in a manner similar to how limb loss can cause phantom limb pain. The nervous system isn't like plumbing, it's a tangled web of self-adjusting feedback loops. Once an input is severed, an area of the tangled web may lose an important calibrating input. Neurons don't emit "noise signals" (or "pain signals" or whatever) they just depolarise in response to stimulation, and altered calibration alters which neurons depolarise and how often. The frequency and number of certain neurons depolarising is experienced as noise (or pain or whatever) by the conscious human they belong to.
Good talk here[0] BUT BE WARNED, I recall* that there's a high-pitched squeal during this talk as a demonstration of what tinnitus is like for done people. It's extremely nasty especially if you're wearing headphones.
Incidentally, the self-adjusting feedback loop model helps explain why things like wiggling your jaw can alter the experience of tinnitus. Due to wiring issues, sensory input from muscles and joints can get mixed in with the auditory inputs. A similar mechanism (which isn't fully understood) helps explain why, for example, people having a heart attack can experience pain in the left arm. There's nothing wrong with the arm, the normal sensory signals from the arm are mixing with those from the heart.
I had tinnitus my entire life and it’s really annoying. I always thought everyone had it too, until I found out they didn’t, which, in a way, was even more annoying. At the same, I can say my hearing is pretty sharp. I often hear sounds that are too subtle or far away for others to hear. So I’m not sure if in my case the ringing has to do with hearing loss. But I’d be so happy to give anything a shot
I can hear ringing in dead silence, and if I pay close attention I can hear it without silence, too. But some say that's just blood flowing, and real tinnitus is much more obvious.
Regardless, I can't escape it either. If I focus on it, I can make myself dissociate from the pain.
https://uselullaby.com "Lullaby can lower your Tinnitus' volume and improve your quality of life with an experimental treatment designed specifically for you."
I'm just promoting this because I've tried this myself and it kind of helps. At least to relax when the noise gets too painful to bear
My case is linked to the neurovascular conflict, but the tool is for the brain, so I hope it helps someone else too.
Lullaby is free. It's notched white noise, with an interactive test to help you find the notch frequency for your tinnitus. So not the same as this youtube clip, which is just an ascending sine tone.
Disclaimer - I’m not a doctor. Simply speaking, the vessel in my brain got too close to the nerve, causing me to become almost 100% deaf on one side, the whole thing took 1 day, probably as a result of a stressful day, combined with the overall setup of my brain. The lack of signals coming from the ear is now causing my brain to “hear” the sound based on what is happening in a vein, some false data coming (and also not coming) to the brain, that’s tinnitus. It’s something between the sound of an old tv and the sound they play in movies when a hero gets too close to an explosion.
I had the MRI scan made, and surprisingly the doctor who did it also suffers from that thing. We are both in 30-40 years old range. This helped me to accept it, not going to lie. Like being able to ask somebody who knows what tinnitus is.
Here's a very interesting study about how manual osteopathy on the temporal bones could help the auditory nerve/tinnitus. It's been a huge relief for me.
I've suffered from tinnitus that's gotten worse at times, and for me it definitely feels like there's some sort of nerve that's pinched or damaged because my hearing is totally fine but when certain muscles are tight in the area it gets louder, when I yawn it squeezes something and I get this loud tone, and sometimes it gets worse with pressure or impact. I had a very nasty and loud lower tone but I found physiotherapy around the neck and especially osteopathy around the temporal bone very, very effective in reducing/eliminating that lower tone. Osteopaths will talk about how if the temporal bone is stuck in rotation it can pinch/damage the auditory nerve. I don't fully understand the mechanics but whatever they do WORKS for me in taking away the loudest tone of tinnitus.
I told my doctor about this effect of yawning and he said that’s just a reflex, unrelated.
However my tinnitus started when they removed my wisdom teeth and that’s also when my TMJ started, so I’m pretty sure they are somehow related, and my tinnitus is generated by some kind of a bone/ligament alignment issue.
It’s very interesting what you said about ostheopathy, I would try it out except I’m afraid it can just as well make it worse as it can make it better if the ostheopath doesn’t know what they’re doing. At least that’s what dentists told me when I asked about if fixing my TMJ would fix my tinnitus.
Ya I also have had wisdom teeth removed and TMJ issues for a long time, and it also seems related. The nice thing about Osteopathy is that it's very gentle so it shouldn't be as dangerous as more aggressive or invasive treatments. Some Osteopaths are especially experienced with ear-related things. I've had very, very good results from it personally.
For me the biggest help has been that as well as general physio/exercises (especially eccentric neck muscle exercises with a exercise band) around the neck getting all hose muscles healthy and relaxed.
And for the resistant band thing, kind of like this video. But I put the resistance band in a door at a 90 degree angle to my head and I focus on the "eccentric" movment, slowly bringing it back into upright position and letting it pull the muscles and lengthen them.
> Here's a very interesting study about how manual osteopathy on the temporal bones could help the auditory nerve/tinnitus. It's been a huge relief for me.
Is this something that only a medical professional should do? If not, I’d love to see a video of this. I can’t figure out from the figures what one is supposed to do.
1. Hearing loss is usually caused by damage and death of the hair cells——the sensory receptor cells that respond directly to sound. The hairs on the upper face of these cells vibratethis physically opens ion channels that change the voltage across the cell membrane. This in turn causes these cell to releases neurotransmitters at their feet. The transmitter release then induces series of action potentials (spikes) in the axons of spiral ganglion cell; #2 below
2. But hearing loss can also be caused by damage to the spiral ganglion cells themselves. These cells and their axons conduct spikes between cochlea and brain. They cells are heavy workers and they are also fussy and metabolically demanding cells—-even by CNS standards. Revving them too high can blow their gaskets.
In sum, two among several mechanisms that contribute to hearing loss and tinnitus.
In a very similar way, blindness can also be caused by two major classes of cell damage and death—-1. the death of photoreceptors (called retinal degeneration) or 2. by damage to axons in the optic nerve (retinal ganglion cell axons). This is usually called glaucoma.
This lovely study from Maison and colleagues is focused on the consequences of hearing loss caused primarily by damage to cochlear nerve fibers and their synapses in the cochlea, not the degeneration of hair cells per se.
It is a systematic and rigorous study that supports the idea that tinnitus can be associated with nerve damage rather than hair cell loss. This is a surprisingly hard problem to nail down.
If you want a good introduction to this work then read this review article by the same group.
I had the ever common thinking it was caused by a visit to the dentist or the antibiotics that were prescribed. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.
It was also possibly when I walked behind a server rack and the fans were blowing air and the sound from the fans were loud, both into my ears. This could could have caused the damage that caused the tinnitus.
Took about two days to kick in fully. Tinnitus started, then stoped. Then started like it wanted to kick in fully and then stopped. Then started and never left.
99% of the time I never notice it. 1% of the time I do notice.
I also think it has something to do with neck pain and the muscles behind the head and around the neck. If I sleep in the wrong position and get a sore neck, then the tinnitus is crazy loud.
I remember thinking my life would never be the same. I was stuck with this forever. Pretty traumatic event. To anyone else out there, please find comfort that you’ll get used to it. You won’t notice it. It’s not the end of the world. Don’t stress. You’ll be fine.
I developed tinnitus during a bout of COVID last week.
On about the third day I had an earache in one ear. Earache went away after about a day but now I have pretty strong tinnitus in that ear. COVID symptoms long gone now but tinnitus remains.
'Volume' is negligible when I wake up but increases over the day. I still feel some 'pressure' in that ear (maybe residual sinus infection?) so I'm hoping it will heal on its own.
Has yours been improving at all? Mine started (just in the left ear) about 48hrs after my 3rd Pfizer shot and remained loud for ~8months. Several months of noticeable dissipation followed by true silence at about the 1-year mark. Thought I was in the clear but it's started again out of nowhere this fall. I'm optimistic it will improve again and can probably be controlled with better lifestyle habits but at this stage is something I feel I will be managing forever. I've seen ENT's and audiologists but they're unable to help past confirming my inner ear and hearing are fine. In 2022 John Stewart had some infectious disease experts on his podcast and one of the epidemiologists stated that he got tinnitus from his 2nd vaccine, and his 3rd exacerbated it. It was at that point that I realized it had to be somewhat common.
It got noticeably milder after consuming medicinal mushrooms (lion's mane etc) for some months but it never went completely away.
I have days where it gets a bit worse. Maybe if I don't sleep well or recently I had some torticolis (neck pain) and had to take muscle relaxers. But then I go back to baseline.
I’ve heard of lots of people first noticing tinnitus while being sick, as well as like the sibling comment, right after getting a vaccine (flu, covid, etc.) It seems like inflammation generally makes the symptoms worse, and I’d bet that most of the time inflammation is causing latent existing tinnitus to cross a threshold and become noticeable and reach your consciousness. I distinctly remember that the first time I consciously noticed my tinnitus, I knew I’d actually been hearing the sound very quietly for some time and not recognizing what it was… I don’t know how long I had tinnitus before I knew I had tinnitus.
What i do not understand is why normal hearing tests were seen as a counter argument to the brain compensation for hering loss theory. If the brain compensated for the loss of nerve or hearing cells, the signal should be back to normal but with more noise, the failure of adaptation of the brain to the noise results in tinnitus. To have patients with normal or nearly normal hearing tests but tinnitus would be expected.
for all people who have tinnitus or the tinnitus is worse because of a visit by the dentist. I have tinnitus and it got much much worse when I got a filling. The reason is they have to make the filling the height of the teeth that was there bevore. even half a mm more can make your jaws clinch and you get tinnitus. My luck I fund another Dentist who took this seriously and took some of the filling away so my jaw didnt clinch anymore... and bam my tinnitus was back to normal.
only a little anectode that could help.
The first dentist did deny that it did came from the filling and the other one did say thats new to him and he will study on this and see me next week urgently. A week later he said it could be and we should try it ... many many many thanks to that doctor without him I would maybe killed myself
The number of medical ‘professionals’ who just automatically dismiss possible connections like this is utterly depressing. I’m sure they must hear plenty of crackpot theories, but that’s no excuse for failing to help people who can be helped. I’m glad you managed to find a professional who was willing to take the time to actually consider your suggestions and help you.
Tinnitus is so strange. It’s like depression. You can’t will it away, but if you start to feel better it also gets better. And if you feel worse it gets worse. And both reinforce each other.
It’s not just perception and it’s not just physical. Physical symptoms make it seem worse and when it seems worse it actually gets worse.
The best thing to do is accept that you have it and try to never hear it, so that you don’t think about it. Then it might actually (not just psycholgicy) get better. It won’t be cured, but it can have a huge improvement.
Not sure if tinnitus but I've heard a ringing in super-quiet environments since I was a kid.
Mid-30s now and a few months back I had a case where the ringing was very noticeable and it lasted a few weeks. I think what set it off was some hearing damage from using high-frequency equipment without hearing protection but it was definitely an experience that I'm not keen on repeating.
Once I noticed that the background ringing was louder than normal I couldn't un-hear it and it was starting to drive me nuts.
I can induce a sleep paralysis while my consciousness is awake. Why? Well, as a child, I thought it was a cool superpower. As the paralysis sets in, I hear a loud wooshing sound. Then it gets louder and louder until full paralysis sets in. A few years ago I had a similar experience, but it left me with a permanent tinnitus. I guess you can hurt yourself by simply lying down doing nothing.
About 6 years ago I caught a bad flu which evolved into an ear infection that required antibiotics, my ears were in pain, really stuffed, popping etc. When I got that under control, I was left with what can only be described as tinnitus, a very high-pitched sound in my ears, almost undetectable in my right ear but quite annoying in my left.
It was there for about 12-18 months, but it slowly started to go away to the point I had to pause for a minute to remember if the left/right one was more affected. After 9-12 months I was only able to hear it if I was wearing ear plugs, and now I need to wear ear plugs and really concentrate to realize that it's not 100% silence, but it's close to 1-5% of what it was and even the "tone" of the tinnitus is more muted.
I'm not sure if they genuinely healed, if there even is such thing as temporary tinnitus (for more than a day/week), or if my brain just got better at filtering that out.
Severe tinnitus 24/7 is the least of my problems that I mostly tune out.
I have left SCDS. It was verified with audiology and CT (a tiny pit) after I correctly self-diagnosed it. A traditional approach surgery is possible, but it's brain surgery where one surgeon accesses the area by lifting your cerebellum out of the way. There is a lot to go wrong for something that isn't 100% debilitating. Just I can't eat croutons because they're way too loud, I always hear my voice like there's a microphone on permanent feedback, I can hear my left eye move most of the time, and music that's too loud makes my eyes jump off focus with a momentary wave of nausea (oculovestibular involvement).
It isn’t just that I get tinnitus when my eras are plugged with ear wax if I don’t clean them a for a while, and when I do poof it’s magically gone. I figure tinnitus is the brains response to a lack of input in a specific frequency range, like filler noise.
I’ll add my two cents, I have mild tinnitus on the left ear, like other readers I learned to ignore it and only really notice it when focusing or drawing attention to it. Luckily doesn’t affect my sleep or work. Stress and similar situations seem to intensify it a little and I become more aware. I’ll add a curious one to the discussion, I’m a big AirPods fan, as soon as Apple released the AirPods Pro I bought them, on the first week of use I started getting horrible headaches/nauseas which I associated (most likely wrongly) to having tinnitus and it causing some balance “imbalance”. Returned them and got back to regular AirPods.
Hmmm, it was within a week or two of getting AirPods Pro (and heavily using the noise cancelling mode) that I developed a strange dull ache/pressure throughout my sinuses and upper jaw. Stopped using noise cancelling and it seems to have improved a lot but hasn’t completely gone away.
Some googling suggests noise cancelling tech has negative side-effects for quite a lot of people.
I strongly suspect that many others must be suffering from environment-/diet-/tech-induced ailments but are simply not inquisitive enough to experiment and identify the sources of discomfort.
Tinnitus and partial hearing loss is the largest personal pain in my life. Ruins my ability to listen to music for pleasure, hinders my focus, and overall disheartening. Hoping there is a cure in my lifetime, both for hearing loss and tinnitus.
My tinnitus started in 2009 during an anxiety period (the worst period of my life) and basically due to an ototoxic drug for dizziness.
I had already experienced it after going to a nightclub when I was a younger but I never thought that this problem would remain forever due to a doctor prescription drug.
Not only that but in the next years I got two more ringings and now I (don't have anxiety anymore) I can live normally with tinnitus but I'm always hope to get a cure. I was a silence junkie previous to the tinnitus and now I miss the "sound" of the silence so much.
I believe that once a year I can hear again the silence but it's my brain tricking me again.
Maybe the article is on to something, but it mostly doesn't seem to apply in my case. As I sit here with my ears ringing, I can tell you that my hearing has recently been pronounced "perfect" by a doctor of audiology (not just an audiologist). So I apparently have no damage, but I still have the ringing.
My ears don't ring all the time though -- often the ringing begins after I eat. I haven't narrowed down which foods could be responsible. It's possible that I have a mild food allergy that I'm unaware of.
Reading the comments, it seems pretty obvious that there are multiple causes.
To add my own anecdote (because I don't see it mentioned otherwise): I have very specific hearing loss (40dB) in one frequency range frequency (4khz). That is also the frequency of my tinnitus. The cause is almost certainly bored neurons making stuff up: there is never input at that frequency, so they produce their own.
Maybe fixing the auditory nerve will help some people. Other folk will need a different cure...
I overslept today and I just woke up thirty minutes ago. A minute within waking up my brain feels under a lot of pressure and the accompanying tinnitus was very intensive. In fact I simultaneously have a headache.
As more time passes the intensity of the headache and tinnitus get lower by the minute. The idea that tinnitus is caused by hearing loss alone sounds like a load of bullshit. Tinnitus gets worse when I wear very tight headphones or when I am ill or when I move my jaw to apply more pressure to the head. If I could engineer some sort of machine to control the pressure applied to my head, I am pretty sure I could control the tinnitus.
Since I have built a mental model of when tinnitus is really bad and when it it is almost imperceptible, even the most intense tinnitus doesn't faze me and strikes me more as an annoyance like a mosquito buzzing around, because I know that it will go away. Weeks go by where I literally don't think a single thought about tinnitus, then suddenly, it strikes and can't be ignored, except I know it will go away so I ignore it regardless.
Mine started after taking antibiotics for Lymes. Not sure what caused it the antibiotics or lymes... this was in 2021 so other things were at play too.
Anyone have any tips for healing?
Really has hindered from doing deep thinking and just even day dreaming. I have been an avid meditator and I feel that has been taken away from me.
What is good though is that I dont hear it when i am active in the day such as working or out with friends.
I sometimes have a difficult time trying to tell if I actually have tinnitus, or if I can simply detect something that's there for everyone. Plenty of websites say that you will always be able to hear the blood flowing through your ears, and that doesn't count as tinnitus. It's just that most people subconsciously filter that out, to the point where it can't be detected even if they look for it, except while in a completely silent, noise-deadening room, such as an anechoic chamber.
It's similar to how I don't have any issues with color in my vision, yet when I look at a completely solid and flat color, I can see noise in it. It's not visual snow, because it obstructs nothing and I can easily tell the difference between even very similar colors, but I don't seem to experience the "noise reduction effect" where if I stare at a solid color, it is completely and entirely solid and unchanging and has no noise at all.
I believe I'm simply observing entropy, and that noise is supposed to be there, because it's impossible for light to always explore all possible paths instantaneously and exhaustively. But I'm not supposed to be able to notice or perceive it, I don't think.
I think it has to do with me being autistic, but it's hard to find any descriptions of similar experiences online, and it's also hard to communicate about it with others.
Exception: my right eye has significantly more noise, to the point where it's difficult to actually see and read through that eye, even though I can still see all colors and text perfectly sharply. If I close my left eye, I will see the darkness through my right, to the point where it's distracting. I think this was an error caused by me being cross-eyed at birth; my right eye just sorta deteriorated, and now it only exists for depth perception.
I see the same noise, but I think it's along our nerves rather than the light it's self. High rest camera don't pick it up for example.
There's a lot of filtering happening in the visual cortex all the time. Your nose for example is visible but gets ignored. (I hate it when I remember this and suddenly notice it lol)
There's also the blind spot in each eye which gets covered by what the other eye can see. If I close one eye now, I can alway see exactly where that blind spot is now.
After I had an eye test where they flashed a light in my eyes, I perceived the blood vessels. Now I can sometimes perceive them if I look at a white TV screen and pay attention.
> Your nose for example is visible but gets ignored
To me, it's anything that's covered in one eye, but visible by the other, that can
get "ignored". It's just binocular vision at work. Similar to the blind spot thing you mentioned.
I've seen my blood vessels too, but they didn't just flash a light in my eyes, they had me look into a machine that did a full retinal scan. Now that was fun, because it was 15 minutes of "wtf your eyelashes are too long they keep getting in the way. keep trying"
Agreed, these are just binocular vision. But here's an interesting one.
A relative had a pituitary tumor crushing her optic nerve, and went to a specialist who ran some tests as she was seeing Van Gogh style patterns everywhere. It turns out she had no color vision in the periphery, but she didn't know this. It was only when she couldn't correctly identify the color of some lights until they were right in front of her, and she got freaked out by it.
That's really cool. It's similar to how I can only read what's in the exact center of my vision, but I don't really notice because I'm always looking at what I'm trying to read. When my eyes move, my brain still maintains the illusion that what I'm reading has not actually moved, I look where I am focusing, so the data is there when I need it.
This is all really cool, honestly.
I can read fine from my left eye, but if I try to read with my right eye, then both eyes will be superimposed, and sometimes I'll get confused when my brain is trying to parse two sentences at once and it forgets which eye it's reading with.
My right eye is defective, lol. Even though it can see perfectly clearly and sharply, my brain just doesn't treat it properly. Everything that relies on having two eyes works fine, like depth perception, but anything that relies on only one eye, can only really be done with my left.
I have tinnitus and strangely, I have no real idea when it started, much less what caused it. Maybe it just started softly and got louder. I think it appeared in my early 20s, couldn't swear that it didn't start way before then, and I'm pretty sure it was there when I was about 30. It seems strange somehow that I just don't actually know.
Badly fitting earbuds (Samsung Galaxy Buds) gave me tinnitus in one ear. I still am not sure how that's possible, but wearing them for more than 30mn was hurting my right ear, tinnitus appeared shortly after and kept getting worse. Once I stopped using the buds, the pain went away and the tinnitus decreased, but it's still there one year later.
I have tinnitus, a 4khz tone on both ears, one more than the other.
I have hearing loss at high frequencies (the curve of my hearing tests drops abruptively right around 4khz). The side with the worst hearing is also the one with worse tinnitus.
My loss probably comes from many many ear infections as a child (plus hearing to loud music on a basement, and just bad genetics).
Things that make my tinnitus worse:
- Basically, any kind of "hearing effort" stresses me out and makes my tinnitus worse (busy places, bars, parties, etc. are the worse, but even music on my headsets, which I enjoy, make it worse). Maybe this puts some doubts on the "phantom limb" theory?
- Stress
- Not sleeping well
- After doing exercise. I play sports, run and lift light weights. After any of these exercises, it gets a bit worse
- Driving a car: the humming noise of car drive is probably the worse for me
- If I clinch my jaws (mimicking a strong bite) I hear another, surprisingly similar tone... However, I feel like it's a different thing, not related.
I wished I had a similar list of things that lessen it... I don't :-)
However: I started using prescription hearing aids. And although they don't really help with tinnitus directly, I do feel much better: general noise doesn't bother me as much, and of course I hear better :-).
Recommendation: if you have some hearing loss, don't wait to use a hearing aid, just like you don't wait to wear glasses. They are expensive, but worth it. And no, they are not just simple "earbuds".
Confession: I play the drums, although very occasionally. I have no proof but I'm sure I had hearing loss way before I started playing. Playing my drums of course makes my tinnitus worse: probably due to the combination of the sound + "exercise".
I have hearing loss in my left ear, from mid frequencies to higher. So basically I can only hear bass on my left hear. Do people usually get hearing aids when one ear is damaged? I went to the doc and they said it was optional since I could still have a normal conversation, so I'm not sure if that's what you're referring to.
I was told the same thing 20-or-so years ago: if you feel like you can have a "normal" life, you don't need to wear one... Now I regret not trying them earlier.
As others said here: your nerves stop receiving stimulus... which over time might trigger tinnitus. And even without tinnitus, unused nerves become atrophied... so using hear aids too late might not help as much doing so now.
It's a social thing... if it were about your eyes, you'd be wearing glasses for sure. Glasses are nowadays "fashionable". Hearing aids definitely aren't.
Now, I do have a big doubt about aids: Couldn't they make your hearing loss even worse?! (since they amplify sound and inject it right into your ear, the exact same thing that ear doctors say that kill your hearing)
I got tinnitus in one ear after a fall where I hit my face hard on a table. After being careful with loud music my entire life this feels like a bummer. But accidents happen and it could have been worse. I also got some numbness in other parts of my face that slowly got better so I have some hope the tinnitus may improve.
Tea tree oil is an ototoxin. I had what I thought was a wart on the backside of one of my ears, and when I put a cotton ball with one drop of tea tree oil on it, I immediately heard ringing and ripped it off. The ringing has remained. It's not severe, but I've read stories online where people have put tea tree oil directly in their ear canal and were badly affected. This has to be relatively common, with how popular tea tree oil is in products that you put on your head. I bet people don't realize their tinnitus is caused by the tea tree oil and continue using the products.
Also, I have a friend who has severe tinnitus as a result of an ear infection. He really struggled with it in the beginning, but hasn't mentioned it in a while.
I have a relatively minor tinnitus, which I thought was caused by my drum lessons in my early twenties.
But when I tried to remember it, I always heard something like a tinnitus sound (albeit quieter) whenever I closed my ears with my hands since my childhood, during which I was never exposed to any loud music or sound.
I’m trying to suss out whats my tinnitus. I’ve had persistent fullness in my head for about 2 years now that I can’t find an explanation for.
Audiologist says I have better than average hearing for my age (41).
The precipitating event in my mind was an Opeth concert in 2021. However, I never thought anything was too loud there, and wore earplugs for most of it. Additionally that was a very stressful time. Also, I have ehlers danlos.
So might be TMJ, sinus pressure, EDS, and/or exposure to loud music.
It sucks especially because Opeth weren’t great performers there. I suspect I don’t like most live metal shows because they seem to make them too loud.
Opeth are just a band more suitable for making studio albums than touring. You'll find other metal bands that are amazing live but boring when listening at home.
Metal concerts are loud sure, but the loudest concerts I've gone to have been electronic or indie stuff with heavy electronic influences - they try to make you feel like you're in a night club I guess.
This has been highly-variable for me over the years. I have noticed changes with with caffeine intake and exercise.
On many occasions I've felt my ears "pop" after an extensive cardio session. The result feels like I just took really weak earplugs out. Rowing is more prone to do this than other forms of exercise in my experience.
I've also noticed that if I force myself to sit in total silence and remain as calm as possible, whatever ringing I can hear will start to diminish to ~imperceptible within a few minutes. When I'm on edge and anxious, the opposite appears to be true.
I’ve had mine for a very long time. It started when I was in loud rock bands in my late teens and early 20s. However, it eventually went away completely on its own. It came raging back several years ago (I’m in my early 40s now) and is now constant. I’m not sure what started it again, but it could have been a very intense course of gentamicin after a kidney surgery that had some complications.
Honestly, it doesn’t bother me as much as some people. It’s just there. I would love for it to go away, but I kind of ignore it most of the time.
My tinnitus completely disappeared when I visited chiropractor, I had some neck issues, after just a few visits, the inner sound completely disappeared, that was uncomfortably relaxing experience, but it just lasted for 2 months, now the sound is back. So my initial assumption that the reason is lack of blood supply, because after those treatments I literally felt the flood of blood going into my brain, it was like the tap was not fully opened before my visit to the doctor.
I’m surprised more people haven’t mentioned noise canceling headphones as a possible cause. There was an HN thread about this awhile back. This has been mentioned on many forums, google it.
My tinnitus (from a single loud party), which I had before noise canceling headphones, gets worse with noise canceling headphones, but only temporarily, like 2 or 3 days.
I found out as well that my headphones plays my own voice back to me so that I dont shout, but was able to turn that off in the settings (Jabra 2), which seems to help.
For me it's an attention issue. I went for a checkup and it was a first time I've been in silenced cabin where doctor checks hearing. And I wasn't able to hear some of the frequencies, because of ringing in my ears, which was louder. And doctor expressed some concern about it.
Before that I rarely ever noticed it. Now it is very loud and constant. Maybe it was like that for a long-long time, but now I just focus on it too much.
Got mine very recently as a side effect of taking Bupropion (Wellbutrin). At 150mg I had no side effects and it was working well (for ~12 months). Then Doc upped it to 300mg and with in 2 weeks silence no longer existed. Went back down to 150mg but Tinnitus is still there after 2 months lets see.
Kinda gotta say that if it doesn't get worse its worth the positive effects of Bupropion still annoying to be in that 1% group with the side effect
Experiencing tinnitus after years of working around saws, aircraft, and being in a band has been one of the reasons the past 4 years especially have been miserable. The proliferation of face masks suddenly made communicating with people extremely difficult where it was only a slight annoyance before.
this article was fascinating and I hope they find a cure for this in my lifetime.
One lesson I've learned in life is to never fly when recovering from flu, even if you feel quite okay. I did that very painful mistake once a decade ago, and since then I've had permanent tinnitus in my left ear. It doesn't bother me much in daily life, but I would like to be be able to experience total silence in nature without that constant noise.
Does anyone know where the research went regarding cold sores on the lip at the virus which causes them? I heard a doctor once speak on the subject that HSV1 I think it is for the lips, goes and burrows in the nerves of the jaw and face and jumps over to the auditory nerve at some point. I was never able to verify any of those claims but it sounded feasible.
Has anybody tried or know somebody who tried the Lenire device? It's been out for a little while now and is in the price range ($4k) where I think it might be worth a shot.
Wow! Just tonight I had a dream that my mild tinnitus had worsened at later years. My brain has adjusted to ignoring the noise the past 20 years or so, especially when doing physical or mentally challenging work. But it’s always there as a companion in the background if I choose to “tune into it”.
I don't know how much of my Tinnitus is related to the "mind body connection" (Sarno), but I find that my tinnitus comes and goes, and is noticeable when I'm dealing with stress.
I suffer from tinnitus myself and a doctor determined that there was damage to the hair cells and auditory nerves after an ear infection. I assumed the cause of such issues was factor was pretty well known.
Some may be able to calibrate their hearing in this regard with something called Auditory Integration Training. I have done it. It worked. You might also want to read more about CAPD (Central Auditory Processing Disorder).
Mine has gotten pretty bad it’s constant now. Before hitting the back of skull worked for a bit and listening to YouTube tinnitus scrubber worked but not anymore. Hoping this can be fixed one day.
I used to have tinnitus. I suppose I still technically do, but it appears much more rarely, and when it does, I can make it stop entirely in just a few seconds. So I'm basically "free" of it these days.
Two things I learned over the years:
1. Tinnitus seems related to dopaminergic neurotransmission (or faults thereof.)
I have ADHD, but I didn't know it until I was an adult. Growing up, I would often get episodes of tinnitus. After being medicated for ADHD, these episodes became much more rare, and also exclusively now only occur at the end of the day, when my meds are half worn-off already.
I've seen many journal papers correlating tinnitus to various dopaminergic dysfunctions. For example, people who develop tinnitus in old age are apparently also more likely to develop parkinsonism, and vice-versa.
If you've noticed that you're developing tinnitus, then you might want to raise the possibility with your GP that you could have some undiagnosed problem with dopamine. Get screened for ADHD if you haven't; get tested for Parkinson's if you're the right age; etc. If it turns out that you have one of these chronic diseases and didn't know it — well, treating it on its own will probably change your life, but it'll potentially also help your tinnitus!
2. However, tinnitus also seems related to some physical process in the ear.
I've learned that, when the high-pitched ringing starts in one ear, I can instantly stop it — not just push it into the background, but literally silence it like pressing "stop" on an alarm — by using my finger to essentially plunge my ear: putting my finger into my ear canal just deeply enough and then twisting, resulting in a pressure seal like in-ear earbuds try to achieve; and then lightly — but quickly — pushing and pulling the trapped air-pressure in and out inside the ear canal, using the finger. After doing this for about 30 seconds (during which the tinnitus won't seem to change), my eardrum and ear canal both begin to feel warm. Once that happens, I then unplug the finger from my ear. At the moment I do, the tinnitus stops.
Presumably, the "plunging" action is in turn flexing my eardrum inward and outward. Basically it's acting like high-amplitude 1Hz infrasound. I'm not sure what this does that helps, but it certainly does help, consistently.
(If you're wondering: I've also had otitis media before, so I know what the sensation of my eustachian tube being blocked with fluid/crud, creating a pressure imbalance of the middle ear, feels like; and what unplugging the eustachian tube + rebalancing that pressure feels like. This isn't that! It's entirely an interaction between my finger, my eardrum, and maybe the bones of the middle ear. My ears are currently 100% clear of detritus on either side of the eardrum according to a recent ENT visit — and yet this procedure still works.)
I just cleared a serious sinus infection that had impacted the base of my skull and neck spinal discs. 4 hospitalizations this year an not a single mention.
I am on TRT and used a TENs machine to kick start my muscles again before hitting the gym and 1 session loosened enough to let my body pour out YEARS WORTH OF SCUM.
I have photos and posted a video to JPS Hospital on my IG because seeing this stuff is really disturbing.
Point being: My perspective is the US medical system at my disposal is utter shit and self-care is extremely important and these people sent me to collections and home with a potentially fatal respiratory suppression.
Reminder for folks who go to concerts or other events / areas that regularly have loud sounds - invest in ear protection! It is probably not worth it to risk your hearing for a slightly "better" listening experience. You will also avoid that partially deaf feeling after being exposed to loud music / sounds. There are a ton of reusable ear plugs on the market that you can easily keep on your person.
For some of you suffering for tinnitus, if you came here looking for a hack, I can offer a small tinnitus hack that worked for me, and may work for you if you find a noise that "cuts" the tinnitus sound. This summarizes what worked for me:
I have bilateral tinnitus that sounds like people screaming in each ear at 15.5khz -- it's bad enough that w/o this hack, self-harm would seem like an attractive option, which was incentive enough to get creative and now I'm only in pain a few minutes/day.
I'm on mobile so please forgive the AI assisted rewrite of a different post I made on HN [1]:
I hope this message reaches those struggling with tinnitus. I understand the intensity of the condition – my own tinnitus was unbearable. But I've found an effective way to manage it, and I'd like to share the steps:
1. *Effective Sound Track*: First, use YouTube-dl to download a specific sound track from this link: [Sound Link](https://youtu.be/8indTo2ykPw?si=izyTOg4gYvnfsqZs). I found it incredibly effective for cutting out tinnitus. It’s worth trying different sound prints if this one doesn’t work for you. Others with tinnitus have also found it helpful. You might want to edit out the initial dialogue using Audacity.
2. *Special Headphones*: Buy waterproof bone conduction headphones that are specifically designed for MP3 playback. Here's the link to the ones I use: [Headphones Link](https://a.co/d/aqqhPm9).
3. *Usage*: Load the MP3 onto these headphones. It’s been a life-changer for me, allowing me to experience what a normal life feels like again. I only really notice my tinnitus briefly each day when I wake up, before I sleep, and when I charge the headphones.
(end AI assist)
The reason this works (for me) is because I hear the tinnitus "inside my head" and the bone conduction headphones similarly make the noise print sound as if it originates from "inside your head". It does not interfere with normal hearing and you quickly become accustomed to the noise print and forget you even have it on your head. This particular model is NOT bluetooth-- it is an appliance that has one function only, play the scrubber noise. This reduces anxiety of dings and beeps and untethers your from your phone, and most of you know anxiety makes it worse. You can also wear these in the bath and the shower.
I'm sure it won't work for everyone, but it's been a literal lifesaver for me, so I hope it helps.
I don't think that's a very good comparison. Cancer strikes at the very heart of what we are (a bunch of cells which are expected to cooperate and sometimes don't). Compared with that, tinnitus seems pretty hackable.
Baldness seems like a good comparison, though, given how hearing involves hair in the inner ear. Cancer is thousands of different disorders so it’s unlikely there will ever be a single cure; making hair grow where we want it is a simpler task.
You could probably be possible to create an animal model by destroying some hearing cells/sensors in the ear.
As for creating a device to detect what the animal "hears", similar to how there's some research that used fmri with machine learning to "see dreams",it might be possible to do that for animal hearing.
We can try. Sometimes the cancer doesn't come back, and sometimes it does, and in no case do we understand why. This is not what most people mean by "cure".
I don't think we have very many treatments that are 100% efficacious and durable for most conditions, even ones that are generally considered curative.
If you take antibiotics-- sometimes it doesn't seem to work at all, and some other times the infection comes back after the cessation of treatment. This is true because of some reasons that are well-understood, and others that aren't.
Yes, most cancers are worse on these metrics than most uses of antibiotics, but not always ridiculously so. There are cancers with 5 year survival rates of >95%, and with very low recurrence rates after 5 years.
Earnest curiosity - when someone is cured of cancer, and it comes back, is that different from me being cured of the flu and then catching the flu again later? Obviously it's different sorts of malady, but is it that the same cancer comes back, or is it just that if you had kidney cancer once, it's likely you might get it again? Or do we just not know enough about cancer to say/it varies on the sort of cancer?
It's not like being cured normally means "and you'll never get that again ever".
We're mostly talking about it coming back. A treatment might eliminate the vast amount of cancer cells, but some can be lying dormant and wake back up at some later time (and since they survived, the ones that are more resistant to treatment have been selected-- prognosis is then much worse the second time around). Or sometimes those "seeds" of recurrent cancer never awake.
Of course, people who get one cancer are, on average, more genetically and environmentally exposed to cancer risk. Cancer treatments themselves can even increase the risk of new cancer in some cases. So getting an entirely independent cancer is possible, too.
That was mostly what I had in mind. There's plenty of diseases where you're cured in the sense that your body can passively take care of it from here, but there's a chance it flares up again. I was unclear if most cancers were a "you got rid of it, but a different part of your kidney developed a cancer now" as compared to "that cancer you had before is back"
The general thinking is not that the cancer will hopefully stay dormant but there's a chance it will flare up in the future. The act of flaring up is what makes the tumor a malignant cancer as opposed to a benign cyst. A cancer cell is already flaring up by definition.
Rather, the usual model is that you physically extract the cancer, or you poison it, and you hope that you removed or killed all of the living cancer cells. If one is left, the cancer will grow back over time. This is why a metastatic cancer is so much worse than one that hasn't yet metastasized - after metastasis, cancer cells can be located pretty much anywhere in your body, but before metastasis, they are all localized to wherever the cancer originally developed, and if you remove enough tissue, it's plausible that you might get them all.
This model is somewhat in tension with (part of) the concept of partial remission, where the growth of a cancer becomes slower. But in such a case, it is even more obvious than usual that the cancer of the future is the same cancer as the cancer of the past, since we could observe it the whole time.
You might also consider the implications of the fact that the terminology for what appears to be a total absence of cancer is "cancer in remission". We say that because we can't know whether the cancer is actually gone. If it isn't gone, it will come back.
Sometimes you get better from a sickness, but it stays idle in your body and resurfaces later. If you get chickenpox as a child, it'll stay in you and eventually come back as shingles when you're an adult.
Others like herpes are lifelong afflictions whose symptoms can clear up, become inactive and eventually reactivate and flare up again.
That’s kind of a flippant answer. I hope you know that viruses (particularly the herpes family) cause at least some forms of cancer and herpes is super transmissible and most people have some form (in particular familial herpes but also chicken pox). Can you catch it from riding a bus? Probably not. But I don’t think you were talking about literally from riding a bus but we don’t know if it’s a viral infection that’s untreated and has flare ups or if you can treat the viral infection and get reinfected. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s both - typically it’s a flare up but even if you cured the viral infection you could get reinfected and get cancer expressed again.
Yea, no shit. That's not the question I was asking. You can choose to be an annoying literalist, or you can be informative, or you can be quiet. You've chosen the least socially reasonable of them.
This is not the first story I have heard of health issues brought on by Kundalini yoga, it seems quite risky. It would be an interesting topic for rigorous study, could teach us about the mind body connection, but I wonder if it could be done in an ethical manner.
If I'm going to speculate wildly, given that tinnitus is linked to hearing loss, and can come from nerve damage, maybe the rising did somehow result in nerve damage? Hypoxia? Excitotoxicity?
I'm sorry for your tinnitus and for the loss of your father.
so after been in this community for a decade... i feel ashamed. I hope you downvote me so your essense is preserved. But this community is a failure ... and im glad i signed out based on what im seeing.
do you think it had to do with earing because of the tinniuts? in this case you are disrespecting many americans who have cancers that are not ear based...
it was a joke contrasting our hyper modern tech niche with ancient wisdom from the vedas. I also eat ghee and cumin. no intention of it being an insult. Just people projecting
What I am saying is that know-it-all types, who have come full circle with this and demonstrate full spectrum brainwave mastery, may have developed tinnitus as a result of experiencing too much fight or flight while fervently enumerating their existential understanding of who they exactly are. But by all means downvote the statement for sloppy writing or your inability to draw the correlation.
Maybe they struggle with understanding inward facing hyper vigilance vs outward facing hyper vigilance and feel it is too dangerous of a word for a reasonable person to associate with.
good stuff, mate. it's been 8 goddamn years since my right ear ngiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings all the time. I'm fine with waiting for another or two 8 years, but please, show some result. pretty please with cherry on top.
Some examples:
- jutting my jaw forwards
- moving my ears back with my face muscles
- pushing downward on the top of my head with my hands
Another possible clue: this has been true since I can remember — even as a child, well before I developed tinnitus. I always thought this was normal, until mentioning it to others, and it seems no one I know shares this experience.
This, to me, suggests that (my flavor of tinnitus, at least) may be due to physical/muscle related causes, and not necessarily associated with hearing damage or neurological. Or that I was “destined” to get tinnitus at some point, as if I was born with some defect that others weren’t.
Or, it could just be that there is something else unrelated with how my muscles are connected to my hearing that cause the same tinnitus (e.g. same frequency), and that the persistent tinnitus actually is hearing damage.
I’ve not looked into it much, and have really only mentioned this to my doctor (who mostly blew it off as irrelevant), and others in my family. But thought I’d share here in case anybody experienced something similar, and may have insight into what causes this “muscle-related tinnitus”, and if it’s somehow connected or unrelated to the persistent tinnitus.