I got rid of mine for a year thanks to a comment on HN. The only reason it came back is because of my lack of discipline. It's bearable as I only notice it when I actively listen for it now. Anyway, I am sure this would just work again.
So there was a comment that claimed it was related to bad neck posture. Being a keyboard warrior in my late 30s at that time I suffered the same issue: Tinnitus and generally bad posture. I figured that even if that wasn't true, working on my posture might be a good invest either way. So a couple of YouTube videos later I started working on it. Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two. To my surprise the tinnitus was actually also gone.
As I haven't build a real habit around the exercises eventually a bad posture came back, and so did the tinnitus. Both are generally not as bad as they were before, though.
Bad posture, and perhaps even more importantly, sitting is a really, really bad thing. There is a reason why taxi drivers have massively shorter life spans than the general population - sitting all day and the following poor circulation is one of the worst things you can do to your body.
By the way, do you have any youtube videos perhaps saved that you followed?
Agreed, bad posture (not just neck but in general) can cause both tinnitus and RSI-like symptoms in my experience and I have been able to tackle both with proper exercising.
Where I don't agree is the following:
> Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two.
While you can make progress quickly (in the sense that your symptoms become less severe), fixing your posture usually takes much, much longer than that. In fact, if we're being honest here, it's never a one-time fix that you do for some $TIME and then stop doing. The reason being that forces & activities that cause or exacerbate bad posture (sitting, carrying a back pack, sleeping on the side, various sports, doing no sport at all, wearing shoes with a high heel drop, …) are not a one-time thing, either. They act continuously, and so "fixing your posture" must be a continuous life-long activity, too.
Very much so. Also applies to other exercises, for the back, joints .. if you make it a habit, you can do a lot of helpful things for your body, when you wait for something and can resist the urge to pull out your phone to distract yourself.
jealous. i've had tinnitus ever since i had memories. my literal earliest memories are laying down when i was put down for a nap and vividly paying attention to the sound. dunno if i was born with it or had some crazy ear infection or what but ive just given up that anything can be done. i'm fortunate it's not all bad but i can't sleep without a fan.
i sometimes get sad that i genuinely don't know what no sound is like. i've never experienced true silence :/ when im super tired i get some weird auditory effects like the tinnitus sound gets super choppy almost like a rumbly gating flutter like the tubes deep in my ear are spazzing out as im drifting off to sleep. im probably gonna die idk
And so was I when I first read about it! I just looked for random YouTube videos that walked you through exercises of how to get rid of your neck hump and bad posture. Most were a mix of exercises that had you basically do the opposite, like lay on your back with a rolled up towel under your shoulders and push your head on the ground, or some general posture exercises like pushing your shoulders back and tense up your neck in a straight position.
I'd recommend to look those up for yourself, as I am terrible at explaining and not a professional, haha. I can't give any specific recommendations as I simply can't find them anymore. But trying to look for them made me realize again just how many there are ...
I can give another recommendation; while you may feel the effects in your neck, it can start well further down from your feet up. Do calf/thigh stretches, tilt your hips "back" (tense your buttocks, do kettlebell swings, dead lifts, squats), shoulder exercises (rows), etc.
You can often tell when people have a desk posture from their hips being tilted backwards and/or pot bellies (even if they're not overweight).
I can induce tinnitus if I want and then after a while it goes away. Very similar to consciously thinking about winking which causes you to be aware of it but then after a while you stop being conscious about it again but you never know when it stopped.
Over the years I have seen a few threads on tinnitus. I have it very mildly and doesn’t bother me much. On the other hand I have had “floaters” in my eyes since I was a teenager (probably just when I noticed them). Until I saw a doc I thought I was going blind but apparently they run in my family. They are like visual tinnitus and my god do they drive me crazy. I find wearing sunglasses helps me ignore them but they can be brutal. I am a big skier and in flat light they drive me bonkers. Not sure I have seen these discussed here but maybe I missed it.
I got a large amount of floaters in my left eye after a sparring session where I was hit in the eye. Also had flashing in the periphery of my vision when I moved my eye, so I went to an eye doctor to have it examined. Luckily he couldn't see any signs of detachment and it's also been stable for well over a decade and a half now without any worsening.
I find that they mostly don't annoy me now, but it genuinely took almost ten years for me to get to that stage. I would focus on them all the time, in particular during a period where I suffered from severe health anxiety.
In general I feel much less anxious about everything now than I have previously, and incidentally now is also when I almost don't notice either the floaters or my (very) mild tinnitus.
There's floaters and then there's asteroid something; you can always go and see a specialist, I believe there's even a treatment for it where they basically filter the particles from the fluid in your eyes.
Also have floaters, but I suspect that if you’re the sort of person who notices and is annoyed by tinnitus (like I have been in the past) then you’re possibly also more likely to notice other body sensations, like floaters, audible heartbeats, tics, etc.
I know I go through phases of noticing stuff. When I just get on with living I no longer notice them, unless I go looking for them.
Floaters are protein debris flakes literally floating in the fluid of your eyeballs. They're not neurological. They become most noticable when moving your eyes. And over time their appearance changes as they slowly migrate, often times going in and out of focus.
You're right, but not everyone can tell the difference and not everyone can describe their experiences very well. There's also the blue field entoptic phenomenon (white blood cells!), and a bunch of similar things within the eye which can look similar to "floaters".
I had floaters for years, they slowly disappeared. Occasionally start coming back again and disappear. When they disappear, I initially kinda miss them, because I start using them as stopwatch. Just spent 5 mins checking; I don't have any right now. I really think I would enjoy having one or two of different sizes and speeds, permanently. I guess that's just wishing for a superpower.
That's not the same thing as visual snow. Or rather, it doesn't have to be. Lots of people do see phosphenes with their eyes closed, like "prisoner's cinema". Human vision is wild.
Maybe it's like a dimly lit room. Some people can fall right asleep while others will say they can't sleep unless it's completely dark, but it's the same amount of "distraction" either way.
There's something to be said about HN, the supposed rationality and intelligence of the forum, and the massive blind spot posters have about anything medical or otherwise biological.
There is no scientific consensus on it!
Although I doubt there's any harm in eating more fruit.
There is some actual science here, just the studies aren't great. I have floaters and stumbled on research out of Taiwan related to this. Mostly out of Tiawan. There is some possible confirmation from Italy, but the study was a cocktail treatment, so you can't isolate the bromelain effects.
What I haven't seen is any properly controlled study proving it false. Just a cluster of researchers in Tiawan with flawed study construction.
There's a typical problem with many sorts of simple treatments. Even though they're simple, organizing 'proper' medical studies on their effect is quite expensive. It's not the drugs that are expensive in medical trials, but the organization, staffing, recruitment, monitoring, and so on. Who's going to pay?
With patentable drugs this isn't a problem, because big pharma stands to make billions if they discover a patentable treatment, but something like pineapples can't be patented or profited off of. For another example, in most of Asia you will see ginger recommended medicinally/prophylactically just about everywhere. I always assumed it was kind of hokey, but when you look at what studies have been done (e.g. as a treatment or prophylactic for colds), not only does it have an effect, but a rather large one.
Ginger is a nausea receptor blocker. For one. It just… is. And it has to be a ton of other things too.
And it's very challenging to find the right words for this. This whole thing about propagation of information. "Hey did you know that humans don't read? They can but they don't, because if this or that was worth reading, someone would have told them!"
and yeah, almost no matter what I write on this subject I always sense a pungent bitterness in the words haha
It's always the problem of not knowing what you don't know. And as one grows older you tend to learn that you know less and less than you once thought, at least if you continue to seek out knowledge. Which makes it a bit paradoxical. The more you know, the more you know how little you know.
I believe there’s a laser surgery to break up the big ones that’s would have far less adverse side effects (though, I suppose maybe the chance of something even worse).
I am taking some bromelain and papain capsules which according to some (small) studies should help. In my experience, the floaters became more transparent, but don't disappear. This is still useful i guess.
Interesting. Summarizing: pineapples contain a compound which breaks up collagen. No proof it does that to the human body, or floaters specifically.
But if it did, I’ve got terrible collagen and so I won’t be eating pineapple everyday, regardless of what the Taiwanese pineapple council would like me to do.
also have floaters. there have been moments in life where i overfixated on them for a month or two at a time and would think theyre getting worse. and then i would get busy with something (like having a child) and i would forget about this problem entirely and then randomly remember they exist. the brain is very good at ignoring things.
Your brain keeps ignoring like 25% of what you see -- your nose. Unlike blind spot, eyes really see the nose, and differently so depending on where you look.
It's mentioned when tinnitus comes up, or when dark mode isn't available. Couple months ago, someone recommended a supplement that it seems could easily(?) be DIY'd in case it's snake oil (even if it's more expensive, then they don't "win"!) :)
Floaters don't pose any danger as long as its long term stable condition and not sudden spike indicating ie retina issues. Why the heck would anybody risk eyesight for such thing? Or is it making life a nightmare for more obsessive individuals?
Weird, I also have floaters and snowboard but they've never bothered me that much. I can just tune them out and don't notice unless I'm looking for them. Come to think of it, this is probably the first time I've noticed a floater in years. It's probably a mental game, similar to how you can always see your nose but never pay attention to it
Same, tinnitus and floaters. And the number of others with both makes me wonder if they are correlated.
I've lived with my floaters for twenty years or more, but sometime on a recent holiday the biggest one moved slightly to obscure the central vision on one eye much more often. Now when a floater in the other eye drifts onto the central area, I just can't focus. I have to flick my eyes to the side hundreds of times a day, and it's annoying enough that I'm considering a vitrectomy.
I went for an eye test earlier this year because I felt I had a massive floater that would not go away after several months, the optician said that a very early cataract was developing - so, its really just a normal floater but when it sits in front of the occlusion, the effect is magnified. Optician said a couple of years for the cataract to be significant enough to remove.
Have both. Also had floaters since at least teen years. Neither bother me substantially although I think I have lost most of 8 kHz volume in my left ear and have tinnitus that I think matches that frequency.
You know what does bother me?
The scintillating scotoma as well as retinal migraine symptoms, the former starting in middle school and latter in my 20s. Fortunately neither is frequent now but damn I used to break into a cold sweat with either and to this day am a bit reluctant to drive because of both.
Anecdotal but I heard some people with autoimmune issues have their floaters go away when they change their diet in a way that improves the autoimmune symptoms.
I've had them all my life. I remember watching a some video a few years back that said they're more noticeable against a bright/white background, which checked out with my past experiences. And judging by your skiing comment, probably for yours as well!
I always thought floaters are part of everybody's eyes since they seemed like dust bits, and thats everywhere and our eyes are wet. One just decides to not focus on that but otherwise its same for everybody, at least thats what I thought.
Nothing bothersome. Not having any tinnitus I could imagine (annoying constant ringing), but due to many rock/metal concerts spent in first row there is some base 'white noise' if I focus hard on it. So I don't, same with floaters.
It's almost certainly my own damn fault I have it, but after at least 35-40 years dealing with it,tinitus sure as hell isn't my friend.
Mine is high pitched, and varries in intensity but has gotten worse lately. Sometimes it makes jus existing down right hard, but usually it's only moderately annoying and I can mostly ignore it.
I've tried an assortment of sound based methods to mask it or train my brain to tune it out, but nothing has worked more than fleetingly.
The only thing that reliably gives me a break is if I can really focus on something. Music (passive or active), cooking, and programming are the most reliable, but sometimes reading, gaming, or good conversation works. Usually, though, everything is done with a constant backing track of flyback transformer whine.
Wear hearing protection, kids, or you may well live to regret it!
Amateur musician with mild/moderate high frequency tinnitus here. I was treated with exposure therapy, and while I hear the sound (less now than before) it doesn't bother me any more. I would recommend a book called "Living Well With Tinnitus". Good luck!
Even if you have tinnitus, wear hearing protection for sure.
Unfortunately, I have a connective tissue disorder, which is the cause of the tinnitus and the cause of my hearing loss as well. The more my hearing loss goes, the more apparent the tinnitus is. IF you're in a position where it isn't a health related issue, you can prevent it from getting worse, or at least reduce the pace that happens at.
I have an orchestra of it going on with the high pitches, those that sound like a vacuum going off in another room and hearing my own pulse. I do miss silence!
I remember about twenty years ago reading a method on a forum somewhere for dealing with tinnitus to create temporary relief. Many folks claimed to experience relief from trying it. Maybe it will help you?
what the author is advocating for "befriending tinnitus" is a well established form of therapy (Acceptance and Commitment/ACT), it's generally very effective because avoidance or compensatory behavior ("trying to make the tinnitus go away / distract myself") is teaching the brain that tinnitus is a problem and is only going to increase the kind of alertness that leads people to focus on their tinnitus. It's the same way with insomnia, people who try to produce sleep efforts tend to worsen their insomnia, you need to befriend being awake.
There's a big psychological component to tinnitus that sustains itself because people view tinnitus as a problem, that's often larger than the physical impairment.
It's not even clear that for most sufferers that there is a physical impairment at all. I went to a Tinnitus clinic in Berlin and was surprised at how little is known about it even now and how much is likely psychological (or more inside the brain than the ear).
I developed tinnitus in my right ear about 5 years ago. I remember exactly when it started. I was welding up a tailpipe repair on my car, and in the next bay over my brother was running the lawnmower to adjust the carbs. The exhaust was basically blasting directly into my right ear from a distance of about 10ft. I don't recall it feeling excessively loud at the time, but afterwards for about a two years I had really bad occasional ringing and occasionally I could hear "rushing" sounds very loudly.
About 3 years ago I used a borescope and some tweezers as a sketchy endoscope and pulled out a hair that had somehow wedged itself in my ear canal. I don't recall how I figured out this plan, but it worked. The tinnitus has never returned since then.
I have no idea whether there's any causal connections between any of these events. It's a big mystery. But TBH I don't really care that much, I'm just super glad it's gone.
PSA that if you have pulsatile tinnitus, where you hear a sort of whooshing sound in time to your heart beat, it might be treatable by surgical intervention (such as stenting). It could even be caused by dangerous issues in the blood vessels around your ear, so it's worth getting that checked out. An MRI Angiogram (MRA/MRV) with gadolinium contrast seems to be the best way of catching those issues. Interventional neurologists are the folks who are best suited to help you.
Just some information I wish I had known at the start of my tinnitus journey.
I really, really notice mine when meditating. You’re in a quiet room. You pause to listen to the sounds around you. You most loudly hear “eeeeeeeeeeee”.
For myself, I noticed that observing it cheerfully, like “oh, hey, little whining sound!” makes it disappear into the background and I stop noticing it.
of course even reading a thread on tinnitus makes mine worse. The mere fact of paying attention to it makes it worse, so I have a hard time seeing how a drug is going to help much. I do wish there was something.
Ostensibly mine is from high frequency hearing loss, which I absolutely have, but I now wear hearing aids and it has no measurable impact from my point of view.
I take comfort in that I can go long periods of time without noticing it, and I know that even though I'm focused on it now and it's loud, it will slowly drift to the background and below conscious notice before too long.
I certainly don't befriend it, but I when I notice it, I acknowledge that I notice it and move on with whatever I'm doing. Eventually I'll notice again, days or weeks later and realize I hadn't noticed it at all in the intervening time. So I just relax and move on.
Very similar to my experience. I just woke up with it one day in my early 30s.
It drove me a bit mad at first, I wanted someone to 'cure' it and make it go away. Then I tried all sorts of things, I narrowed down the frequency (IIRC it's 13.5kHz) and tried masking by playing that in my right ear. I tried white noise. I tried 'notching' all my mp3s to remove that frequency band. I don't think any of it really helped.
But somewhere towards the end of all that I guess I started to accept it. It's here now because of this thread and sometimes it's present at night, especially if I drink too much, but most of the time I'm just not conscious of it any more. Occasionally I think it's actually gone-gone, but then if I 'look' for it then it usually returns.
The only way (for me) to proceed was to zen it out. Accept this is how it is and likely how it will be forever and suddenly it's just not very important.
Though I acknowledge that some folks likely have a harder time with that due to relative severity of the condition.
I have had occasional tinnitus, and once it lasted for a few months and then went away. Sometimes it appears suddenly, and I've taken vitamin B12 and magnesium and it goes away in a few hours. Vitamin D might also help according to some studies, but in my case I think it might make it worse. Not sure if placebo or not.
I've had tinnitus for 25+ years after neglecting an ear infection while I was working overtime.
It's never disappeared, but the "rain on a tent" sounds from mynoise.net, fan noise, and having a Twitch stream on in the background masks it enough that it's not bothersome during the day.
just a reminder there is a temp solution that worked for me that is kinda well know its about holding your hands agaisnt your head and drumming your fingers for 10 seconds on teh back of your skull, for some reason it clears it up for about a minute, something like that please google it
This page has so many dang scripts and the iframe doesn't do it any favors. I've allowed everything and it still doesn't load. There are far too few specialists that work on tinnitus and so many dental and ENT specialists choose to not take it seriously enough.
I have high pitched 7k hz bi-lateral ringing, 24x7. I've had it my whole life. I am convinced part of it is due to being born very premature (I was 1 lb 11 1/2 ounces). I believe it may be cervical and/or neurological (vascular, specifically).
It's so frustrating because nothing has happened. Masking only does so much. Sitting around reading a book, or trying to sleep is almost impossible.
I've been wanting to make a documentary style video on this diagnosis/issue, because a more people suffer like this than people realize. One medical professional that was helping me passed away a few years ago and that still eats away at me, because he really cared that he wasn't able to help me and it ate away at him. I still miss him.
Crazy thought but given that you have a pure sine frequency, maybe it would be possible to listen to an out of phase version of it to cancel. Same principle as noise cancelling except the noise is purely internal. Though I guess phase might drift over time making it not work. Still would be interesting to hear your results with this, success or not.
I had a strong feeling that I was developing tinnitus after my my usage of Apple's airpods[1] for meetings, video calls (personal and Official) and such, especially after years of Work From Home. I used to get puss from my ears, and sometimes that tweet/humming sound after a long day's use.
Later I switched to Bone Conduction headphones. I felt like BC Headphones has improved my condition a lot. No ear pain or puss or the humming noise. I hope it stays that way!
Any in-ear headphones can cause ear infections from prolonged use, the airtight seal makes for a nice humid environment bacteria like.
The solution is to not wear them as long, especially right after a shower or the like, when there is extra moisture in your ear.
Alternatively you can put alcohol in your ears to kill the bacteria, sort of like you’d do with mouthwash. Any pharmacy will sell over the counter ear drops with alcohol, meant for drying out swimmers ear. You’d have to keep doing it once every week or two, but it would keep the infection away.
I read this a lot. My explanation is that it does not cause it but it does place you in silent environment (via noise cancellation) more often than you're used to, and that's exactly where you're likely to notice your existing tinnitus.
If you live in a noisy place, your noise levels might be high enough that you never even get the chance to notice it. AC alone might be enough to cover it if it's little.
there is precedent for this, you don't really feel your heart beating or hear your blood rushing most of the time. the brain learns which signals aren't important to you.
tinnitus also happens to be a very predictable signal, so the key is to convince your brain that it's noise to be filtered out. if you focus on it you will convince your brain of the opposite.
A similar strategy to this did help me a lot. Got tinitus 5 years ago in one ear due to a weird ear cleaning procedure followed by some sort of inflammation. It was quite weird in the beginning and it always got worse when I had a cold and my sinuses were blocked. Had some periods when it was really bad and I could fell like I can't take it any more, but somehow I accepted it and started to learn to live with it and ignore it as much as possible, focus on other sounds around me and so on. I went to a couple of clinics, my hearing was just fine and they always recommended white noise (used it a bit in the beginning, but somehow I didn't want to depend on headphones and constant sounds). What did help me in quiet places or when sleeping is just to think of something else and ignore the sound completely, at this point I can barely hear it/notice it even when going to bed or having headphones on with no sound. I do have friends who got it mostly because of loud music (musicians and concerts) and somehow they stress too much about it, making it unbearable. I understand that everyone has different experiences, but for me just ignoring it and somehow making your brain forget it and filtering it out did help a lot. EDIT: also completely ignoring the community (like reading about it on reddit or Facebook groups), stop watching videos like this about it helps a lot in forgetting about it and stops you from ruminating too much about it all the time.
While I agree that the brain can generally block it out once you accept it, I'll add that sometimes (for some people) it goes from a constant tone to intermittent chirping. The first time mine layered in a "typewriter tinnitus"[1] I wondered if I was picking up electronic interference in my head, which is a bit more difficult to tune out.
> there is precedent for this, you don't really feel your heart beating or hear your blood rushing most of the time. the brain learns which signals aren't important to you
At the risk of a kind of odd tangent, I had a very weird experience a couple years ago where I woke up one morning and my entire body felt like it was "external" to my feeling, for lack of a better description. Getting up and walking around made me feel queasy because I could feel everything in my abdomen sloshing around, and lying sideways made me feel what I assume is how claustrophobic people feel in tight spaces because it felt like there were multiple surfaces around me instead of just the one I was lying on. I had severe brain fog to go along with it; the words coming out of my mouth felt like what I wanted to say, but it didn't feel like I was choosing them; normally my speech feels almost like a distillation of my thought process, but this felt like they were just spontaneously coming out without any thought process to generate them. My wife (still my fiancee at the time, but we had been together for several years) apparently couldn't tell anything different about me outwardly and said she wouldn't have been able to tell anything was wrong other than what I was telling her. The sensation didn't last all day, but after it left I had an odd numbness everywhere. The numbness was gone by the next morning too, but a couple weeks later the brain fog and numbness came back (albeit not quite as strong as it had been originally), and it's only been gradually fading away since then.
The experience (and the later experience that's still going on for a while now) has made me realize just how much my perception previously had been, let's say, "curated" by mind. One thing I've noticed is that even when the physical sensation isn't present, the "reaction" to the sensation will still occur. For example, I remember a time when I was shoveling large amounts of snow, and I suddenly noticed that I was taking large amounts of time between each shovelful, which had been happening instinctively due to how much I needed to catch my breath, but even then I still didn't physically feel tired or winded. Plenty of times I've woken up somewhat earlier than usual and tried to get back to sleep but not been able to, and eventually I realized there must be reason, so I'd have to actively think about whether I was thirsty or hungry or needed to use the bathroom, and then suddenly realized that one of them was actually the case. Pain is one of the weirdest cases, even with my numbness being a lot more mild than it was for the first year or so, because I still have the reflex that I'd expect from a sudden severe pain even if I don't feel it nearly as strongly.
I don't know for sure how much of this generalizes to everyone else, but the experience has definitely made me reconsider some cognitive theories that didn't seem plausible to me before. The idea that our brain basically tricks us into "remembering" feeling something as the reason for us taking a certain action seems pretty consistent with how I was would act the same way in circumstances where I normally would expect to have sensations causing me to act that way without being able to actually feel the sensation. In some ways the philosophical idea of consciousness being an illusion don't seem as crazy to me as before either, because it's clear that the reality I experience is only perceived through the lens of my biology, and I can't come up with a strong argument against the idea that my sense of "self" is just an evolutionary hack for handling some parts of my body (with the parts not benefiting from conscious management being actively hidden from whatever part of me feels like "me").
I don't even know why I have tinnitus. It's not end of the world bad tinnitus, but sometimes does get a little annoying. It is louder in the evenings/nights than in the mornings. I have it since primary school 4th grade or so, when I realized I have it, because an old teacher described her own tinnitus. But as far as I can remember there was no very loud sound event before that causing the tinnitus. Maybe it comes from bad posture or so, already in primary school. Too heavy school bag with too many books? Who knows. Have had it ever since. Most effective masking method for me is sound of rain whitenoise like that rainymood website.
I have it after I shot an indoor USPSA (IPSC) match right after a major ear infection. I always wear double ear plugs and muffs. The ENT I saw said he thought it was the infection that did it not the shooting. My hearing test came back very good despite the ringing. It’s always there, especially when it’s dead silent but after about four years, I don’t think about it anymore most of the time. I always wear shooting grade earmuffs even when doing yardwork with a lawnmower and the weedeater, I baby my hearing the best I can. It is a good reminder that we only get it once.
My dad has it really bad because he worked in a nightclub in his twenties. He would say it's like a jumbojet idling its engines nearby, all the time.
It's thanks to him that I started taking ear protection seriously.
There's a book that briefly mentions the same effect on cluster headaches. They are not the main topic, but in the foreword author tells a story about having them as the reason he started the the journey. "The Presence Process", Michael Brown.
Yeah, that's nice and all, but people suffering from tinnitus will tend to get downright angry when you tell them: "Just change your attitude to it." There's nobody with tinnitus who hasn't heard it 100x already. And it's not that easy.
It's unfortunate and surprising that there's still no effective drug, though lidocaine does, in fact, work. (Very temporarily, sadly.)
And time does help, at least sometimes. Over the past ten years, my tinnitus has gone from a 5/10 (highly annoying and noticeable above ambient noise, but not debilitating in any respect,) to something like a 1/10 (I don't even hear it unless I'm in an extremely quiet room and trying to sleep).
...But it sure ain't my friend, and never will be. It's hard to interpret it as anything but an annoying side-effect of self-inflicted nerve damage.
I've had it all my life. I'm 55. Mine is bearable and generally I don't notice it. Mine was caused by "glue ear" or more likely the operations to "cure it", which caused ear drum scarring and what not. I don't think that glue ear is a modern diagnosis anymore. Mind you doctors were only beginning to not advise people to smoke for their health in the early '70s.
I know what a variety of tinnitus is like (I've never known anything else) and I'm sure that other varieties can be horrendous. In my case time does not help.
Perhaps we ought to insist on a tinnitus spectrum, with multiple dimensions and some TLAs. I don't think that advice from a single data point is very helpful, or being charitable: annecdata. I'm glad it disappeared for OP.
Tinnitus ranges from, say, me (I'll live) through yourself (fuck! but I'll live) to committing suicide in despair at the extreme end.
Wow, I’ve had it for 15 years and until now I’ve never thought it may be connected to also being «treated» for glue ear as a kid. Do you have more info on this and how you came to that conclusion?
(I see you use another quoting style, so I'll try to keep my language to the point) I only heard about the term tinnitus as a 'teen or perhaps later.
ENT: Ear, Nose and Throat - a medical specialism.
My earliest memories are from around 18 months. I used to have very bad earache whenever I had a cold or influenza. My mother told me that I used to burst into tears, unprovoked or without any of the usual baby related reasons and eventually around age five or six I was diagnosed with "glue ear".
The way it was explained to me was: my eustacian tubes were too narrow. Speaking to children: "Your ears, nose and throat are all linked together and the tubes that link your ears to the rest of you are too small and get blocked easily".
I had surgery to insert "grommets" into my eustacian tubes. This was done twice. Grommets are tiny plastic, hollow tubes. From memory: about 3mm long and 3mm outer diameter but that is from a long time ago.
Now here is where it gets complicated! My dad was in the British army (so was my mum but that's another story). This means we moved house every two years or so. I can fix dates quite well.
The first operation was performed in Rinteln, West Germany at a British Forces hospital. We were stationed in Paderborn so it would be around 1976. I had a second set inserted in Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester (UK) in 1977 or perhaps early 1978.
I know that the second set of grommets were removed by a doctor (I think an ENT specialist) but I can't remember if the first set were removed in Manchester and replaced by the second pair at the same time.
I recall that the doctor used a black, plastic, bell shaped thing that fitted over my ear and wiggled some sort of hooked, metal probe within my ear to pull out the grommets. It was quite painful.
Even after the operations, I still got earache whenever I had a cold up until around age 20-25. That age range is a bit hard to pin down. I'll also note that when we were stationed in Cyprus in 1986-7ish, a lot of swimming and diving helped clear the tubes!
One of the nasty side effects of glue ear is that you have trouble with pressure changes. Airliners and swimming are the bane of your life.
> It's unfortunate and surprising that there's still no effective drug, though lidocaine does, in fact, work. (Very temporarily, sadly.)
There's some research, but yeah, I'm surprised that something that affects so many people and in some cases affect them very severely isn't receiving more attention.
At least there are things one can do immediately after the fact to limit nerve damage (applying intratympanic steroids etc), but even these things are often missed and haven't become part of routine procedure yet.
And I'm very curious why Shore's device is still stuck in FDA hell while the (from what I've heard) inferior version, Lenire, passed a long time ago.
30 or so years here, still 5/10 after all these years. I don't let it bother me for the most part, but it'll certainly never be anything but a negative thing.
I'll be honest, this is the first time I'm hearing "just change your attitude towards it" though. It's like the terrible advice someone with depression gets- just be happy!
I mean people with tinnitus can choose to get angry about it or they can... change their attitude toward it.
I have it. I've changed my attitude toward it and made it my friend. I don't really know what else to tell you, but if you want to, the way is open for you. Or you can continue to see it as an aversive thing, and it will continue to be so.
Yeah, I know people don't like that message, but yeah... just accept it.
No amount of wishing it away is going to make it vanish in the same way if I really want to fly I just need to think I am a bird... at least in theory. ;)
It doesn't mean you have to be happy with it but just accept it, bring it out like a photo album of the family. 'Here is my tinnitus, it stays past its welcome but keeps me company.' 'There is my balding, society considered it ugly, I think it is just neat.'. 'Oh the knee that wants to play up every once in a while, yeah that happens, we work with it the best we can.'
Meh. My tinnitus is a result of high-frequency hearing loss. The hearing loss is not noticeable - maybe I can't hear something just below what dogs can hear? - but the tinnitus is noticeable.
I have no idea how it happened - I never used headphones much, I don't work around machines or jet engines, etc. One doctor said it's just wear and tear.
It doesn't bother me though. I figure that nobody has a full stack of bricks when it comes to health, and here's one of the places I'm short. Compared to some of the places where other folks have health problems, this is not a biggie.
IIRC it's only for a specific, rare variant, though?
There's also that surgery where they sever your auditory nerve and render you deaf. Some have done this in an extreme last-ditch effort to cure their tinnitus. Sadly, it doesn't always work -- many of those who tried became deaf and yet remained stuck with tinnitus.
For people looking for treatment for long-term tinnitus, notched sound therapy has been statistically shown to help by reducing brain activity in relation to the perceived tinnitus frequencies (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8832119/). In other words, it doesn't go away, but it becomes less "important" to the auditory centers.
There are various professionally provided therapies of this style, but there are also simple self-therapy apps that find the perceived frequencies and then play white noise or a music library with the sound adjusted to produce the notched effect in that small frequency window. For example: https://audionotch.com/https://www.tinnitusnotch.com/https://www.tinnaway.com/
I haven't used this for years and I don't know if it helped me or not, but the below is a bash script which will duplicate a directory of mp3s and 'notch' everything using the linux command line tool 'sox'. You'll have to figure out the frequency band you want to remove, it's currently set to remove approximately a half-octave notch around my target frequency, 13.5kHz. Sox can do lots of file formats but you'll have to adapt the script if you want anything but mp3s altered. And no I'm not 100% sure why I felt the need to multi-process enable it...
#!/bin/bash
HIGHFREQ=16000
LOWFREQ=-11500
if [[ -z $1 || -z $2 ]] ; then
echo "Usage: " $0 " <InputDir> <OutputDir>"
exit
fi
OLDDIR=$1
NEWDIR=$2
echo pushd $OLDDIR
pushd $OLDDIR
TEMP=0
BUFSIZE=1024000
CONCURRENCY=1
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
for file in `find |grep mp3`; do
mkdir -p $NEWDIR/"`dirname \"$file\"`"
TEMP=$(($TEMP + 1))
TEMP=$(($TEMP % $CONCURRENCY))
echo $TEMP $(basename $file)
if [ "$TEMP" = "0" ]; then
sox --multi-threaded --buffer $BUFSIZE --temp $NEWDIR/"`dirname \"$file\"`" -V2 "$file" -C -0.1 "$NEWDIR/$file" gain -hen sinc $HIGHFREQ$LOWFREQ
wait
else
sox --multi-threaded --buffer $BUFSIZE --temp $NEWDIR/"`dirname \"$file\"`" -V2 "$file" -C -0.1 "$NEWDIR/$file" gain -hen sinc $HIGHFREQ$LOWFREQ &
fi
done
wait
popd
cp -R --update=none $OLDDIR/* $NEWDIR
If you do not already use MyNoise to help you focus at work, then, like, what are you even doing? Sometimes I'll listen to music of various kinds if my work isn't too deep, but whenever I need to concentrate deeply on a problem, MyNoise will have the perfect noise blocker. Go explore the site. It's a lovely little corner of the "classic" internet: no ads, no shenanigans, just this one dude making a technical masterpiece that you can enjoy.
People say hearing loss is permanent, that may be true and I thought tinnitus was that, but its a separate correlated thing that doesnt have to be permanent
Ever since I got better earplugs and kept them on my keyring for more routine use, the symptoms have dissipated over time
Not going to name a brand since aficionados all have opinions about their deficiencies in favor of another brand thats equally open to debate
But I’m glad my tinnitus symptoms haven't seemed to be permanent
I haven't had ringing after music festivals in years now, and I can hear people again in loud environments
I've had tinnitus for years. At best it's usually isolated to my left ear and sounds like crickets. At worst it sounds like a choir of crickets in a large cathedral.
Funnily enough I only just remembered it because of this post and yes the crickets are still there. Thanks for that OP.
This is a funny but sad coincidence! I'll chime in the same as others, I've had tinnitus for 20+ years and I know it is all due to one event. Somedays if I am tired or stressed it gets worse, and then some days I have so much going on I don't think about it (much). But sometimes when I have a calm moment or if I am on vacation trying to relax, I really have no idea what silence sounds like anymore.
I've had tinnitus since 15 or so. Randomly it was like a firecracker exploded in my left ear... Super frustrating at first. But over time, 20 some years later, it is what it is.
I got rid of mine for a year thanks to a comment on HN. The only reason it came back is because of my lack of discipline. It's bearable as I only notice it when I actively listen for it now. Anyway, I am sure this would just work again.
So there was a comment that claimed it was related to bad neck posture. Being a keyboard warrior in my late 30s at that time I suffered the same issue: Tinnitus and generally bad posture. I figured that even if that wasn't true, working on my posture might be a good invest either way. So a couple of YouTube videos later I started working on it. Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two. To my surprise the tinnitus was actually also gone.
As I haven't build a real habit around the exercises eventually a bad posture came back, and so did the tinnitus. Both are generally not as bad as they were before, though.
10/10, would do again.
Bad posture, and perhaps even more importantly, sitting is a really, really bad thing. There is a reason why taxi drivers have massively shorter life spans than the general population - sitting all day and the following poor circulation is one of the worst things you can do to your body.
By the way, do you have any youtube videos perhaps saved that you followed?
Agreed, bad posture (not just neck but in general) can cause both tinnitus and RSI-like symptoms in my experience and I have been able to tackle both with proper exercising.
Where I don't agree is the following:
> Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two.
While you can make progress quickly (in the sense that your symptoms become less severe), fixing your posture usually takes much, much longer than that. In fact, if we're being honest here, it's never a one-time fix that you do for some $TIME and then stop doing. The reason being that forces & activities that cause or exacerbate bad posture (sitting, carrying a back pack, sleeping on the side, various sports, doing no sport at all, wearing shoes with a high heel drop, …) are not a one-time thing, either. They act continuously, and so "fixing your posture" must be a continuous life-long activity, too.
"with just some casual invest everyday only"
Very much so. Also applies to other exercises, for the back, joints .. if you make it a habit, you can do a lot of helpful things for your body, when you wait for something and can resist the urge to pull out your phone to distract yourself.
jealous. i've had tinnitus ever since i had memories. my literal earliest memories are laying down when i was put down for a nap and vividly paying attention to the sound. dunno if i was born with it or had some crazy ear infection or what but ive just given up that anything can be done. i'm fortunate it's not all bad but i can't sleep without a fan. i sometimes get sad that i genuinely don't know what no sound is like. i've never experienced true silence :/ when im super tired i get some weird auditory effects like the tinnitus sound gets super choppy almost like a rumbly gating flutter like the tubes deep in my ear are spazzing out as im drifting off to sleep. im probably gonna die idk
Never too late to see a doctor about it.
Could you explain more about what "straightening the neck" entails in terms of exercise? I'm interested.
This worked for me: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u9OQMBPrFgI
> I'm interested.
And so was I when I first read about it! I just looked for random YouTube videos that walked you through exercises of how to get rid of your neck hump and bad posture. Most were a mix of exercises that had you basically do the opposite, like lay on your back with a rolled up towel under your shoulders and push your head on the ground, or some general posture exercises like pushing your shoulders back and tense up your neck in a straight position.
I'd recommend to look those up for yourself, as I am terrible at explaining and not a professional, haha. I can't give any specific recommendations as I simply can't find them anymore. But trying to look for them made me realize again just how many there are ...
I can give another recommendation; while you may feel the effects in your neck, it can start well further down from your feet up. Do calf/thigh stretches, tilt your hips "back" (tense your buttocks, do kettlebell swings, dead lifts, squats), shoulder exercises (rows), etc.
You can often tell when people have a desk posture from their hips being tilted backwards and/or pot bellies (even if they're not overweight).
I can induce tinnitus if I want and then after a while it goes away. Very similar to consciously thinking about winking which causes you to be aware of it but then after a while you stop being conscious about it again but you never know when it stopped.
Over the years I have seen a few threads on tinnitus. I have it very mildly and doesn’t bother me much. On the other hand I have had “floaters” in my eyes since I was a teenager (probably just when I noticed them). Until I saw a doc I thought I was going blind but apparently they run in my family. They are like visual tinnitus and my god do they drive me crazy. I find wearing sunglasses helps me ignore them but they can be brutal. I am a big skier and in flat light they drive me bonkers. Not sure I have seen these discussed here but maybe I missed it.
I got a large amount of floaters in my left eye after a sparring session where I was hit in the eye. Also had flashing in the periphery of my vision when I moved my eye, so I went to an eye doctor to have it examined. Luckily he couldn't see any signs of detachment and it's also been stable for well over a decade and a half now without any worsening.
I find that they mostly don't annoy me now, but it genuinely took almost ten years for me to get to that stage. I would focus on them all the time, in particular during a period where I suffered from severe health anxiety.
In general I feel much less anxious about everything now than I have previously, and incidentally now is also when I almost don't notice either the floaters or my (very) mild tinnitus.
As someone with both as well, yeah they are there but really they don't bother me.
I cannot change them so I don't worry about them, they are just little my little floating jelly blobs friends that visit when I am at my computer.
There's some short manga thing about an anthropomorphic floater if you like this vibe
Also this is why I like dark mode in everything. They're much less noticeable.
This is the only way. Gotta gaslight yourself into liking them lol
One need not like them to be familiar
There's floaters and then there's asteroid something; you can always go and see a specialist, I believe there's even a treatment for it where they basically filter the particles from the fluid in your eyes.
Also have floaters, but I suspect that if you’re the sort of person who notices and is annoyed by tinnitus (like I have been in the past) then you’re possibly also more likely to notice other body sensations, like floaters, audible heartbeats, tics, etc.
I know I go through phases of noticing stuff. When I just get on with living I no longer notice them, unless I go looking for them.
Not exactly a revelation, I know.
This!
Called visual snow. Many people who suffer from it also have tinnitus.
And they're not "floaters" but look like old school TV statics. Easier to see over plain color (blue sky, night time etc.).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow_syndrome
Visual snow is different from floaters, though.
Floaters are protein debris flakes literally floating in the fluid of your eyeballs. They're not neurological. They become most noticable when moving your eyes. And over time their appearance changes as they slowly migrate, often times going in and out of focus.
You're right, but not everyone can tell the difference and not everyone can describe their experiences very well. There's also the blue field entoptic phenomenon (white blood cells!), and a bunch of similar things within the eye which can look similar to "floaters".
Having both floaters and visual snow, there is absolutely no way anyone would ever mix them up, though. Incredibly different experience.
I had floaters for years, they slowly disappeared. Occasionally start coming back again and disappear. When they disappear, I initially kinda miss them, because I start using them as stopwatch. Just spent 5 mins checking; I don't have any right now. I really think I would enjoy having one or two of different sizes and speeds, permanently. I guess that's just wishing for a superpower.
Yeah, they can literally go out of focus depending on their distance to the retina.
I have both as well. Floaters are mildly annoying, but at least when you lie in bed at night you don't see them in the dark.
There is also visual snow syndrome to keep you company at night.
Wait, that’s not a thing everyone sees when they close their eyes?
That's not the same thing as visual snow. Or rather, it doesn't have to be. Lots of people do see phosphenes with their eyes closed, like "prisoner's cinema". Human vision is wild.
Apparently not, but it also seems like everyone does, lol
Maybe it's like a dimly lit room. Some people can fall right asleep while others will say they can't sleep unless it's completely dark, but it's the same amount of "distraction" either way.
Lol I actually do see them in the dark. Not as much but still there. I've gotten used to them at this point thankfully
Start eating pineapple, you will be surprised of the effect on the floaters.
There's something to be said about HN, the supposed rationality and intelligence of the forum, and the massive blind spot posters have about anything medical or otherwise biological.
There is no scientific consensus on it!
Although I doubt there's any harm in eating more fruit.
There is some actual science here, just the studies aren't great. I have floaters and stumbled on research out of Taiwan related to this. Mostly out of Tiawan. There is some possible confirmation from Italy, but the study was a cocktail treatment, so you can't isolate the bromelain effects.
What I haven't seen is any properly controlled study proving it false. Just a cluster of researchers in Tiawan with flawed study construction.
I'm bothered constantly by the way statements are shared without any back up. Cite a source at least.
There's a typical problem with many sorts of simple treatments. Even though they're simple, organizing 'proper' medical studies on their effect is quite expensive. It's not the drugs that are expensive in medical trials, but the organization, staffing, recruitment, monitoring, and so on. Who's going to pay?
With patentable drugs this isn't a problem, because big pharma stands to make billions if they discover a patentable treatment, but something like pineapples can't be patented or profited off of. For another example, in most of Asia you will see ginger recommended medicinally/prophylactically just about everywhere. I always assumed it was kind of hokey, but when you look at what studies have been done (e.g. as a treatment or prophylactic for colds), not only does it have an effect, but a rather large one.
Indeed. As I see it, it boils down again and again to this: Is someone reading the primary molecular-biology literature? Anyone?
(Law of headlines: No.)
For instance, Ginger and its pungent constituents non-competitively inhibit activation of human recombinant and native 5-HT3 receptors of enteric neurons, as they say. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nmo.12107
Ginger is a nausea receptor blocker. For one. It just… is. And it has to be a ton of other things too.
And it's very challenging to find the right words for this. This whole thing about propagation of information. "Hey did you know that humans don't read? They can but they don't, because if this or that was worth reading, someone would have told them!"
and yeah, almost no matter what I write on this subject I always sense a pungent bitterness in the words haha
It's always the problem of not knowing what you don't know. And as one grows older you tend to learn that you know less and less than you once thought, at least if you continue to seek out knowledge. Which makes it a bit paradoxical. The more you know, the more you know how little you know.
Partner may be happy with pineapple :) But I wouldn't expect much more.
One can always get the surgery, where they vacuum them out..doesn't seem worth the risk to me, even if they annoy me.
I believe there’s a laser surgery to break up the big ones that’s would have far less adverse side effects (though, I suppose maybe the chance of something even worse).
How can we possibly talk about something without a scientific concensus.
I am taking some bromelain and papain capsules which according to some (small) studies should help. In my experience, the floaters became more transparent, but don't disappear. This is still useful i guess.
Interesting. This is from personal experience? Has anyone else eaten pineapple and had a similar experience?
Apparently the subject of some small studies, could do with some replication
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-and-nutrition/pinea...
Interesting. Summarizing: pineapples contain a compound which breaks up collagen. No proof it does that to the human body, or floaters specifically.
But if it did, I’ve got terrible collagen and so I won’t be eating pineapple everyday, regardless of what the Taiwanese pineapple council would like me to do.
Pineapple contains enzymes that digest flesh. I don't know if that's relevant here, but it seemed worth mentioning.
Even so, how would a meaningful amount of it be delivered to the eye from oral ingestion without damaging anything in between?
also have floaters. there have been moments in life where i overfixated on them for a month or two at a time and would think theyre getting worse. and then i would get busy with something (like having a child) and i would forget about this problem entirely and then randomly remember they exist. the brain is very good at ignoring things.
Your brain keeps ignoring like 25% of what you see -- your nose. Unlike blind spot, eyes really see the nose, and differently so depending on where you look.
That stinks, sorry to hear.
It's mentioned when tinnitus comes up, or when dark mode isn't available. Couple months ago, someone recommended a supplement that it seems could easily(?) be DIY'd in case it's snake oil (even if it's more expensive, then they don't "win"!) :)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Thanks. I have been looking for "unknown or expired link" for ages.
There's a laser treatment for floaters now (laser vitreolysis). It's not always applicable and it has its own risks and side effects.
Floaters don't pose any danger as long as its long term stable condition and not sudden spike indicating ie retina issues. Why the heck would anybody risk eyesight for such thing? Or is it making life a nightmare for more obsessive individuals?
Anmy papers on that working. The main NHS hospital for eyes in UK (Moorfields) says that has no proof of working.
Weird, I also have floaters and snowboard but they've never bothered me that much. I can just tune them out and don't notice unless I'm looking for them. Come to think of it, this is probably the first time I've noticed a floater in years. It's probably a mental game, similar to how you can always see your nose but never pay attention to it
Yeah, or to the frames of your glasses.
Or the existence of your tongue.
Same, tinnitus and floaters. And the number of others with both makes me wonder if they are correlated.
I've lived with my floaters for twenty years or more, but sometime on a recent holiday the biggest one moved slightly to obscure the central vision on one eye much more often. Now when a floater in the other eye drifts onto the central area, I just can't focus. I have to flick my eyes to the side hundreds of times a day, and it's annoying enough that I'm considering a vitrectomy.
I went for an eye test earlier this year because I felt I had a massive floater that would not go away after several months, the optician said that a very early cataract was developing - so, its really just a normal floater but when it sits in front of the occlusion, the effect is magnified. Optician said a couple of years for the cataract to be significant enough to remove.
Have both. Also had floaters since at least teen years. Neither bother me substantially although I think I have lost most of 8 kHz volume in my left ear and have tinnitus that I think matches that frequency.
You know what does bother me?
The scintillating scotoma as well as retinal migraine symptoms, the former starting in middle school and latter in my 20s. Fortunately neither is frequent now but damn I used to break into a cold sweat with either and to this day am a bit reluctant to drive because of both.
Anecdotal but I heard some people with autoimmune issues have their floaters go away when they change their diet in a way that improves the autoimmune symptoms.
I've had them all my life. I remember watching a some video a few years back that said they're more noticeable against a bright/white background, which checked out with my past experiences. And judging by your skiing comment, probably for yours as well!
I always thought floaters are part of everybody's eyes since they seemed like dust bits, and thats everywhere and our eyes are wet. One just decides to not focus on that but otherwise its same for everybody, at least thats what I thought.
Nothing bothersome. Not having any tinnitus I could imagine (annoying constant ringing), but due to many rock/metal concerts spent in first row there is some base 'white noise' if I focus hard on it. So I don't, same with floaters.
I have the same problem. Some good mitigations are dark mode on the computer and using very dark, yellow/brown alpine sunglasses in bright sun.
It's almost certainly my own damn fault I have it, but after at least 35-40 years dealing with it,tinitus sure as hell isn't my friend.
Mine is high pitched, and varries in intensity but has gotten worse lately. Sometimes it makes jus existing down right hard, but usually it's only moderately annoying and I can mostly ignore it.
I've tried an assortment of sound based methods to mask it or train my brain to tune it out, but nothing has worked more than fleetingly.
The only thing that reliably gives me a break is if I can really focus on something. Music (passive or active), cooking, and programming are the most reliable, but sometimes reading, gaming, or good conversation works. Usually, though, everything is done with a constant backing track of flyback transformer whine.
Wear hearing protection, kids, or you may well live to regret it!
Amateur musician with mild/moderate high frequency tinnitus here. I was treated with exposure therapy, and while I hear the sound (less now than before) it doesn't bother me any more. I would recommend a book called "Living Well With Tinnitus". Good luck!
Even if you have tinnitus, wear hearing protection for sure.
Unfortunately, I have a connective tissue disorder, which is the cause of the tinnitus and the cause of my hearing loss as well. The more my hearing loss goes, the more apparent the tinnitus is. IF you're in a position where it isn't a health related issue, you can prevent it from getting worse, or at least reduce the pace that happens at.
I have an orchestra of it going on with the high pitches, those that sound like a vacuum going off in another room and hearing my own pulse. I do miss silence!
I remember about twenty years ago reading a method on a forum somewhere for dealing with tinnitus to create temporary relief. Many folks claimed to experience relief from trying it. Maybe it will help you?
It was text back then but nowadays there are videos. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YyT9ZwWy5Jc
>tinitus sure as hell isn't my friend.
what the author is advocating for "befriending tinnitus" is a well established form of therapy (Acceptance and Commitment/ACT), it's generally very effective because avoidance or compensatory behavior ("trying to make the tinnitus go away / distract myself") is teaching the brain that tinnitus is a problem and is only going to increase the kind of alertness that leads people to focus on their tinnitus. It's the same way with insomnia, people who try to produce sleep efforts tend to worsen their insomnia, you need to befriend being awake.
There's a big psychological component to tinnitus that sustains itself because people view tinnitus as a problem, that's often larger than the physical impairment.
It's not even clear that for most sufferers that there is a physical impairment at all. I went to a Tinnitus clinic in Berlin and was surprised at how little is known about it even now and how much is likely psychological (or more inside the brain than the ear).
I developed tinnitus in my right ear about 5 years ago. I remember exactly when it started. I was welding up a tailpipe repair on my car, and in the next bay over my brother was running the lawnmower to adjust the carbs. The exhaust was basically blasting directly into my right ear from a distance of about 10ft. I don't recall it feeling excessively loud at the time, but afterwards for about a two years I had really bad occasional ringing and occasionally I could hear "rushing" sounds very loudly.
About 3 years ago I used a borescope and some tweezers as a sketchy endoscope and pulled out a hair that had somehow wedged itself in my ear canal. I don't recall how I figured out this plan, but it worked. The tinnitus has never returned since then.
I have no idea whether there's any causal connections between any of these events. It's a big mystery. But TBH I don't really care that much, I'm just super glad it's gone.
Just curious, why didn't you go to the doctor?
lately I've been listening to this on repeat at full volume and the tinnitus is coming back a bit: https://youtu.be/4lzqUe1Qfec
but I don't care fuck it
PSA that if you have pulsatile tinnitus, where you hear a sort of whooshing sound in time to your heart beat, it might be treatable by surgical intervention (such as stenting). It could even be caused by dangerous issues in the blood vessels around your ear, so it's worth getting that checked out. An MRI Angiogram (MRA/MRV) with gadolinium contrast seems to be the best way of catching those issues. Interventional neurologists are the folks who are best suited to help you.
Just some information I wish I had known at the start of my tinnitus journey.
I really, really notice mine when meditating. You’re in a quiet room. You pause to listen to the sounds around you. You most loudly hear “eeeeeeeeeeee”.
For myself, I noticed that observing it cheerfully, like “oh, hey, little whining sound!” makes it disappear into the background and I stop noticing it.
of course even reading a thread on tinnitus makes mine worse. The mere fact of paying attention to it makes it worse, so I have a hard time seeing how a drug is going to help much. I do wish there was something.
Ostensibly mine is from high frequency hearing loss, which I absolutely have, but I now wear hearing aids and it has no measurable impact from my point of view.
I take comfort in that I can go long periods of time without noticing it, and I know that even though I'm focused on it now and it's loud, it will slowly drift to the background and below conscious notice before too long.
I certainly don't befriend it, but I when I notice it, I acknowledge that I notice it and move on with whatever I'm doing. Eventually I'll notice again, days or weeks later and realize I hadn't noticed it at all in the intervening time. So I just relax and move on.
Very similar to my experience. I just woke up with it one day in my early 30s.
It drove me a bit mad at first, I wanted someone to 'cure' it and make it go away. Then I tried all sorts of things, I narrowed down the frequency (IIRC it's 13.5kHz) and tried masking by playing that in my right ear. I tried white noise. I tried 'notching' all my mp3s to remove that frequency band. I don't think any of it really helped.
But somewhere towards the end of all that I guess I started to accept it. It's here now because of this thread and sometimes it's present at night, especially if I drink too much, but most of the time I'm just not conscious of it any more. Occasionally I think it's actually gone-gone, but then if I 'look' for it then it usually returns.
The only way (for me) to proceed was to zen it out. Accept this is how it is and likely how it will be forever and suddenly it's just not very important.
Though I acknowledge that some folks likely have a harder time with that due to relative severity of the condition.
I have had occasional tinnitus, and once it lasted for a few months and then went away. Sometimes it appears suddenly, and I've taken vitamin B12 and magnesium and it goes away in a few hours. Vitamin D might also help according to some studies, but in my case I think it might make it worse. Not sure if placebo or not.
I've had tinnitus for 25+ years after neglecting an ear infection while I was working overtime.
It's never disappeared, but the "rain on a tent" sounds from mynoise.net, fan noise, and having a Twitch stream on in the background masks it enough that it's not bothersome during the day.
"Befriending" it though? Naah, I don't think so.
just a reminder there is a temp solution that worked for me that is kinda well know its about holding your hands agaisnt your head and drumming your fingers for 10 seconds on teh back of your skull, for some reason it clears it up for about a minute, something like that please google it
This page has so many dang scripts and the iframe doesn't do it any favors. I've allowed everything and it still doesn't load. There are far too few specialists that work on tinnitus and so many dental and ENT specialists choose to not take it seriously enough.
I have high pitched 7k hz bi-lateral ringing, 24x7. I've had it my whole life. I am convinced part of it is due to being born very premature (I was 1 lb 11 1/2 ounces). I believe it may be cervical and/or neurological (vascular, specifically).
It's so frustrating because nothing has happened. Masking only does so much. Sitting around reading a book, or trying to sleep is almost impossible.
I've been wanting to make a documentary style video on this diagnosis/issue, because a more people suffer like this than people realize. One medical professional that was helping me passed away a few years ago and that still eats away at me, because he really cared that he wasn't able to help me and it ate away at him. I still miss him.
Holy cow, that's a small baby! Congratulations on being alive!
It looks like good old fashioned jQuery, so I'm surprised your browser doesn't like it, but it looks like the direct link for the video inside the iframe is https://iframe.mediadelivery.net/embed/570723/69b827da-0ce9-...
Crazy thought but given that you have a pure sine frequency, maybe it would be possible to listen to an out of phase version of it to cancel. Same principle as noise cancelling except the noise is purely internal. Though I guess phase might drift over time making it not work. Still would be interesting to hear your results with this, success or not.
I had a strong feeling that I was developing tinnitus after my my usage of Apple's airpods[1] for meetings, video calls (personal and Official) and such, especially after years of Work From Home. I used to get puss from my ears, and sometimes that tweet/humming sound after a long day's use.
Later I switched to Bone Conduction headphones. I felt like BC Headphones has improved my condition a lot. No ear pain or puss or the humming noise. I hope it stays that way!
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35023808
Any in-ear headphones can cause ear infections from prolonged use, the airtight seal makes for a nice humid environment bacteria like.
The solution is to not wear them as long, especially right after a shower or the like, when there is extra moisture in your ear.
Alternatively you can put alcohol in your ears to kill the bacteria, sort of like you’d do with mouthwash. Any pharmacy will sell over the counter ear drops with alcohol, meant for drying out swimmers ear. You’d have to keep doing it once every week or two, but it would keep the infection away.
I’ve always wondered if it was my AirPods causing the tinnitus (or my acids reflux). Maybe I should give them a break and see what happens.
I read this a lot. My explanation is that it does not cause it but it does place you in silent environment (via noise cancellation) more often than you're used to, and that's exactly where you're likely to notice your existing tinnitus.
If you live in a noisy place, your noise levels might be high enough that you never even get the chance to notice it. AC alone might be enough to cover it if it's little.
there is precedent for this, you don't really feel your heart beating or hear your blood rushing most of the time. the brain learns which signals aren't important to you.
tinnitus also happens to be a very predictable signal, so the key is to convince your brain that it's noise to be filtered out. if you focus on it you will convince your brain of the opposite.
A similar strategy to this did help me a lot. Got tinitus 5 years ago in one ear due to a weird ear cleaning procedure followed by some sort of inflammation. It was quite weird in the beginning and it always got worse when I had a cold and my sinuses were blocked. Had some periods when it was really bad and I could fell like I can't take it any more, but somehow I accepted it and started to learn to live with it and ignore it as much as possible, focus on other sounds around me and so on. I went to a couple of clinics, my hearing was just fine and they always recommended white noise (used it a bit in the beginning, but somehow I didn't want to depend on headphones and constant sounds). What did help me in quiet places or when sleeping is just to think of something else and ignore the sound completely, at this point I can barely hear it/notice it even when going to bed or having headphones on with no sound. I do have friends who got it mostly because of loud music (musicians and concerts) and somehow they stress too much about it, making it unbearable. I understand that everyone has different experiences, but for me just ignoring it and somehow making your brain forget it and filtering it out did help a lot. EDIT: also completely ignoring the community (like reading about it on reddit or Facebook groups), stop watching videos like this about it helps a lot in forgetting about it and stops you from ruminating too much about it all the time.
While I agree that the brain can generally block it out once you accept it, I'll add that sometimes (for some people) it goes from a constant tone to intermittent chirping. The first time mine layered in a "typewriter tinnitus"[1] I wondered if I was picking up electronic interference in my head, which is a bit more difficult to tune out.
[1] https://youtu.be/bWPuYol1Tjo
> there is precedent for this, you don't really feel your heart beating or hear your blood rushing most of the time. the brain learns which signals aren't important to you
At the risk of a kind of odd tangent, I had a very weird experience a couple years ago where I woke up one morning and my entire body felt like it was "external" to my feeling, for lack of a better description. Getting up and walking around made me feel queasy because I could feel everything in my abdomen sloshing around, and lying sideways made me feel what I assume is how claustrophobic people feel in tight spaces because it felt like there were multiple surfaces around me instead of just the one I was lying on. I had severe brain fog to go along with it; the words coming out of my mouth felt like what I wanted to say, but it didn't feel like I was choosing them; normally my speech feels almost like a distillation of my thought process, but this felt like they were just spontaneously coming out without any thought process to generate them. My wife (still my fiancee at the time, but we had been together for several years) apparently couldn't tell anything different about me outwardly and said she wouldn't have been able to tell anything was wrong other than what I was telling her. The sensation didn't last all day, but after it left I had an odd numbness everywhere. The numbness was gone by the next morning too, but a couple weeks later the brain fog and numbness came back (albeit not quite as strong as it had been originally), and it's only been gradually fading away since then.
The experience (and the later experience that's still going on for a while now) has made me realize just how much my perception previously had been, let's say, "curated" by mind. One thing I've noticed is that even when the physical sensation isn't present, the "reaction" to the sensation will still occur. For example, I remember a time when I was shoveling large amounts of snow, and I suddenly noticed that I was taking large amounts of time between each shovelful, which had been happening instinctively due to how much I needed to catch my breath, but even then I still didn't physically feel tired or winded. Plenty of times I've woken up somewhat earlier than usual and tried to get back to sleep but not been able to, and eventually I realized there must be reason, so I'd have to actively think about whether I was thirsty or hungry or needed to use the bathroom, and then suddenly realized that one of them was actually the case. Pain is one of the weirdest cases, even with my numbness being a lot more mild than it was for the first year or so, because I still have the reflex that I'd expect from a sudden severe pain even if I don't feel it nearly as strongly.
I don't know for sure how much of this generalizes to everyone else, but the experience has definitely made me reconsider some cognitive theories that didn't seem plausible to me before. The idea that our brain basically tricks us into "remembering" feeling something as the reason for us taking a certain action seems pretty consistent with how I was would act the same way in circumstances where I normally would expect to have sensations causing me to act that way without being able to actually feel the sensation. In some ways the philosophical idea of consciousness being an illusion don't seem as crazy to me as before either, because it's clear that the reality I experience is only perceived through the lens of my biology, and I can't come up with a strong argument against the idea that my sense of "self" is just an evolutionary hack for handling some parts of my body (with the parts not benefiting from conscious management being actively hidden from whatever part of me feels like "me").
I don't even know why I have tinnitus. It's not end of the world bad tinnitus, but sometimes does get a little annoying. It is louder in the evenings/nights than in the mornings. I have it since primary school 4th grade or so, when I realized I have it, because an old teacher described her own tinnitus. But as far as I can remember there was no very loud sound event before that causing the tinnitus. Maybe it comes from bad posture or so, already in primary school. Too heavy school bag with too many books? Who knows. Have had it ever since. Most effective masking method for me is sound of rain whitenoise like that rainymood website.
I have it after I shot an indoor USPSA (IPSC) match right after a major ear infection. I always wear double ear plugs and muffs. The ENT I saw said he thought it was the infection that did it not the shooting. My hearing test came back very good despite the ringing. It’s always there, especially when it’s dead silent but after about four years, I don’t think about it anymore most of the time. I always wear shooting grade earmuffs even when doing yardwork with a lawnmower and the weedeater, I baby my hearing the best I can. It is a good reminder that we only get it once.
I got mine too after an infection.
What's weird is sometimes I wake up and then all of the sudden I hear it starting.
My dad has it really bad because he worked in a nightclub in his twenties. He would say it's like a jumbojet idling its engines nearby, all the time. It's thanks to him that I started taking ear protection seriously.
There's a book that briefly mentions the same effect on cluster headaches. They are not the main topic, but in the foreword author tells a story about having them as the reason he started the the journey. "The Presence Process", Michael Brown.
It took a while but this worked for me (no gimmicks either)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vOHoeRYxBI
Yeah, that's nice and all, but people suffering from tinnitus will tend to get downright angry when you tell them: "Just change your attitude to it." There's nobody with tinnitus who hasn't heard it 100x already. And it's not that easy.
It's unfortunate and surprising that there's still no effective drug, though lidocaine does, in fact, work. (Very temporarily, sadly.)
And time does help, at least sometimes. Over the past ten years, my tinnitus has gone from a 5/10 (highly annoying and noticeable above ambient noise, but not debilitating in any respect,) to something like a 1/10 (I don't even hear it unless I'm in an extremely quiet room and trying to sleep).
...But it sure ain't my friend, and never will be. It's hard to interpret it as anything but an annoying side-effect of self-inflicted nerve damage.
I've had it all my life. I'm 55. Mine is bearable and generally I don't notice it. Mine was caused by "glue ear" or more likely the operations to "cure it", which caused ear drum scarring and what not. I don't think that glue ear is a modern diagnosis anymore. Mind you doctors were only beginning to not advise people to smoke for their health in the early '70s.
I know what a variety of tinnitus is like (I've never known anything else) and I'm sure that other varieties can be horrendous. In my case time does not help.
Perhaps we ought to insist on a tinnitus spectrum, with multiple dimensions and some TLAs. I don't think that advice from a single data point is very helpful, or being charitable: annecdata. I'm glad it disappeared for OP.
Tinnitus ranges from, say, me (I'll live) through yourself (fuck! but I'll live) to committing suicide in despair at the extreme end.
Wow, I’ve had it for 15 years and until now I’ve never thought it may be connected to also being «treated» for glue ear as a kid. Do you have more info on this and how you came to that conclusion?
(I see you use another quoting style, so I'll try to keep my language to the point) I only heard about the term tinnitus as a 'teen or perhaps later.
ENT: Ear, Nose and Throat - a medical specialism.
My earliest memories are from around 18 months. I used to have very bad earache whenever I had a cold or influenza. My mother told me that I used to burst into tears, unprovoked or without any of the usual baby related reasons and eventually around age five or six I was diagnosed with "glue ear".
The way it was explained to me was: my eustacian tubes were too narrow. Speaking to children: "Your ears, nose and throat are all linked together and the tubes that link your ears to the rest of you are too small and get blocked easily".
I had surgery to insert "grommets" into my eustacian tubes. This was done twice. Grommets are tiny plastic, hollow tubes. From memory: about 3mm long and 3mm outer diameter but that is from a long time ago.
Now here is where it gets complicated! My dad was in the British army (so was my mum but that's another story). This means we moved house every two years or so. I can fix dates quite well.
The first operation was performed in Rinteln, West Germany at a British Forces hospital. We were stationed in Paderborn so it would be around 1976. I had a second set inserted in Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester (UK) in 1977 or perhaps early 1978.
I know that the second set of grommets were removed by a doctor (I think an ENT specialist) but I can't remember if the first set were removed in Manchester and replaced by the second pair at the same time.
I recall that the doctor used a black, plastic, bell shaped thing that fitted over my ear and wiggled some sort of hooked, metal probe within my ear to pull out the grommets. It was quite painful.
Even after the operations, I still got earache whenever I had a cold up until around age 20-25. That age range is a bit hard to pin down. I'll also note that when we were stationed in Cyprus in 1986-7ish, a lot of swimming and diving helped clear the tubes!
One of the nasty side effects of glue ear is that you have trouble with pressure changes. Airliners and swimming are the bane of your life.
There are some notes. Hope it helps.
The bane of your life, yet helped clear the tubes. Interesting
> It's unfortunate and surprising that there's still no effective drug, though lidocaine does, in fact, work. (Very temporarily, sadly.)
There's some research, but yeah, I'm surprised that something that affects so many people and in some cases affect them very severely isn't receiving more attention.
At least there are things one can do immediately after the fact to limit nerve damage (applying intratympanic steroids etc), but even these things are often missed and haven't become part of routine procedure yet.
And I'm very curious why Shore's device is still stuck in FDA hell while the (from what I've heard) inferior version, Lenire, passed a long time ago.
30 or so years here, still 5/10 after all these years. I don't let it bother me for the most part, but it'll certainly never be anything but a negative thing.
I'll be honest, this is the first time I'm hearing "just change your attitude towards it" though. It's like the terrible advice someone with depression gets- just be happy!
I mean people with tinnitus can choose to get angry about it or they can... change their attitude toward it.
I have it. I've changed my attitude toward it and made it my friend. I don't really know what else to tell you, but if you want to, the way is open for you. Or you can continue to see it as an aversive thing, and it will continue to be so.
Yeah, I know people don't like that message, but yeah... just accept it.
No amount of wishing it away is going to make it vanish in the same way if I really want to fly I just need to think I am a bird... at least in theory. ;)
It doesn't mean you have to be happy with it but just accept it, bring it out like a photo album of the family. 'Here is my tinnitus, it stays past its welcome but keeps me company.' 'There is my balding, society considered it ugly, I think it is just neat.'. 'Oh the knee that wants to play up every once in a while, yeah that happens, we work with it the best we can.'
Meh. My tinnitus is a result of high-frequency hearing loss. The hearing loss is not noticeable - maybe I can't hear something just below what dogs can hear? - but the tinnitus is noticeable.
I have no idea how it happened - I never used headphones much, I don't work around machines or jet engines, etc. One doctor said it's just wear and tear.
It doesn't bother me though. I figure that nobody has a full stack of bricks when it comes to health, and here's one of the places I'm short. Compared to some of the places where other folks have health problems, this is not a biggie.
There's surgery...
IIRC it's only for a specific, rare variant, though?
There's also that surgery where they sever your auditory nerve and render you deaf. Some have done this in an extreme last-ditch effort to cure their tinnitus. Sadly, it doesn't always work -- many of those who tried became deaf and yet remained stuck with tinnitus.
For people looking for treatment for long-term tinnitus, notched sound therapy has been statistically shown to help by reducing brain activity in relation to the perceived tinnitus frequencies (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8832119/). In other words, it doesn't go away, but it becomes less "important" to the auditory centers.
There are various professionally provided therapies of this style, but there are also simple self-therapy apps that find the perceived frequencies and then play white noise or a music library with the sound adjusted to produce the notched effect in that small frequency window. For example: https://audionotch.com/ https://www.tinnitusnotch.com/ https://www.tinnaway.com/
I haven't used this for years and I don't know if it helped me or not, but the below is a bash script which will duplicate a directory of mp3s and 'notch' everything using the linux command line tool 'sox'. You'll have to figure out the frequency band you want to remove, it's currently set to remove approximately a half-octave notch around my target frequency, 13.5kHz. Sox can do lots of file formats but you'll have to adapt the script if you want anything but mp3s altered. And no I'm not 100% sure why I felt the need to multi-process enable it...
(If anyone uses it, you'll probably want to give it absolute paths, or you're going to end up making NEWDIR inside OLDDIR
And yes, this will do a whole nested collection, not just the content of a single directory)
If you do not already use MyNoise to help you focus at work, then, like, what are you even doing? Sometimes I'll listen to music of various kinds if my work isn't too deep, but whenever I need to concentrate deeply on a problem, MyNoise will have the perfect noise blocker. Go explore the site. It's a lovely little corner of the "classic" internet: no ads, no shenanigans, just this one dude making a technical masterpiece that you can enjoy.
i love mynoise. Stephane's work is great
People say hearing loss is permanent, that may be true and I thought tinnitus was that, but its a separate correlated thing that doesnt have to be permanent
Ever since I got better earplugs and kept them on my keyring for more routine use, the symptoms have dissipated over time
Not going to name a brand since aficionados all have opinions about their deficiencies in favor of another brand thats equally open to debate
But I’m glad my tinnitus symptoms haven't seemed to be permanent
I haven't had ringing after music festivals in years now, and I can hear people again in loud environments
I've had tinnitus for years. At best it's usually isolated to my left ear and sounds like crickets. At worst it sounds like a choir of crickets in a large cathedral.
Funnily enough I only just remembered it because of this post and yes the crickets are still there. Thanks for that OP.
The post beneath this one is titled:
How Golden Is Silence, Actually?
This is a funny but sad coincidence! I'll chime in the same as others, I've had tinnitus for 20+ years and I know it is all due to one event. Somedays if I am tired or stressed it gets worse, and then some days I have so much going on I don't think about it (much). But sometimes when I have a calm moment or if I am on vacation trying to relax, I really have no idea what silence sounds like anymore.
I've had tinnitus since 15 or so. Randomly it was like a firecracker exploded in my left ear... Super frustrating at first. But over time, 20 some years later, it is what it is.
We aren't friends. Nor enemies.