Tinnitus linked to undetected auditory nerve damage

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.

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.

Ditto! Very useful for relieving ear pressure at altitude.

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.

If someone doesn't know how to do it, they could still learn it

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valsalva_maneuver

That’s not the same thing, I believe.

It's not the same thing, but it would allow them to

"[...] relieve your ear pressure without moving anything else"

And I just realized that I meant the Frenzel Maneuver, which I always forget the name of. OK you need a nose clip, but besides that it's hands free.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenzel_maneuver

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.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_clearing [2]: https://www.freedivinginstructors.com/article/204

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.

BTV or Jan Dow sound closest to what's being described in this thread.

To me, it "feels" kind of like moving the base of my tongue sideways and tensing my bottom jaw (in the same way I would pre-yawn).

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.

valsalva involves moving your hands

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.

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.

This is the correct answer.

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)

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 can do this too. It also does the same thing as yawning when your ears get blocked on a plane or driving up a steep hill. It unblocks them.

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 okay, that must be something different (that I can't do) then.

Stapedius reflex? Some can control this muscle volintarily (me as well), it dampens incoming noise by a few dB to protect the ears.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_reflex

Right. I can do it too - I can make them click/crunch and roar - which I'm sure is due to the sound muscles make when tensed.

Squeeze your fist and hold it up to your ear. It's audible.

Click is from pressure gradient when opening/tightening the eustachian tube. If I switch to open I can hear myself breathing.

Partially covering the outer ear makes the flow of blood audible.

That's not tinnitus-related.

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.

Another example why you shouldn't take ChatGPT at face value.

The clicking sound is the opening of the Eustachian tube. Flexing the tensor tympani sounds like a deep rumbling.

There’s a whole subreddit dedicated to this, which they call “ear rumbling”:

https://www.reddit.com/r/earrumblersassemble/

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.

wow there's a word for my useless ability!

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 think that is the experience of _everyone_

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. :-)

Not the same thing at all. Try squeezing your eyelids really tight, you might hear a noise. That's what he's talking about.

Oh Internet, so maybe I can do that, thought we all could! Sounds like roaring wind...

I can do that too.

I am genuinely shocked I can do it...

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.

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.

I went from, "What's this guy even talking about?" straight to inducing roaring after vaguely recall doing it as a child over 30 years ago.

I always just assumed this was a normal thing that everyone had and never bothered to look it up. Sounds exactly like the roar of a high wind to me.

I've always been able to do this, and I've always assumed that it's not unusual. It does not seem to be at all related to my tinnitus.

It took me a long while to figure out that I can make my tinnitus better by pushing by jaw backwards (using my hands).

As I understood it, the ear and the jaw muscle are delicately close. "Pressure" on the ear can somehow cause the nerves to send such signals.

I got prescribed some special training to relax the muscles in the neck and jaw area; still need to start it.

I read that being able to modulate the tinnitus to also be quieter somehow is a good indicator of being able to improve it with therapy.

My symptoms started along with my jaw crackling. So it seems they are related.

Putting my symptoms here:

- Constant noise in ear

- Also seems like noise / tingling sensation in the brain

- Is higher just when I wake up

- Started along with an infection that went to the ear. Infection cleared up. Tinnitus didn't.

- Been on for a year and a half.

- Its terribly unbearable. Not suicidal level but very close to it.

I bet you have a tongue tie. Go get a frenectomy. Do tongue stretches. Get some facial massages.

mind elaborating more? I also have horrible sleep apnea that is related to a lazy tongue

- 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

It's living hell.

I have the same shit, it sucks.

  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

That's wild. Never tried that before but just did and I can 100% repro.

Only the first and third do anything for me, but both seem to add the same high pitch tone to the mix.

Same here, what the hell? Luckily it goes away as soon as I stop doing it.

I get more buzzing with the first and third as well. I like the go biting doesn’t seem to change it for me.

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.

Moving the ears backwards has no effect for me.

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.

Same!

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.

My breathing is impaired as well, there is simply not enough space in my mouth as a result of the fix.

Exactly, my tongue also seems like it's too big for my mouth afterwards.

I wonder if rapid palate expansion would fix this also.

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.

how does nerve damage relate to sleep apnea? doctors have recommended tonsil removal to expand my palate space.

also have tinnitus bte

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.

EDIT: This whole reddit thread is quite crazy, full of people having all sorts of issues cured by various methods that classic ortho wont approve: https://www.reddit.com/r/orthotropics/comments/11ow1yb/expan...

My ears ring when I yawn. Does anyone else get that?

Yep same here, and I don’t have tinnitus. Sometimes I seem to get it temporarily though, for unclear reasons.

Interesting. I don't have tinnitus but when I jut my jaw forward I hear really low white noise.

interesting, I've just tried it and I get the same

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".

same. wow this really lends to the "it's physical" theory

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.

That's a peculiarly specific sort of autophony.

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!

if it helps you or your doctor, my experience is exactly the same. I can amplify the tinnitus with jaw movements

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.

Exactly the same for me.

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.

have you tried this

https://youtu.be/2yDCox-qKbk?si=eEjtlP97v8UiubX4

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 relatable. Have always been able to do this.

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!

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).

Yup. Pushing jaw forward is the most prominent one. Goes up a lot.

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.

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.

- jutting my jaw forward

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'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?

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.

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!

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.

Same here. Head and neck movement can make my tinnitus worse. If I sleep poorly on my neck then I can wake up with my tinnitus being much louder.

Try putting your fingers in your ears and massaging around. I've found it gives me complete relief for about 10 seconds.

I think mine might be related to stress, hypertension, and an all-around lack of relaxation.

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.

Where are you based, and would you want to troubleshoot with a friend who notices similar things? :)

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'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.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S180759322...

Mine is due to hearing damage from being stupid.

I can modulate it as well using my jaw muscles.

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.

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

Could it be that those movements are pinching a nerve somewhere and causing the tinnitus?

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.

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 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).

Tinnitus was one of the reasons I stopped cracking my neck - would trigger it shortly after.

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).

I can do that as well.

moving my ears back with my face muscles

Uh, this has always made me hear a high-pitched whirr. Like a tiny buzzer with a dirty power supply. Huh.

suggests that (my flavor of tinnitus, at least) may be due to physical/muscle related causes

I have explosion-related tinnitus/hearing damage and it also reacts to muscle movements. So, it seems like they are the same.

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.

Do you have TMJ?

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.

Mine reminds me of the high-pitched sound made by old, tube TVs. I think it was called the flyback transformer. 16Khz.

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.

I remember enjoying that sound as a child. Muting the TV while falling asleep.

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.

The exact formula is 4,500,000 / 286 = 15734.265734265... Hz.

That is for NTSC, for PAL the formula is 625*25 = 15625 Hz

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.

It's the PAL and NTSC (480i / 240p) sets we can hear. VGA (480p and higher) screens scan at > 30khz so we can't hear them.

I like the sound and can hear when a shop has a CRT security camera when I walk past lol

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.

For what it's worth, I had that and pretty all my friends I bothered to ask could also hear old TVs back when were kids. It is exceedingly common.

I couldn't charge my macbook at night because the official apple charger made that noise and it bothered me.

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

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.

Honestly you should probably just get a professional hearing aid, they do a hearing test and adjust its frequency response to your ears.

The longer you wait with getting it, the harder it will be for your brain to adjust to processing the full corrected sounds.

I've been considering this more often lately. I was hoping for an inexpensive option since hearing aids are just earbuds with a custom tune.

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.

They're not really, but I can see why Beltone stores would give you that impression. Go see an audiologist.

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.

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.

For example listen to the following, at a level that it isn't uncomfortable and your Tinnitus might be gone for a short time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNf9nzvnd1k

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.

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.

This seems promising? https://hms.harvard.edu/news/scientists-regenerate-hair-cell...

I remember full well that music was much richer to me until maybe my mid 20s. It would be amazing to get that back somehow.

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.

Seems neurological and reminiscent of phantom limb pain after amputation. And they treat that now by fooling the brain with mirrors...

there is also this similar project from the EU https://www.regainyourhearing.eu/ this is very interesting. They put hair regrowth stuff in the ear

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.

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.

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.

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.

  >When listening to music with headphones it is important to... not to push the volume too high

I've started referring to this experiential phenomenon as "The Call of the Loud"

(of course a reference to https://www.livescience.com/what-is-call-of-the-void)

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..."

And I have the suspiction, this can happen with visual signals as well. See "visual snow".

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.

[0] https://www.dxomark.com/apple-macbook-air-15-m2-2023/

you can also try this exercise for very low risk temporary tinnitus suppression

https://youtu.be/2yDCox-qKbk?si=eEjtlP97v8UiubX4

it works reliably well

nice that worked for 5 seconds

this works for 2-4 mins for me

https://youtu.be/2yDCox-qKbk?si=eEjtlP97v8UiubX4

Your advice about not listening to your tinnitus is spot on, but easier said than done. I found the guidance in the book Rewiring Tinnitus really helped me in this respect https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rewiring-Tinnitus-Finally-Relief-Ri...

mdma does the same for some reason. Total quit for 8h ... but also totaly high.

Cue all the top comments about why this isn’t news, or how we’re no closer to a cure.

I’ve just accepted that there won’t be a cure anytime soon, and come to terms with it.

Would love to be proven wrong, but I think they’ll find a cure for tinnitus when they can cure baldness and cancer.

I get the point but we can cure many many forms of cancer and have treatments for baldness so it feels like a moving goalposts situation.

we can cure many many forms of cancer

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".

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".

You don't typically catch cancer riding the bus.

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.

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.

Cancers can be like that too.

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.

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.

Diseases without the possibility of animal testing are going to take a long time.

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.

You could study auditory nerve regeneration in animals, it would just be difficult to determine whether or not it cures any tinnitus that they have.

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.

It's cilia, not hair, growing from the hair cells in the inner ear.

Other than that nitpick, sure.

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.

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.

Hope you get some relief.

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.

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.

Sorry to hear.

Phrasing…

I thought it was funny.

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).

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...

If the solution to concerts is that you have to protect your ears yourself then I would argue that the concerts themselves should be held accountable.

I have tinnitus and it SUCKS. The people who threw the outdoor music festivals I went to in my 20s should be brought to trial...

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 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.

I may simply remove that fan in the future.

I’ll assume you know what you’re doing, but I still had a gut reaction. Careful not to burn your house down.

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'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.

Makes me realize I should not take even the most mundane things for granted

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.

Have you ever tried the back of the head tap thing? https://lifehacker.com/this-weird-trick-might-give-you-brief...

I wish all of these weird tricks worked. I’m sure all of us tried them during our initial panic

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'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.

Is tinnitus really just "freaker by the speaker" syndrome?

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 as well.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8788157/

I know, I am a heretic for drawing any negative attention to our savior from the deadly pandemic.

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 that 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.

No - I had tinnitus from when I was quite a young child.

As OP said though - it's a case of, if you focus on it, it'll weigh you down.

No. Many people got it because of burn out stress for example.

Earplugs often give me tinnitus when I am wearing them.

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.

Makes me wonder if nervous transduction is based on PLL resonant circuits

This makes sense in a "phantom limb" way.

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.

It reminds me of what sometimes happens in an electrical circuit if you disconnect an input and leave it floating.

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.

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.

https://norcaloa.com/CAOT/articles-in-press/CAOT-101018

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.

Could you link a video or something on the exercises you do? Not sure what eccentric means in that context.

Here are the streches:

https://1drv.ms/b/s!AkOl7L0amzk1gZJkufVhfYr8q1vtbw?e=tjuBWD

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EG7z_qsYNY&ab_channel=Rehab...

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.

https://norcaloa.com/CAOT/articles-in-press/CAOT-101018

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.

I'm pretty sure it's just something that trained osteopaths could do. Cranial osteopathy takes a lot of practice and learning as I understand.

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.

to add to my other comment: https://youtu.be/2yDCox-qKbk?si=eEjtlP97v8UiubX4

this trick helped me be in silence for the first time in decades. it was wonderful, to say the least

How long did this silence last for you?

I don't think there is any way to heal tinnitus.

The best you can do is get habituated to it, that is get used to it.

The only way is as you have found is to concentrate or do something else.

you learn to zone out your tinnitus. ironically, meditation helps me be more present and be WITH the tinnitus.

it sucks. especially if you have an injury it might be permanent, however ENT doctors have told me it's all imagines which I refuse to believe

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"

It's just binocular vision at work.

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.

its diabetes in disguise is what my doc said

Hey, this is very interesting. Do you have any pointer?

The inflammation in your body can be picked up by your ears if you are sensitive to it

Yes, a quick search through Pubmed shows that 25% of Diabetes patients have Tinnitus.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35261656/

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.

I’m not saying it’s the only cause, but it may well aggravate it.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250886390

We had tinnitus before anc was common

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.

Anyone else experience this?

My tinnitus started days after my first covid shot. Plenty of people have reported tinnitus after covid or the shots.

Mine is very mild but it's still annoying.

Same here, after my first Moderna shot it started and hasn't gone away.

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.

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 whole thing is tiny - the tip link is about 150nm long. Another pic here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2921850/ fig 1)

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 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.

Can you describe in more detail how you adjust your position? You move your neck back, I guess, and anything else?

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.

the leaflets:

https://imgbb.com/XWnTZVB

https://imgbb.com/r6PBbTK

Have Tinnitus.

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.

The beauty of our race is it's absurd ability to accept uncomfortable situations as "normal".

the obvious exceptions being chronic pain, and the jets' imperative to steal defeat from the jaws of victory.

Thank you. I needed to hear the last part.

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.

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.

mine just suddenly happened. It really bothered me to start with, now I barely notice it even though its actually kind of loud.

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.

That’s tinnitus.

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.

Do they have noise cancelling? There was a thread a while back about people blaming active noise cancelling as a possible cause.

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.

why do you need this paid service? seems they're monetizing 1 audio clip

here's a YouTube video that does the same thing

https://youtu.be/qNf9nzvnd1k?si=HCFBFkuTCeVd2d_9

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.

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.

https://www.lenire.com/what-is-lenire/

intrigued but wondering if this is a shameless plug

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.

Does it also sound stronger for you after a nap or intense exercise?

Just anecdotal, but I always noticed people I knew that had tinnitus had a history of using a lot of over the counter pain medication

fwiw, I have mild tinnitus and have never had anything stronger than child Tylenol syrup - and that maybe once every two years or so.

Lots of good tips here, thanks!

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.

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

I’m surprised no one has suggested noise canceling headphones as a possible cause. There was an HN post about this awhile back

Does this study bring anything new to the table?

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.

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.

Summary of the science:

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.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5438769/

I would like to share, that my tinnitus changes its pitch with the rate of breathing and tension on the muscles that help with diaphragm breathing

This study uses fmri neurofeedback to teach people to control their auditory cortex, with impact on tinnitus :

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381191...

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 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.

T and H are major factors for ruining my life. Ruined dreams and suicidal.

A lot of us also spend too much time in quiet environments.

When I’m outside, my tinnitus is barely noticeable. It’s only when I’m in my silent office does it drive me crazy.

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.

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.

Found ringing in the air only occurs when I do inverted exercises, like when your upside down

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.

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.

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.

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).

For what it's worth, here's my case:

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".

Well, this has always been my suspicion ever since I started being affected.

All hearing tests I performed stop at 8k while I can easily hear into 15k and my ringing is way up there in the 13-14k range.

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”.

Also associated with rushed covid vaccines.Perhaps their is good reason that vaccines usually take around 10 years to develop.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8788157/

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.

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.

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...

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 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.

paper (open access): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-46741-5

older report (2016) from one of the authors: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27108594/

planned study: https://oto.hms.harvard.edu/news/dr-zheng-yi-chen-named-prin...

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.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=XGq3MXQlRJs

* Can't verify right now, trusting my memory.

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.

PSA: I thought I had tinnitus but it was just ear wax sitting against my eardrum. A doctor cleared it up in 15 minutes.

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

It seems like tinnitus is to hearing what migraine is to vision.

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.

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).