It's impossible to describe how depressing it is to hear a sound non stop in your ears, night and day, wherever I go or whatever I do, it just never stops.
The brain started filtering it out a bit after months, but it's always there and you're often reminded of it when you're in a slightly more silent environment.
There are days where it becomes especially loud and falling asleep you'd just like to cry or something.
I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember, so I've never had any negative feelings associated with it. As a kid I just thought it was natural that everyone's ears would ring all the time and would get louder when it was quiet. My ears are ringing right now as I write this.
Then I developed pulsatile tinnitus in my early 30s, which means I can hear my heartbeat in my (right) ear at all hours of the day as well. When I tell people about it, I like to describe it like the heartbeat from Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.
Developing pulsatile tinnitus really affected my mental health for a while, despite living my whole life with a constant buzzing and ringing in my ears. I couldn't get over the fact that there was now this loud whooshing sound in my right ear, 60+ times per second, and my doctors couldn't even tell me why after several MRIs. I thought I was going crazy, or that I'd developed some kind of brain tumor invisible to scans.
I don't have any great advice except to say that eventually (maybe six months to a year) my brain just adapted to the sound and I hardly ever think of it anymore. It's as much a part of my life as the buzzing and ringing I've had since I was a kid. It can be annoying when I'm trying to listen intently for something (my wife is a birder and it's hard to hear things she points out), but it thankfully doesn't affect my mental health anymore.
I got a high-pitch ringing tinnitus when I was about 18-20. I went from being a person that falls asleep in <5 min to needing at least 1h + needing a background radio/white noise/stream to fall asleep. I sympathize and recognize everything that you reflect on here. I felt kind of "depressed" the first year.
But no matter how cliché it sounds, it does get better with time. The brain does get better and better with filtering it.
I also discovered that my tinnitus gets worse with caffeine, stress and lack of sleep. In periods when I live a overall "healthy" lifestyle in respect to sleep, stress, food, working out etc. I forget that I have tinnitus. When I sleep to little and/or when I'm stressed, it comes back full force.
I have totally cut out caffeine, which also happened to help with my migraine.
Now ~15 years later I'm in my early thirties and I rarely think about it tbh. However, after a bad cold about 5 years ago I got a secondary tinnitus which is a low-frequency humming. This set me back and cased me some sleepless nights but I have adapted to this as well.
The thing I miss the most is the concept of "total silence". I do envy my fiancé sometimes if we're out in the woods or whatever and I know that she can just relax while "hearing nothing".
Let time do its work and experiment with your body/health to find what makes it lessen. Chances are that de-stressing, sleeping well and eating and working out does make it better.
Sorry to hear this. I similarly woke up one day with bi-lateral tinnitus at about an 8/10 in loudness. Thought I was going to lose my mind.
After about 9 days one morning the right ear completely resolved and the left ear was at about a 5/10.
Very, very, very long story short, I did a ton of digging and experimenting and realized it was related to a neck injury (a lot of people with whiplash have short-long term tinnitus). Over a year of physical therapy later, the tinnitus in the left ear is usually gone and only flares up if I lift weights with poor form.
If you've had a neck/shoulder injury in the past 1-2 years, it's something I'd look into.
I got it about ten years ago and it drove me absolutely insane for a few months until I just accepted that I would have it. Then a weird thing happened: my brain stopped paying attention to it. Now I mostly only hear it when I think to myself, “do I still have tinnitus?” and try to listen for it. It’s still there, I just don’t care anymore. I had no idea that even what you hear can be such a subjective experience until I went through this, but it makes sense. You do this all the time when you tune out ambient sounds and conversations to focus on something.
My dad had tinnitus and it bothered him relentlessly. He was constantly following potential new treatments, talking to doctors about it, etc.
I have it too. I've taken the approach of truly accepting it: "I will hear these sounds the rest of my life, and I'm truly okay with that". As a result it doesn't give me anxiety or bother me, and I find it helps it fade into the background. The more you focus on it (and let it bother you) the more it stays in the foreground.
I know the advice of "just learn to be okay with it" is easy to communicate but very hard to actually do. I found mindfulness meditation helped me learn to accept things without judgement, including the presence of my tinnitus.
2. rotate your hands so your index fingers are on the base of your skull, middle fingers just above
3. now put your index fingers on your middle fingers and "snap" them down on the muscle at the base of your skull some 10-15 times
4. if your tinnitus goes away or reduces, it's caused by muscle tension instead of nerves
This blew my mind when I first tried it, but looked into it and it makes total sense: we all work on computers all day, necks get fatigued, and the impact forces the muscles to contract until they force-release, alleviating the tension-caused tinnitus.
Just wondering do you think you got tinnitus or was it there and you suddenly started noticing? I don't know I got it around 20y ago but I'm honestly unsure if it was one or the other because it became worse and worse the more I started focusing on it. Eventually it subsided. I can still hear it if I listen for it (as I just did now and I can hear a distinct 'bruising' kind of sound) but there's literally months between I even think of it or notice it. There have been studies that lots of 'normal' people notice tinnitus when they enter a sound-proof room.
What helped me was just taking long showers - I literally couldn't hear a thing during the shower and some time after. And it seems the 'drown out' period would last longer. And just knowing something would stop it somehow made me ease more into it and maybe reduced the fear that had been programmed into my brain. I also did omega 3 and gingo biloba (just low doses) and felt like it had some effect.
Was there any trigger and how 'loud' do you perceive it?
I once read something about the prevalence of depression in people with tinnitus. I was surprised by it, but I didn't really consider how disruptive it must be when you're accustomed to not having it. By contrast, I've had it basically my whole life. I remember laying awake at night, listening to the deafening ringing, thinking about how weird it was that silence isn't silent. It wasn't until later that I knew my experience isn't the norm.
I'd love to have a treatment or cure. Especially for folks like you that truly suffer from it.
You'll get used to it. 42 male here. Started at 12-13 years of age. Barely notice it anymore. Some things (lack of sleep, extreme stress, some medicines/drugs) accentuate it a bit, but it's annoying at best, not interfering. I also produce music, so I don't think it has affected my hearing. So you'll be good. Stop worrying.
Oh, use a fan based white noise machine (or a loud fan) during sleeping, really drowns it out.
Also got tinnitus here. Woke up with it about 5 years ago. I'd recently had COVID and was also on a strong medication. But I've been a lifelong insomniac so this article has me wondering.
I can only sleep when there's another noise in the room for frame of reference, otherwise the tinnitus feels like the loudest sound in the universe. My current solution is an air purifier on its audible middle setting (basically white noise with a use), and a humidifier in winter.
> The Oxford researchers proposed that the large spontaneous waves of brain activity that occur during deep sleep, or non-rapid eye movement sleep (non-REM), might suppress the brain activity that leads to tinnitus.
As somebody with tinnitus, forgive me, this seemed instinctively obvious. A very bad night of sleep raises the volume of the tinnitus substantially. Stress does the same.
Not sure about stress, but definitely have the same exp re sleep. If I’m tired the ringing is very noticeable, when I wake up early after a late night it can be deafening. But besides from noticing it being “louder” it seems to go away, or I just ignore it.
Also, in the fleeting moments between waking and full consciousness, I can hear all sounds coming back to me (ringing included), exactly as if they had been turned off by my brain during sleep and are now being turned on again.
I also have been suffering from tinnitus a little over a year now. It definitely has impacted my sleep, especially my mornings. It's the first thing I think about when I wake up.
I've been following the work of Auricle Inc., a company commercializing decades of neuroscience research out of Dr. Susan Shore's lab at the University of Michigan. (Full disclosure: I have spoken to their CEO about potentially helping with their funding, although my primary concern is getting their product to the public).
Instead of just masking the sound, their device targets the root cause using bimodal neuromodulation. It pairs specific audio tones with mild electrical pulses to the jaw/neck to desynchronize hyperactive neurons in the dorsal cochlear nucleus.
Here are the two papers that cover the underlying science, and go over the efficacy:
Dr Shore device has been decades in development. It's been all the rage in r/tinnitus , r/tinnitusresearch and T. Facebook groups. Still according to people that have tried it, it's no silver bullet.
I've had tinnitus for 25+ years and followed a lot of science. At some point some Brasil researchers found a drug that reduced tinnitus volume as a secondary effect. There wrote papers about it, but unfortunately, nothing came of it.
For people suffering from tinnitus, here is a technique that greatly helped me:
1. Place your hands over your ears such that your fingers are on the back of your skull - thumbs should be on your neck and middle fingers at the base of your skull.
2. Tap your middle fingers on the base of your skull repeatedly for ~30 seconds
It apparently doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s not permanent, but for me it greatly reduces the “volume” or stops it entirely.
I have no idea what the explanation is, but it’s free, safe, and you can try it right now.
Got mine after my first Acid trip (still don't know if it was real acid). Its not debilitating for me, just annoying. So yeah, be careful out there folks. The Acid trip was very cerebral though and I consider it to be an important experience in my life so I am kind of on the fence that it might have been worth the trade off....
AirPod pros noise cancellation gave me my tinnitus. Just as a warning to others be careful. There’s an apple support page with lots of people complaining about the same thing.
It's interesting. I guess the algorithm moves the pod diaphragm to try to oppose external noise but must push the ear drum out of it's design range.
I have tinnitus. My theory of how it arises is the bit of the ear that converts spatial movement to electrical signals - some hairs tied to an ion channel basically - gets moved too far and breaks the thing in such a way that the channel jams open.
The noise pro stuff may be worse than regular loud noises as the ear recognises loud noises and tries to protect itself but may not do that with the noise cancellation movements.
The opening sentence “Those who have never endured the relentless ringing of tinnitus can only dream of the torment” does not mean what they think it means. Unless this is a very niche kink.
I solved mine by chronically exposing myself to very low noise during sleep - wearing good earplugs in an already silent room. To the point where you can hear your eyeballs move etc. I guess this may be where the link to good sleep comes from, which implies a quiet sleeping environment
I also have good experience with wearing ear protection in a quiet room. But I haven't been disciplined enough about it. My probably wrong rationale is that part of the issue is hearing loss and reducing the volume retrains your brain to be able to process smaller signals.
I have, I think, probably the most benign tinnitus I could imagine.
I randomly get something in my head that sounds pretty close to coil whine, but definitely isn't coil whine — I've had it when I'm in the depths of the wilderness with no electronics.
It typically lasts less than 20s and I can go months between occurrences.
I’ve had it for almost 6 years. I’m fairly certain it can be solved by a simple laser to the blood vessels in my ear, but doctors refuse to even try it. My tinnitus started as hearing my heartbeat for over a year before it turned into a screeching noise. It makes complete sense to me that blood vessels in the ear are the primary cause, considering how many ailments can cause new blood vessel growth… why has nobody even considered this as a cause to tinnitus? If i could clearly hear my own pulse/heartbeat, then maybe just maybe it’s because a blood vessel was forming extremely close to the inner ear… but nobody will help me, because American doctors are only concerned about their paychecks than they actually care about helping anyone. All of that blood rushing through my ear, shaking the inner ear bones, etc, has destroyed about 80% of my hearing in my right ear… i really wish there was a doctor out there that actually cared enough to help me try to end it… it’s game over if it ever spreads to my other ear too and nobody is still willing to help me…because i will go insane if this begins permanent surround sound with both ears screeching inside my head.
I thought it was raining on our trip to venice: "you hear that dear, quite nasty rain". She looked at me puzzled, but hadn't noticed what I really heard. The next day was obvious... This now 15+ years ago. Some days it is bad, some days I hardly notice. It does not affect me that much: still hear near pitch perfect (work on music stuff as hobby), mostly a consistent hiss which can get annoying sometimes as it can distracts, mostly can ignore it. Some people can't, maybe lucky?
Edit: Local doctor just once told me:just listen to music to drown it out, don't over do.... Keep enjoying it. never seeked further help.
I’ve been using my tinnitus to evaluate whether I got enough sleep or when I’ve become tired for years, so it’s nice to randomly trip over validation here that the link is universal to and not just a hyperlocal mutation. Thanks for posting this.
I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed this if I was trying to tune out tinnitus, but I’m just used to it? Not like anything is every quiet (my hearing is hyperactive), but, like, the tone and volume of it right now is “insufficient sleep but circadian forced us awake” so I need to be particularly measured and chill if I drive while it’s this loud.
I'm 35. I've got tinnitus since I was 9/10 years old. The insurgence of my tinnitus is interesting: I got it after sleeping an entire night with a television static after watching a VHS. Another interesting aspect is that the aforementioned insurgence happened in 2 phases: I went asleep watching a VHS and the subsequent static sound made me hear a ringing sound for a while (some days IIRC) then disappeared; a week after that I went asleep again in the same way (vhs, static etc) and from that moment onward I always got a ringing. It sounds like when you turn on a ctr tv. Initially I was kind of alarmed. No one believed me and I found the existence of the condition after many years on tv or internet. My brain filter the sound most of the time so I live with the condition.
Tinnitus might be the simplest debilitating disease. It's sad that no therapy, even alleviating, is available.
I always thought that tinnitus is caused by a "rusted" acoustic nerve wire (here it's coexistence with hearing loss) no central mechanism is evolved. Linking non-REM sleep phase to tinnitus production is unexpected.
I am a 69 yr old female. I don't remember a time without tinnitus, even as a child. In the last two years I had a couple of scary episodes where the whooshing, whistling, ringing ,buzzing, heart pulse became a HORN. In my right ear. It was driving me crazy, making me cry because it wouldn't stop. Nothing would cover the noise. I ended up at a neurologist. I found out I had a cyst in a pineal gland, that I didn't know about. But no answer to the horn sound, migraine and nausea. eventually after about a week it stopped. The second time was only a day. It is a frustrating ongoing situation, but I guess others have far worse problems.
[+] [-] epolanski|3 days ago|reply
Got it randomly one day this summer.
It's impossible to describe how depressing it is to hear a sound non stop in your ears, night and day, wherever I go or whatever I do, it just never stops.
The brain started filtering it out a bit after months, but it's always there and you're often reminded of it when you're in a slightly more silent environment.
There are days where it becomes especially loud and falling asleep you'd just like to cry or something.
Don't wish it on anybody.
[+] [-] nozzlegear|3 days ago|reply
Then I developed pulsatile tinnitus in my early 30s, which means I can hear my heartbeat in my (right) ear at all hours of the day as well. When I tell people about it, I like to describe it like the heartbeat from Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.
Developing pulsatile tinnitus really affected my mental health for a while, despite living my whole life with a constant buzzing and ringing in my ears. I couldn't get over the fact that there was now this loud whooshing sound in my right ear, 60+ times per second, and my doctors couldn't even tell me why after several MRIs. I thought I was going crazy, or that I'd developed some kind of brain tumor invisible to scans.
I don't have any great advice except to say that eventually (maybe six months to a year) my brain just adapted to the sound and I hardly ever think of it anymore. It's as much a part of my life as the buzzing and ringing I've had since I was a kid. It can be annoying when I'm trying to listen intently for something (my wife is a birder and it's hard to hear things she points out), but it thankfully doesn't affect my mental health anymore.
[+] [-] BOSIG|3 days ago|reply
But no matter how cliché it sounds, it does get better with time. The brain does get better and better with filtering it. I also discovered that my tinnitus gets worse with caffeine, stress and lack of sleep. In periods when I live a overall "healthy" lifestyle in respect to sleep, stress, food, working out etc. I forget that I have tinnitus. When I sleep to little and/or when I'm stressed, it comes back full force. I have totally cut out caffeine, which also happened to help with my migraine.
Now ~15 years later I'm in my early thirties and I rarely think about it tbh. However, after a bad cold about 5 years ago I got a secondary tinnitus which is a low-frequency humming. This set me back and cased me some sleepless nights but I have adapted to this as well.
The thing I miss the most is the concept of "total silence". I do envy my fiancé sometimes if we're out in the woods or whatever and I know that she can just relax while "hearing nothing".
Let time do its work and experiment with your body/health to find what makes it lessen. Chances are that de-stressing, sleeping well and eating and working out does make it better.
[+] [-] anonym00se1|3 days ago|reply
After about 9 days one morning the right ear completely resolved and the left ear was at about a 5/10.
Very, very, very long story short, I did a ton of digging and experimenting and realized it was related to a neck injury (a lot of people with whiplash have short-long term tinnitus). Over a year of physical therapy later, the tinnitus in the left ear is usually gone and only flares up if I lift weights with poor form.
If you've had a neck/shoulder injury in the past 1-2 years, it's something I'd look into.
[+] [-] jarnagin|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] newt_slowly|3 days ago|reply
I have it too. I've taken the approach of truly accepting it: "I will hear these sounds the rest of my life, and I'm truly okay with that". As a result it doesn't give me anxiety or bother me, and I find it helps it fade into the background. The more you focus on it (and let it bother you) the more it stays in the foreground.
I know the advice of "just learn to be okay with it" is easy to communicate but very hard to actually do. I found mindfulness meditation helped me learn to accept things without judgement, including the presence of my tinnitus.
[+] [-] mieubrisse|3 days ago|reply
1. put your thumbs on your ears
2. rotate your hands so your index fingers are on the base of your skull, middle fingers just above
3. now put your index fingers on your middle fingers and "snap" them down on the muscle at the base of your skull some 10-15 times
4. if your tinnitus goes away or reduces, it's caused by muscle tension instead of nerves
This blew my mind when I first tried it, but looked into it and it makes total sense: we all work on computers all day, necks get fatigued, and the impact forces the muscles to contract until they force-release, alleviating the tension-caused tinnitus.
[+] [-] accounting2026|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] mynameisash|3 days ago|reply
I once read something about the prevalence of depression in people with tinnitus. I was surprised by it, but I didn't really consider how disruptive it must be when you're accustomed to not having it. By contrast, I've had it basically my whole life. I remember laying awake at night, listening to the deafening ringing, thinking about how weird it was that silence isn't silent. It wasn't until later that I knew my experience isn't the norm.
I'd love to have a treatment or cure. Especially for folks like you that truly suffer from it.
[+] [-] whatsupdog|3 days ago|reply
Oh, use a fan based white noise machine (or a loud fan) during sleeping, really drowns it out.
[+] [-] randerson|3 days ago|reply
I can only sleep when there's another noise in the room for frame of reference, otherwise the tinnitus feels like the loudest sound in the universe. My current solution is an air purifier on its audible middle setting (basically white noise with a use), and a humidifier in winter.
[+] [-] baxtr|3 days ago|reply
It suddenly came one day I was more stressed than usual. Stayed since then.
I often catch myself falling asleep thinking: maybe when I wake up tomorrow, it’s gone. Just to wake up the next day and hear it again.
It’s very annoying. But I have learned to live with it. Some days are better some are worse.
[+] [-] bookofjoe|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] mynameisash|3 days ago|reply
> The Oxford researchers proposed that the large spontaneous waves of brain activity that occur during deep sleep, or non-rapid eye movement sleep (non-REM), might suppress the brain activity that leads to tinnitus.
[+] [-] bookofjoe|3 days ago|reply
https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/4/3/fcac089/6563...
[+] [-] bookofjoe|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] Kinrany|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] Fire-Dragon-DoL|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] ElCapitanMarkla|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] thrance|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] jryb|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 days ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] amelius|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] NooneAtAll3|3 days ago|reply
it seems that these researchers think it's non-REM sleep that helps in prevention, not just sleep in general
[+] [-] ramoz|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] rheng|3 days ago|reply
I've been following the work of Auricle Inc., a company commercializing decades of neuroscience research out of Dr. Susan Shore's lab at the University of Michigan. (Full disclosure: I have spoken to their CEO about potentially helping with their funding, although my primary concern is getting their product to the public).
Instead of just masking the sound, their device targets the root cause using bimodal neuromodulation. It pairs specific audio tones with mild electrical pulses to the jaw/neck to desynchronize hyperactive neurons in the dorsal cochlear nucleus.
Here are the two papers that cover the underlying science, and go over the efficacy:
The foundational mechanism and Phase 1 trial showing how it induces long-term depression (LTD) in the brain circuitry: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aal3175
The Phase 2 double-blind, randomized clinical trial results showing significant reductions in tinnitus loudness and burden: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
[+] [-] xtracto|3 days ago|reply
I've had tinnitus for 25+ years and followed a lot of science. At some point some Brasil researchers found a drug that reduced tinnitus volume as a secondary effect. There wrote papers about it, but unfortunately, nothing came of it.
[+] [-] marand23|2 days ago|reply
[+] [-] firemelt|2 days ago|reply
[+] [-] jdenning|3 days ago|reply
1. Place your hands over your ears such that your fingers are on the back of your skull - thumbs should be on your neck and middle fingers at the base of your skull.
2. Tap your middle fingers on the base of your skull repeatedly for ~30 seconds
It apparently doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s not permanent, but for me it greatly reduces the “volume” or stops it entirely.
I have no idea what the explanation is, but it’s free, safe, and you can try it right now.
Hope that helps! Tinnitus sucks.
[+] [-] getnormality|3 days ago|reply
Hold up. How do we know when ferrets have tinnitus???
[+] [-] the_mitsuhiko|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] wpollock|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] nowittyusername|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] stacktraceyo|2 days ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|2 days ago|reply
I have tinnitus. My theory of how it arises is the bit of the ear that converts spatial movement to electrical signals - some hairs tied to an ion channel basically - gets moved too far and breaks the thing in such a way that the channel jams open.
The noise pro stuff may be worse than regular loud noises as the ear recognises loud noises and tries to protect itself but may not do that with the noise cancellation movements.
(diagram of what the gear looks like https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/3-s2.0-B97801237494750...)
[+] [-] ctmnt|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] kiririn|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] YZF|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] dahart|3 days ago|reply
And this I can sometimes use to pinpoint my tinnitus tone(s): https://generalfuzz.net/acrn/
[+] [-] RockstarSprain|3 days ago|reply
The surgeon dentist was really surprised by this and could not evoke any similar cases in their practice before mine.
[+] [-] Marsymars|3 days ago|reply
I randomly get something in my head that sounds pretty close to coil whine, but definitely isn't coil whine — I've had it when I'm in the depths of the wilderness with no electronics.
It typically lasts less than 20s and I can go months between occurrences.
[+] [-] cyager81|2 days ago|reply
[+] [-] gbraad|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] altairprime|3 days ago|reply
I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed this if I was trying to tune out tinnitus, but I’m just used to it? Not like anything is every quiet (my hearing is hyperactive), but, like, the tone and volume of it right now is “insufficient sleep but circadian forced us awake” so I need to be particularly measured and chill if I drive while it’s this loud.
[+] [-] Salmoneo|2 days ago|reply
[+] [-] tsoukase|2 days ago|reply
I always thought that tinnitus is caused by a "rusted" acoustic nerve wire (here it's coexistence with hearing loss) no central mechanism is evolved. Linking non-REM sleep phase to tinnitus production is unexpected.
[+] [-] m3kw9|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] bookofjoe|3 days ago|reply
[+] [-] margaritaP|2 days ago|reply