Welcome to your new life. This upgrade is not optional and a reboot will not clear it.

Tinnitus has many causes. Most of them are avoidable but some (antibiotics) less so.

People's ability to internalise a coping mechanism also varies. My own ability rises and sets like the tide. Some days it's all encompassing and some days it's just the liveness check for the nuclear storage tank alarm which reassures me I'm not dead yet.

White noise can help. Tuned noise can help. Other sounds can help. Apple ipods are said to help. It's all subjective. Do you want to test a rather odd mouth fitted electrode plate and a series of tuned sounds? It might help, and is being licenced with Food and Drugs.

Seeing "the Who" live in Glasgow twice in the 70s probably triggered mine. Or a number of other over-amped gigs. But my GP assured me the drugs for blood pressure, or antibiotics, or any number of situations were just as likely or what is known as "idiopathic" which is Latin for "who knows"

My partners tinnitus is much more intrusive and causes her more grief, since she now misses much ambient bird song lost in the ear soup. Beyond commiserations there isn't much I can say, inside my own kilohertz whine sound bath.

I pray every day for a cure.

"Complex trauma opens up another possible pathway between tinnitus and trauma -- one similar to that proposed for the connection between tinnitus and traditional trauma. Let’s say, for example, that my parents belittled me constantly and that as a result I never felt myself competent in handling challenges. Instead, I was made to feel powerless in the face of adverse circumstances and carried this insecurity into my adult life. Hence, when I am faced with the challenge of responding to tinnitus, my sense of helplessness as a child reemerges and blocks my ability to adequately deal with it. As the authors of the EMDR studies propose, this would mean that to treat the tinnitus we would need to treat the trauma."

https://therapistwithtinnitus.com/2023/01/31/is-tinnitus-tra...

Phillips JS, Erskine S, Moore T, Nunney I, Wright C. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing as a treatment for tinnitus. Laryngoscope. 2019 Oct;129(10):2384-2390. doi: 10.1002/lary.27841. Epub 2019 Jan 28. PMID: 30693546.

Rikkert M, van Rood Y, de Roos C, Ratter J, van den Hout M. A trauma-focused approach for patients with tinnitus: the effectiveness of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing - a multicentre pilot trial. Eur J Psychotraumatol. 2018 Sep 11;9(1):1512248

Moore, Tal & Phillips, John & Erskine, Sally & Nunney, Ian. (2020). What Has EMDR Taught Us About the Psychological Characteristics of Tinnitus Patients?. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research. 14. 229-240. 10.1891/EMDR-D-19-00055.

"This brief summary considered literature from both the hearing and trauma disciplines, with the goal of reviewing mechanisms shared between tinnitus and PTSD, as well as clinical reports supporting mutual reinforcement of both their symptoms and the effects of therapeutic approaches."

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/12/11/1585

"clinicians who offer tinnitus and hyperacusis rehabilitation should screen for suicidal and self-harm ideations among patients with symptoms of depression and a childhood history of parental mental illness"

https://tinnitustherapy.org.uk/adverse-childhood-experiences...

"Good mental health/EMDR treatment with tinnitus includes a comprehensive phase 1 history taking, targeting any precipitating trauma experiences, and “float back,” targeting the negative cognitions about the present experience of tinnitus."

https://www.emdria.org/blog/emdr-therapy-and-tinnitus/

Thanks for the reminder. Do you remember if it was mainly the mid and trebles that were too high ?

Do you also get hurt when hearing loud bass / infra bass ?

Shit. I have never been to a loud concert. And I think I’ll go without for the rest of my life. I do love my Bose noise cancelling headphones. I listen to music at a low volume. I am now wondering if the noise cancellation part that generates its own frequencies helps or hurts.

Why is the new style to avoid capitalization when writing? I see it everywhere now. I can only imagine the annoyance of fighting autocorrect just to format your content like this.

There was an earlier thread on tinnitus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21572827 where people had some techniques for relief. Maybe this could be useful.

I have it since I can remember, but got aggravated by two events:

(1) One time when I was going to setup the drums to play for a band, walked front of a tall speaker and precisely when I stepped in front of it a loud boom scaped from it; and

(2) covid-19.

It's kind of in "stereo", in the right ear is a bit louder and with a higher pitch than in the left ear. I can't imagine how terrible it is for people with worse cases but in my case I can live with it despite sometimes I have trouble hearing some stuff - but it's kind of uncanny sometimes I even forget about it until I remember I have it, like now reading "tinnitus" in the title of this article. Something like the yawn effect.

Most veterans have it, I sure do although relatively mild. Besides being issued defective ear plugs, the CVC helmets we used were garbage at protecting your ears.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/08/29/business/3m-settlement-mi...

I sang in choirs for nearly 25 years. The scariest thing about it was that everyone thought that the way to test a microphone was to tap firmly & directly on the diaphragm.

They also thought they could adjust or move equipment without muting the channel on the mixer.

It is absolutely crazy to tap your mic when you know that booms are bound to reverberate from your powered-up PA system.

Microphones amplify human speech. They are not drums. Why not test them by speaking or singing in front of them?

I kept telling them that one day they would damage either a speaker, an amp, or someone’s perfectly good hearing.

I have it from being a death metal singer/guitarist 30 years ago, but it gets much worse when tired or higher blood pressure (handy though ; most people don't have an actual audible alarm for that). It's indeed not recommended, it is, however very clever how the brain mostly filters it out unless I actively think about it.

I am in my 50s and the most notable 'side effect' is that I must avoid conference calls; it seems unconsciously I got good at reading lips in person, even in groups, but video calls and especially audio calls are just too hard. I tell people now I'm handicapped, which is indeed true I guess; we either meet in person or they will have to write it down. Captions sometimes work, but we work with people from around the world and some English accents just generate mostly random words as captions. Not sure why a discussion about a payment api is mostly about rain, goats, [laughter], [music] and such...

I’ve played drums and loud music for a long time. When I pay close enough attention there’s this persistent, aggravating noise — which I sometimes call “silence”, and other times call “tinnitus”.

Both my wife and I started experiencing tinnitus days after the first covid shots. I will never be able to prove the shots were the cause but there was really nothing else happening in our lives back then.

In my case it was never severe but I've heard of people woken up by their tinnitus.

Thankfully it has mostly subsided. These days I barely notice it unless I'm in a very quiet environment.

> so now, i am one of those people that plucks their ears when an emergency vehicle goes by with the siren blaring.

You might get one of those low-end decibel meters that supposedly are calibrated at the factory (around $25 in the US), to measure how loud the sirens are. Maybe they're louder than they need to be, and you can request for them to be adjusted, as a public health improvement.

I've been meaning to do something like this. My city has sirens throughout the day, but one particular ambulance company's seems much louder to me than any other company or other emergency vehicle -- dangerously louder. As someone who walks miles every day, on major streets and near hospitals, the near-daily potential hearing damage risk has started to get a bit concerning. I'd like to have data (and make sure it's not just a frequency sensitivity specific to me), before I ask them respectfully if the volume can be adjusted.

There is lots of active research:

https://www.tinnitustreatmentreport.com/

I have had tinnitus for years, I suspect partly genetic and exacerbated by spending a lot of my 20s and 30s at loud concerts. But just recently I noticed I now have deafness to certain frequencies in one ear. I had an air leak a tire and realized I could hear the hiss of air escaping with one ear but not the other. Protect your ears, folks.

Had a huge scare after a concert a few years ago. My ears hurt and were very poor for a few days after. Very scary.

Luckily it went away. I wear ear protection all the time now. agree that there should be laws governing sound volume.

I also have tinnitus, as well as hearing loss related to loud music from nightclubs and concerts, and of course natural aging. AirPods Pro and the ability to adjust the audio to be personalised to my audiogram (hearing test results) is a huge quality of life increase. All done on device, no need to go anywhere or see any specialists.

I have had a touch of it for a few years. I have been very careful to protect my hearing. Always listening to headphones on the lowest setting. Always wearing hearing protection while operating lawn equipment. I have been an amateur competitive shooter and always double up with plugs and muffs. Then in 2022, I had a terrible double ear infection the same week I competed in a local USPSA (IPSC) match and boom that was it. Ironically the ear doctor thinks it was the infection. I showed him the system I use for shooting. It doesn’t bother me anymore though it is always there when there is silence.

It’s really tough, my heart goes out to you. I have tinnitus too but mine is much better than it used to be. Carry high quality earplugs on your keychain everywhere you go. And believe it or not, diet and especially sodium play a big part. Take care of your ears and they may heal and dial back the high sodium foods.

I have been to a lot of very loud electronic music shows in my life. For most of it I was young and foolish and did not wear hearing protection. Later in life I started to wear earplugs. I occasionally get waves of tinnitus in one ear. It comes on randomly and only lasts about one minute. I’m always afraid it will not go away. One day the wave will decide to just stay? I haven’t been to any loud shows in over a decade. I have no idea what triggers the waves, I can just be sitting in a quiet room and suddenly it will hit. And then nothing for a few weeks. Ears are strange.

My dad also has it. Tinnitus is one of the topics on HN that I always click to see if there was any progress. That and Alzheimer.

I can hear the high frequencies of cathode ray tubes, and generally feel like I hear much higher frequencies than others.

That’s just normal, but when I’m tired or stressed, my blood pressure is up, or I’m sick, it’s what most people probably classify as tinnitus and is at a much lower frequency, more of a high pitched tone.

I feel terrible because I never did anything wrong. I never went to a concert. I never worked around loud things for prolonged periods. I never listened to music too loud. I have tinnitus. It seems to go up in intensity when my TMD acts up, but it never goes completely away. Mine isn't nearly debilitating, but I worry that it's going to get worse with time.