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.

Blogs like these remind me of the time I was riding my scooter without a helmet. A lady in a wheelchair yelled “wear a helmet it’s how I ended up in this chair”

So now I wear a helmet

yeah, me too. Got it from as a 16yr old being shown how to shoot a 3030 without hearing protection.

I'm sure its more than that, but thats when i first noticed it.

Hate it, but have learned to just accept it.

I got tinnitus as a baby from ear infections and it sucks enough I’m very thankful I cannot remember life without it. That would be torture

Tinitus is misfiring nerves firing along the path somewhere from ear cochlea to cortex. From your description there is pain and discomfort for high frequencies also, it's not just a pure ringing that might even favor 1 ear? I did some research for a novel ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA&t=4697s ) and learned that hearing is not too hard to understand, but it's mysterious in its perfection and a Job Well Done in evolution, the most complicated thing that comes already hard-wired.

Some 30,000 nerves along the path from ear to cortex in 4 neuronal stages. An awful lot. That would make pain and discomfort after hearing damage (and slowness of healing) a sort of canary that there might be some systemic problem with myelin or nutrition. (try "Key Nutrients for Myelin Support") and try to binge on those items if you are ready to try anything.)

I've had temporary damage with effects lasting a week. I was a sound guy and have at times troubleshooted crossover networks that peaked around 3kHz and it wasbad, but the very worst was dropping a 60lb steel theater weight onto a pile of other weights. Didn't even hear the sound but hearing went silent for 5 minutes and took a week to all come back! Also ultrasonics that were felt as pressure not sound. I recovered completely and have a rolloff beyond 13k that is probably age. But it's scary, I hope you heal!

This greg.technology gent is not just any ear blaster, he brought us Sonic Garbage ( https://sonicgarbage.greg.technology/ ) that has been featured here on HN. And check out his cheerleading offer at ( https://blog.greg.technology/ ). It looks like a good deal because I've exchanged emails with him and he is a plain spoken cheerful guy... the offer is not satire in any way.

Took 1-2 years before I went a single day without thinking about tinnitus after I gave it to myself playing drums. I was so happy to be smashing those punk drums in the first rehearsal of this band. I remember exclaiming afterwards to one of my bandmates, "Wow my ears are ringing! That was awesome!" He said, "Ya, mine have been ringing for 30 years." My heart immediately sank knowing what I had just done.

I spent a lot of days/months totally devastated about it. I remember reading this story about some woman in a scandinavian country who chose medical-assisted suicide because hers was so bad. I thought that was going to be my story. I thought it was inevitable.

But I met a lot of people who lived completely normal lives and described their tinnitus as so much worse than mine. I eventually got used to it. I wouldn't say the actual ringing is better or worse than it was. I have no idea how to measure it anyways. But life has gotten so much better. And I almost never think about it any more -- maybe once every few weeks I'll have the thought, "Oh ya, I have ringing in my ears" and a few seconds later I forget about it again. I think it gets better for most people, thankfully.

But it'd be cool to hear complete silence again.

I've got the typical high-pitched ringing kind that I've had for as long as I can remember, along with pulsatile tinnitus that developed several years ago, meaning I can hear a whooshing sound in my ears to the rhythm of my heartbeat. When I tell people about the pulsatile tinnitus, I like to joke and compare it to the heartbeat from Edgar Allen Poe's story "The Tell-Tale Heart."

Luckily neither of these tinnituses bothers me as much as the subject of that story. In fact they don't bother me much at all anymore, although the pulsatile one did cause a great deal of anxiety when it first developed seemingly out of nowhere. My brain has learned to adapt and ignore the sounds pretty easily unless I'm in a quiet room and have nothing else to focus on.

And a tip for anyone suffering: I've found that those "8 hours of brown noise" loops on YouTube work wonders for drowning out the sound of both regular and pulsatile tinnitus.

I “got over” mine after many months of “tinnitus meditation” (there’s a short book on this written by a guy who has some crazy disease that causes extra-bad tinnitus). Basically, you meditate by purposefully focusing on your tinnitus. It starts to flip your brain’s response from one of fear to one of relaxation. Even within the first session, you’ll find that when you try to focus on the noise for as long as you can (use a timer and start with 5 mins), you eventually get distracted and think about something else, even if just for a moment. Then you realize that your brain isn’t “forced” to notice it - and the more you practice this, the better you’ll get at noticing it and gently pivoting your attention back to.. the rest of the world. The noise never goes away, your ability to ignore it just improves over time.

The book is a quick read and helpful: https://a.co/d/ckOzbSq

I no longer meditate as often, but when I do, it’s actually still quite effective. I now see it more as a “retreat” of sorts - I can just kind of dissociate and let the ringing take over. Reading this article brought it back, incidentally.. but I’m ok with it. Once you fully surrender to the noise, you can start to let go of it. It’s the mental resistance that makes it hard to deal with.

Tinnitus may be a symptom of hearing loss. I recommend you get checked by an Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) specialist.

Think you mean plugging, not plucking, your ears, unless sirens make you remove hair, in which case they did you a favor.

I got some nice ear plugs designed for concerts (Loop) because I go to a concert and I already have mild tinnitus and don't want it to get worse.

I do not know why concerts have to be SO LOUD. Loud, sure. Permanent ear damage loud, why? It should tell you something that the guys on stage wear ear plugs.

That's a really good point about hearing damage vs eye damage, the only thing I can think of is it's a lot harder to measure and people don't care as much. It would be really hard to prove you had hearing loss in a court of law, let alone that it came from one specific event, and you'd have a much easier time proving that a high powered laser blinded several people, perhaps. And nearly 100% of people would choose "deaf" if they were forced to pick between that and blind.

Got permanent tinnitus due to damage to auditory nerve from an accident back in 2010.

Coping was hard. Distracting yourself with various things so you dont think about it was key.

Things to try - 1) Keeping yourself distracted or occupied and trying to not be conscious about it for 50% of the day to start with, gradually improving to 90% of the day 2) White noise apps for sleep 3) Carry ear plugs at all times. Plug them in if watching a movie in a theatre or attending to an Indian wedding. Prevents worsening of the situation.

To those out there: you're not alone. The journey is different for everyone, and what helps one person might not help another — but with patience and experimentation, many find ways to manage and live fully despite it.

Stay away from COVID boosters then, folks. I'm really enjoying a degraded life from a nearly-useless booster. The disgusting part is that hearing damage is a scientifically accepted side-effect that researchers are afraid to speak out about for fear of being "canceled."

Suppressing side-effect information is every bit as bad as anti-vaxxing.

I have tinnitus from going to loud concerts. I want to evangelize the importance of wearing ear plugs. It’s just not worth having hearing damage.

I got tinnitus in my right ear after the second round of mRNA vaccines for Covid in May 2021 that never went away, equally do not recommend.

If you’re going to concerts / loud venues regularly, please for the love of god invest in some decent earplugs. They go for $15-30 on amazon and come with a carrying case usually, it’s a simple habit that will save you lots of heartache down the line.

Best way for me to get rid of my tinnitus was to get a hearing aid. In my specific case I got the Lyric hearing aid which is a totally invisible hearing aid positioned deep inside the ear canal and it is worn 24/7. It is known to reliably eliminate a tinnitus that is caused by hearing loss in the high frequency range.

I get a weird transient tinnitus where my hearing drops out in one ear or the other for about 15 seconds, and is replace by a tone, which slowly fades as my hearing comes back. It sometimes happens multiple times per day, and sometimes not for weeks at a time. I've seen a couple specialists about it, but no known cause.

I also notice a low-level tinnitus when I'm in very quiet places. I keep white noise machines around to cover it.

Went to a jazz club and could not believe why the music had to be so loud. My ears were numb coming out of there for an hour

I was very miserable when my chronic tinnitus showed up, but my life improved greatly after my doctor got me in the right cognitive behavioral therapy to learn to ignore it. After plenty of practice, it's now hard for me to hear it without actively listening for it, even though it is quite loud.

My advice to anyone struggling with tinnitus is to avoid silence for a while. Focus on anything but the tinnitus. Never give yourself the chance to focus on it. Buy bone conductor headphones and listen to ambient music instead of sitting in silence. Buy a white noise machine for when you go to bed, or run a fan. Then spend a few minutes every waking hour of your day actively listening to the sounds around you

Eventually you'll have trained yourself to listen to something else. As long as there's something else to listen to, even if it is very quiet, you'll default to listening to that instead of your tinnitus until it becomes something you do passively.

I might as well not have tinnitus anymore. I can't speak for everyone, especially not in regards to hypersensitivity to noise like the author here has, but I went from mourning the loss of my daily comfort to completely forgetting about the problem in a couple of months.

I have a “mild” tinnitus that I only hear in complete silence.

Last time I went to a party, I pulled out an AirPods when we were (practically) standing in front of the speakers. Still remember puzzled and “not cool, dude” looks, lol. I’m not taking chances with this tinnitus crap after what I read online.

Can it somehow be related to having tight neck / jaw muscles?

I have had tinnitus for most of my life. When I was a child I had a massive ear infection that burst my eardrum on the left side and that is the worse side. Honestly I can just tune it out and it seems normal. It mainly causes issues in louder environments because it can be difficult to hear what people are saying. And it doesn’t need to be very loud. A bar with music and lots of people talking around me can be enough.

It is totally possible to exist with it though.

I have tinnitus, and the only way of not hearing it is to not think about it. I am hearing it again after reading this article.