> 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.
https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/4/3/fcac089/6563...
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.
Doesn't seem to be a thing?
1. Airpods or ANC
2. WFH ->. Less movement -> stiff muscles around neck and head -> head trasnfer frequencies changing
3. Covid vaccine
2. WFH -> Less movement -> Decreased blood flow can contribute to the onset of tinnitus.
Long exposure to high volumes causes hearing damage. Many people set volume on headsets too high to hear better.
3. Many people are diagnosed with tinnitus every day, and some are bound to have it discovered after a vaccine shot. In the same way, some people will have tinnitus discovered after COVID. That doesn’t yet prove causation.
Whenever I do, I swear I feel increased pressure on my ears and my tinnitus temporarily gets worse. I've often wondered if I imagine it, but hearing from others here makes me think it isn't so strange.
ANC reduces background noise, which typically allows users to listen at lower volumes, thereby reducing total sound exposure to the ear. So if the user adapts their volume, that would lead to less risk of tinnitus. This works for me :)
But there are lots of people on forums suggesting that there is a link between tinnitus and ANC. One reason could be that ANC headphones allow you to listen very accurately to inner auditory signals, and if you already had some tinnitus, you might start to notice it.
When it gets to be too much, though, I can just go inside, and that's not something that you can do with tinnitus.
I'm sorry that you're going through that, that must be terrible. Have you tried adding white noise?
Sometimes I get a new frequency. Since 2000 it has gotten worse, since 2020, much worse. But changing my environment seems to effect it for better and worse.
No doubt mine is connected to my mental illness and probably temporal lobe seizures.
Oh, use a fan based white noise machine (or a loud fan) during sleeping, really drowns it out.
I also recall the days before I listening to music a lot with earplugs at rather high volume, like, 6/7 hours per day multiple days.
That's the only out-of-the-ordinary thing I did leading to it, it might be related or completely unrelated, who knows.
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.
Blindness isn’t “no sight” or pitch black, there’s visual snow.
If you pay attention, you can always feel your muscles/joints. Sometimes I smell burnt popcorn, but not usually, but maybe that’s because smell is always present. Similarly always taste saliva.
Also see sensory deprivation experiments. We don’t seem able to experience “absence of sensation”.
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.
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 don't know if I have tinnitus. I had strong ringing in my ears every now and then as a kid. I once told a classmate about this, who said I should see a doctor, but I've had it as come up every now and then as long as I can remember.
I now have a continuous beep, but only really hear it when I intentionally tune into it. E.g. I can hear it now because I'm writing about it, but most of the day I simply don't hear it, because I don't tune in to it. Not sure if it was always there or just starting at some age. It is sometimes more present when I'm e.g. sick.
I have no idea if other people have this kind of permanent beep as well, because I never asked anyone.
(I just asked my wife and she doesn't have it.)
One day my kid brought a nasty flu from the kindergarten. My otolaryngologist recommended the strongest irrigation stream I can find to clean my sinuses.
Not only did it not help, but it also pushed some goo to the end of my sinuses, which resulted in pulsatile tinnitus.
After about 6 months my kid got sick again, so we all got sick, and I got rid of this tinnitus where I was hearing my heartbeat, by casually blowing my nose. The trick was having a stiff blockage, I guess, so the pressure builds up.
It sounds stupid and probably won't help you, but I wanted to share my story. I had no support from the people close to me and the heartbeat was driving me insane.
I'm sorry you have to go through this. Even though it's not a life-treating condition, it might be a life changing condition (QoL).
The brain definitely seems to get better at filtering it out over months/years though, at least until something makes you focus on it
I assume my brain is somehow able to filter it out, unless it’s too tired/busy.
I'm a bit older than you, and I've lived with tinnitus for over 14 years. I got it back then by listening to very loud music on my earbuds at the gym. I've consulted many doctors, did many audiometries, and they know where my hearing loss is, which is what causes my tinnitus (a high-pitched one).
Many things helped manage it, especially when sleeping. Here is what worked for me:
1. I sleep with a white noise machine. It helps mask the sound, and trains my brain to stop listening to it. I've tested pink noise and brown noise, but white noise works best for me. When traveling, noise cancelling headphones and a white noise mp3 file I downloaded from a white noise generated website 14 years ago worked wonderfully. YT-dlp can help here as well (there are some great white noise sources on youtbue, but this recent one is my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv2XyqC-EQ4).
2. Ginkgo Biloba pills: They work wonders for me. The theory I've read about it is that they increase blood flow in small vessels, which include the blood vessels that go through the inner ear.
3. Listening to instrumental music while working. Helps mask the noise during the day, and it is less boring than white noise. Calming instrumental music from video games works best for me, since they are meant to be played on a loop. Examples of good OSTs: Octopath Traveler, Journey, Bastion, and the instrumental music from Clair-Obscur Expedition 33. Some instrumental is a bit too exciting (with ups and downs), and I find that distracting. Some instrumental has a subtle chorus, and that also messes with work. Why instrumental music? The theory is that the parts of your brain that process lyrics are the same ones that you use for your internal monologue, so it can be distracting.
4. Sleeping well: It is true that being sleep-deprived can make my tinnitus get worse. All the usual things that help with sleep, such as reducing caffeine intake, and not ingesting caffeine before bed help here.
5. Controlling stress and anxiety: Here, doing all the usual things, such as exercise, meditation, having financial security, journaling, and having good relationships with friends and family, all that helps me. I avoid doomscrolling like the plague, and I especially avoid catching up on news before bed.
I hope that, even if none of these things help you, at least you know that you are not alone, and that this condition can be managed. Finding what works for you will be your own journey, but you are not alone.
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.
Hold up. How do we know when ferrets have tinnitus???
My tinnitus is much worse now, but I don't have a TV in my room anymore, so I just play a podcast on my iPad. That tiny built-in speaker doesn't really cover up the tinnitus, but the voices lull me to sleep (which is probably what the TV was doing all along).
My brain eventually figured out how to tune it out and now it associates the sound with silence.
Now I've developed it again after feeling depressed and blasting music in my car. The new version crackles and alternates tones in my left ear. I have a doctors appointment coming up to hopefully figure it out.
There is a new expensive treatment for it called Lenore which works by playing sounds and stimulating your tongue at the same time. Those pathways are located close together in the brain and by stimulating both at the same time, it's supposed to train it to filter out the noise.
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...
jmclnx•1h ago
But after that article I heard nothing more. I just looked it up and seems it may not be a reliable method.
bookofjoe•1h ago
Aboutplants•1h ago
wcoenen•1h ago
But I noticed a side-effect: if I then turn off the tone generator, my tinnitus would disappear! Unfortunately that effect only lasts for a minute or less, so it is not really practical to get relief this way.
bookofjoe•1h ago
magnetic•49m ago
Note that I would be careful about using pure tones for too long. Pure tones end up focusing the energy in your cochlea towards a small area of hair cells. Since these cells don't regenerate, it may be wise to avoid overstressing them.
ajb•1h ago