The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

My tinnitus is usually not bad enough to be bothersome, but when it gets painful, I listen to https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenera...

That's not just noise, it does... something... that provides instant relief.

That site also has a great variety of background sounds which you can adjust and combine in myriad ways.

I think I've had it my whole life. It's that persistent high-pitched noise - almost like the imperceptably high sound old TVs used to make when they were turned on - when nothing else is making sound. If there's not a lot going on around me I can hear it quite well. I pretty much tune it out and it doesn't affect my quality of life.

I sort of understand where the author is coming from. About ten years ago I ended up getting a ton of floaters in my eye and I struggled to accept them for a few months. In the end my brain tuned those out as well... at least most of the time.

Most of this comes down to acceptance of something you can't change. It sucks. Nothing you can do about it.

Place the palms of your hands over your ears with fingers resting gently on the back of your head. Your middle fingers should point toward one another just above the base of your skull. Place your index fingers on top of you middle fingers and snap them (the index fingers) onto the skull making a loud, drumming noise. Repeat 40-50 times. Some people experience immediate relief with this method. Repeat several times a day for as long as necessary to reduce tinnitus.Dr. Jan Strydom, of A2Z of Health, Beauty and Fintess.org.

My tinnitus is a side effect of a double stapedectomy, replacing the stapes bone in my middle ear with a titanium replacement. I have no regrets, my hearing went from 20% of normal to 80% and allowing me to have mostly normal hearing.

At first, the tinnitus was maddening, I would wonder if I would rather be deaf then have the constant ringing. Then I read an article about counseling and training as an effective method. I ended up training myself to not focus on it, now it isn’t an issue unless I think thoughts like “wow, I haven’t thought about my tinnitus in a long time”, am asked about it or see a mention of it.

My ENT surgeon told me at my last checkup after surgery that the tinnitus is in the brain and that I would have ringing even if he removed the inner and middle ear. I sometimes wonder if the ringing is there if I am not thinking about it.

The first rule of tinnitus club is... don't talk about tinnitus. Because then you remember you have it and start hearing it again.

Had it about a decade now, I can ignore it most of the time.

This is another article about tinnitus:

> A Music Lover’s Guide to Tinnitus: https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/2985

It has great resources too:

> Hearing Wellneaa for Musicians: http://journals.lww.com/thehearingjournal/Fulltext/2017/0400...?

> American Tinnitus Association: https://www.ata.org/

(And warns about apps like this: Tinnitracks:

http://www.tinnitracks.com/en)

— UPDATE —

It was also posted to HN; here it is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14618455

Constant dog-whistle in my right ear for the last ten years+. Perceived sound is constant, but effect ranges from insignificant basic condition to friving me up walls, and keeping me awake at night. Never really did the loud music stuff, and no headphones/earplugs, really. A grinning, idiot colleague once emptied a huge bucket of glass bottles into a container where the broke and shattered as I was standing right by. Felt my ear flattening, and that was the start of it.

There is a Visual version of tinnitus that goes by the name Visual Snow[1].

I developed both at the same time. The visual snow was maddening and tinnitus is unpleasant. There is apparently a link between the two and seems both are mostly noise artifacts of the visual and auditory systems of the brain. It makes sense that these systems would have some innate noise in the signals.

Eventually I was desensitized to the new baseline noise levels. Kinda like Exit signs at movie theaters, You don't notice until someone points it out.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow

I have a theory that everyone experiences some form of tinnitus, but only some are bothered by it. It's like when you start thinking too deeply about how your intangible mind controls your body, it can be rather suffocating, as there is no escape from the unanswered sense of emptiness that thought can generate. Similarly with tinnitus, once you start focusing on it too much, it feels like like something you can't escape from. I've helped a few of my friends with tinnitus by simply helping them focus on other things (especially when alone).

I developed tinnitus in 2009, a neurological "gift" from a case of swine flu. (The other gift was chronic paroxysmal hemicrania, a nightmarish migraine-like condition that threatened to destroy my life until I got it under control with medication.) The tinnitus was exacerbated a few years later after a freak accident while inflating a mountain bike tire. The tire exploded off the rim, more-or-less directly into my right ear. I'm now partially deaf on that side, but of course I hear the tinnitus load & clear.

Ultra low frequencies are my problem. When it is quiet (at night), if there is anything generating low frequency waves anywhere around, I may hear it. It feels like an incredibly subtle repeating gentle puff of air entering the ear (which makes sense, given that it's a pressure wave). And unfortunately, one ear is more sensitive to it than the other, which gives me a feeling of uneven pressure from one side of my head to the other.

There is no cure for this, as far as I know, because it is an external sound. And it's nearly impossible to identify the source for many reasons (difficulty in detecting/recording, ease of transmission through solid objects (such as the ground), and long waves which can carry very far).

It just takes a little ambient noise to mask it. The sound isn't painful, per se, because it's very low amplitude. But when there is nothing else to distract, it feels like having your head inside a washing machine.

Sources can include large engines (locomotive, truck, ship, whatever.), heavy equipment (particularly at factories), and my favorite - wind over a mountain ridge. The last one can carry for miles!

I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember. Most days I don't even notice it, it probably helps that I listen to music for 12 hours a day, but even sitting in a quiet area without music it's not intrusive unless I focus on it.

Oddly enough though, it really flares up when I'm stressed, especially if it's emotional or relationship stress. I'm not sure why that is. It never really gets "bad" in that it causes me distress, but it gets very noticeable.

When I was young I had many earaches, and they had to put in ear drops and a cotton ball to keep the medicine from coming out of my ears. I heard a noise I could not explain, it sounded like radio noise I said at the time. The doctor thought I said static but it was more like radio feedback.

I had a hearing test, and I was told I had normal hearing.

It comes and goes, and at times I can ignore it or it dies down for a while and starts up again.

Doctors say it is not Tinnitus, I am not sure what it can be?

Tinnitus really is a horrible. I suffer from it and find the ringing detracts significantly from my cognitive abilities; my train of thought is often derailed because my brain is being goofy and fighting with the noise.

I also had headphones glued to my ears all through middle-school and high-school, and even though I was careful with the volume I can only assume this is the culprit for my current auditory state.

I wish I could make it go away.

An interesting collection of research papers on Tinnitus: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/4725/towards-an-...

I have had tinnitus and it was pretty terrible the first year but I got used to it almost completely. Then I woke up one day with a new thing called diplacusis where I hear a tone on top of sound for certain frequencies. So my wife says hi how are you and I hear that plus a tone for each word. It sounds kind of like the radios in the xwings in Star Wars. I’ve been adjusting for 3 months but it’s very hard to habituate. Fortunately it has softened in that time. But it seems to be extremely rare associated with a sudden dip in one of the hearing ranges where the rest of hearing is mostly normal. Oh well...

I've had mine for 11 years now. It started out mild and got much worse over the first year or two. It has since plateaued to high-pitched noise. I learned to tune it out most of the time, but occasionally I'd get those sudden extreme attacks that last for several seconds before subsiding to the normal level. Thankfully I've trained myself to cope with it, which as the article author mentions our brains are good at doing. I've been living mostly a normal life, but occasionally I get reminded of it if it's too quiet, or when reading an article like this.

A good way to deal with tinnitus is by trying to find sounds/background noise to tone it down or drown it out (and by drowning out I mean not loud, more like a gentle distraction). This can be anything from the sound of the rain, a shower, car with windscreen wipers on, the tumbling and rumbling of a dryer, a train, the winds, birds chirping, waves etc..

There are plenty of white noise generator apps available, just experiment and if you find something that seems to help set a timer. It will help getting to sleep. Rest is so important.

I had it for a couple months earlier this year and it was terribly annoying. My ENT took all sorts of images (CAT, MRI) and in the end just gave me some strong antibiotics in the ear. After a few days I was like, what is wrong, and realized it was gone. Of course there are many reasons but in my case it was some oddball bacterium.

I have two things- a constant, quiet hissing noise that doesn't bother me (can only hear it when things are completely quiet). And another, which happens sporadically- it will feel like a rapid pressure change in my head followed by a high pitched noise that gradually decays. Annoying, but not critically so.

I have intermittent tinnitus from djing but I barely notice it 90% of the time, even when it’s quiet. Every once in a while something will trigger it and it’ll be overwhelming and I’ll have to find something to listen to to drown it out.

I suffer from it in my right ear, I discovered some foods exasperate it.

I've been treating my occasional tinnitus with a combination of neti pot rinsse with the valsalva maneuver. It's mostly gone since I started doing this every so often.