Tinnitus Seems Linked with Sleep

WTF tried this and my tinnitus diminished for half a minute. It's back now, but that was interesting.

I think it has to do with how quiet is the environment, as the finger snaps are very loud and drown the tinnitus, but putting on my noise-cancelling headphones without music make it feel louder. Maybe a fan/rain/white noise generator would help people who have trouble sleeping because of tinnitus.

Here’s something better I’ve found to improve on it: you can get a $30 massage gun from Amazon with one of those round soft heads, gently put it to the back of your head where doing the manual exercise above hits with your fingers and run it at the slowest setting. It’s exactly the same thing, and it’s very effective for shutting off tinnitus. I do this when mine gets bad.

I’ve also noticed my tinnitus is inversely proportional to the last night’s sleep quality for me, so the article bears out on an anecdotal standpoint.

I have pretty loud tinnitus at night but I find it has the same effect as rain on the roof, comforting. I like it when it really roars, I will just drift off then. Didn't realise it could be loud in a way that could wake you up. Its just a hissing squeel roar for me, basically pink noise... the type of thing that puts babies to sleep. I wonder if its anxiety about the tinnitus rather than the sound itself that is disturbing? Or my tinnitus is only really mild.

Are you talking about actual snapping of the fingers or just tapping with the fingers on your skull? “Snapping” is a specific action with a couple of fingers to make a loud “snap” sound. If that is what you mean, I’m not clear how this operation can be performed.

>> There’s even a category of tinnitus for sounds within the ear that can be objectively heard by someone other than the sufferer - This is known as “objective tinnitus”.

This doesn't make sense. If it can be heard by someone else, its by definition an aural stimulus event and not tinnitis.

So it's like "anxiety" - a catch-all term when doctors have no clue.

I have both. I can hear blood rushing around my ears where the sound varies from windy/water rushy sounds to faint very high-pitched sounds. Then when I exert myself physically (e.g. get up suddenly after not moving a long while) there can be a kind of thud followed by very loud high (but not very high) frequency ringing. Once that happens regardless of how idle I am it doesn't go away for hours. Sometimes it just creeps up slowly from nothing in particular. The first kind mostly don't notice and forget it's there, the other is very distracting so play music or white-noise.

Strangely I don't know that either of them interfere with falling asleep. It may very well be that I just don't even try to sleep unless tired and quiet, can't tell--I don't do it consciously. Lately I usually start something on Netflix or YouTube without autoplay so perhaps that's what I accidentally found to work.

When I was in the army, during training, my room mate had tinnitus, from stress and a loud noise. He was asked to drink a LOT of water by the medics. This was almost 20y ago, so I don‘t remember the details, but hydration seems to be a treatment. I only remember since it seemed weird to me at the time.

I had vague problems in that area and changed pillows - I had a harder latex sort of pillow that was moulded, moved to a cheapo supermarket pillow and seems to have gone away.

This is very interesting to me. I have bruxism (extra bone growth on the top of my jaw by my back teeth) as well as mild tinnitus, and I have firm pillows I sleep on. I will do some research on TMJ/bruxism-specific or just softer pillows. I'm sure it'll be a very long-term fix and not see immediate results, but the link between TMJ/bruxism and tinnitus is an interesting area, and might be my own cause. Thank you for the comment!

Generally stress often manifests in tight jaw muscles. And the jaw is close to the nerves that cause one form of tinnitus. And the jaw muscles are also connected to the muscles in neck and shoulders. And these muscles are often strained with people that spend their days hunched over computer screens.

So, jaw relaxation, posture, sports does it for me.

Where do you even find a doctor who can tell you? I haven't been able to get past: "well your hearing looks fine, good luck" (even though I've done independent tests to see that I have significant loss in the tinnitus side above 10khz; they just didn't test that high).

>the other two types always go away after good sleep

In other words, it seems the other two types of tinnitus are sensitive to the amount of reactive oxygen species (ROS).

When you sleep, the ROS are suppressed by glutathione. Then, you feel fresh and rested when you wake up.

When you go through your day, the amount of ROS slowly but steadily increases until you sleep and allow glutathione to do its job again. The cycle repeats.

Given that your tinnitus seems to depend on ROS, I would suggest to experiment with NAC 600 mg and see whether it improves the symptoms. NAC is a glutathione precursor and causes the immediate suppression of ROS.

If there is a correlation then the condition can be treated and improved.

How do you isolate and identify the different causes? I think I have all three of these at times, and I suspect neck muscles because cervical traction seems to help sometimes. But it’s really hard to pin anything down concretely, tinnitus seems so evasive. Sometimes I can’t even match tones I can hear loud and clear when using a tone generator.

> Hearing loss can not be healed

My friend had a tinnitus for a while and later found out it's due to hearing problems on both ears. He then got hearing aids and the tinnitus went away.

So it looks like, _some_ form of hearing loss induced tinnitus can be treated.

It would be cool to additionally match this with blood glucose levels. It may give some good hints.

For example, if tinnitus gets worse while blood pressure and glucose both go up (without eating) then it may be a hint of an underlying metabolic problem.

To confirm this further, you can then eat 15 g of sugar and see what happens next. If tinnitus improves then the hypothesis of metabolic underlying problem becomes very, very probable.

I worked on lowering my blood pressure and for certain my tinnutus has become a lot milder, and my life a lot more liveable as a consequence.

I have tinnitus so badly that some days I am incapacitated. It's bad. I use white noise machines to get through the day - it masks it but doesn't make it go away.

The thing that I've discovered that actually makes it go away: extreme bass. Massive, 18" speaker cabinets and kilowatt amplifiers for long periods of time, the kind that makes your whole body vibrate, while wearing ear protection. I discovered my first this after DJ'ing a club with a proper bass soundsystem and have confirmed it since. The effect lasts from weeks to months.

I found a few things in the medical literature which support this as a real possibility and emailed a researchers about it who said the same thing. I am seriously considering opening up a crackpot bass-therapy clinic to help other sufferers, but need to have other people confirm it works for them first.

I have tinnitus, nobody ever asked me though. Any figure quoted is likley bullshit.

I'd say there are tons of weird semi-medical things that people have that are basically benign that they just live with. I've had bouts with tinnitus; I went to the gun range with my cousin who I've known my whole life and mentioned the importance of hearing protection and to try and keep my tinnitus minimized. He mentioned he has the same issue.

I also had what has been called "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" as a child where I had strange sensations of my body feeling larger or smaller when going to sleep. I never thought much of it, but eventually I heard that it happens to other people too.

The link does clarify a bit about what they mean.

“the scatter of prevalence estimates is wide, although most study results have shown rates of between 10% and 15% of the adult population. The largest and most scientifically reliable study was undertaken as part of the National Study of Hearing in England (n=48 313).3 The results of the study showed a prevalence of 10·1% among adults, with the tinnitus described as moderately annoying by 2·8% of respondents, severely annoying by 1·6%, and at a level that severely affected ability to lead a normal life by 0·5%. Results from studies in Egypt,4 Japan,5 and Nigeria,6 indicate tinnitus prevalence is broadly similar in these countries to in Europe and the USA.”

I have this too. Is there some study showing it is the same underlying problem causing both symptoms? I only knew that you are more likely to have tinnitus and migraines if you have visual snow.

There are some treatments for both symptoms. The ones I've tried involve listening or looking at static. Neither had much effect on me.

The best way I've found to deal with it is to ignore it. focusing on treatments preversly makes me more aware of the annoyance.

After reading your comment, I looked up visual snow syndrome, and I think I have it, too. I guess not much one can do about it?

Did you get diagnosed by a professional? I suspect I suffer from the same rare symptoms but I am too affraid to ask an ophthalmologist on such a rare condition.

I had never heard of visual snow, it's interesting that the symptoms seem to primarily be the brain not rejecting normal noise sources like floaters and white blood cells.

Funnily enough, I have mild tinnitus, but sleep very soundly. I have a fan on 24/7 in my bedroom that helps enough for drowning out the tinnitus sound. I rarely if ever wake up in the middle of the night, and wake up fairly refreshed. I even fall asleep relatively fast compared to some other people I know.

Elsewhere in this thread, it's been mentioned that there are several types of tinnitus (it's apparently an umbrella term), and some tinnitus can be caused by a firm pillow and bruxism, which fits my description.

I wonder if the type of tinnitus has more or less effect on sleep than others.

Alternatively, what contributed to your sleep issues also contributed to your tinnitus.

I'm saying that because that was the case for me. A back then undiscovered dose of mercury led to all kinds of back then mostly ignored ("it's not that bad and it'll probably go way" - I was young) issues, and some tinnitus was just a part of it, but also some serious sleep issues.

Any such environmental factors are rarely diagnosed, because that's really hard unless it's so bad that it's severe acute poisoning. But any less than that probably won't ever be discovered and will all be attributed - by the person themselves too (in my case definitely) - to "stress" (even if there is not that much) or aging. You can't detect it with imaging, symptoms are inconclusive at best, and forget blood tests, they are only useful for said acute poisonings.

> and only dream here and there

You would not know if you dreamed, normally. Only if you wake up while still dreaming. Even then usually you quickly forget most or all of what it was about. To remember more you have to wake up right in the middle of it.

By the way, speaking about dreams, during the years when I had those issues my dreams often were nightmares, they were full of feelings of helplessness, being unable or barely able to move, and generally very unpleasant. I had more than once during those harder times dreams where parts of my body were very seriously diseased including total tissue disintegration and open holes in my body, inside the dream.

Those dreams came from "below", from the "hardware", not from my (completely unconcerned) consciousness (I hope I kind of get across what I mean, not sure how to formulate this correctly). What I mean is, at the time I had no worries about my health whatsoever. All my problems, even though something like almost-asthma allergy coming out of nowhere and suddenly, seemed normal and manageable and as if it would all go away given some time, so I just coped (for example, hyposensitization treatment) and worked around the issues but didn't think much of it.

Since the problem was actually diagnosed (university clinic, lab tests) and solved (chelators, for years) my dreams have become AMAZING, and super interesting too. I'm so glad I had to wake up during some of them (alarm was set) so that I actually remember some. I never knew what great fantasies, sophistication and city-, house- and landscapes my brain was capable of generating, it was just terrible before.

Given that experience, I think even if it's kind of useless because it's way too vague and probably very dependent on the individual, the contents of dreams might give some indications to a body's health status too.

I thought it is totally normal to have sleep wake cycles? This is not science obviously but my Sleep Cycle app gives me lower scores when I don’t have these cycles, compared to when I have several (3-4) such cycles.

I came to this article expecting it to be about a potential cause for tinnitus in disturbed sleep, but the claim within it actually seems to be that tinnitus causes sleep disturbance, specifically of slow-wave sleep.