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Comment by mickdarling | Hacker News Reader

Since I haven’t seen this mentioned. It has been remarkable for a temporary solution to let me sleep when my tinnitus is particularly loud.

Basically cover your ears with your palms and snap your index fingers loudly on the back of your skull. 40 or 50 times and when I remove my hands, it is blessed silence for at least a few minutes and often long enough to fall asleep.

https://lifehacker.com/this-weird-trick-might-give-you-brief...

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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.

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.

Isn't tinnitus part of your inner ear vibrating itself dysfunctionally (normally only moves sound-dependent for protection), and by giving it one large vibration, you're making it do the "protection" thing, stopping the vibrating?

My understanding was more like the Stereocilia at places corresponding to certain frequencies no longer convert motion to signals.

The flick might be a simulation of an impulse signal which covers all frequencies and tricks the brain into thinking that the absent frequencies were also included in the heard impulse.

Most tinnitus is the subjective kind that doesn’t involve any known physical vibration, it’s just the brain inventing signals. TIL, elsewhere in this thread, that to your point there is also sometimes “objective tinnitus” which is the ear vibrating itself. Mine is the subjective type. There are sound therapies that work for me, temporarily, and the thinking is mainly that hearing tones near the ringing frequencies causes the neurons to send real signal, so that when it stops your brain finally registers that it’s not hearing the tone anymore.

That does not seem like a plausible explanation since the noise does go away and is not persisting. But I'm really curious about why it did work, in the hopes of a permanent solution.

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.

I know this seems like ‘If all else fails ‘hit with lunar boot’, but hit the back of your head pretty hard.

It’s a weird motion so practice with you hand in front of you.

- Hold your right hand in front of you.

- Cross your index finger over your middle finger

- Press your index finger and your middle finger together pretty hard

- Let your index finger slip off the middle finger (You will notice the index finger has quite a bit of power)

- Now place the palms of your hands over their respective ears, covering them completely. Pointing your finger back around your head.

- Repeat the index/middle finger motion above but let the index finger smack the back of your skull (It should sound like a very loud thump)

- Repeat this 40-50 times (Your fingers will likely get tired)

- Remove your hands from your ears and hopefully you will have some relief from the tinnitus (The effectiveness and duration seems to be highly variable from person to person and type of tinnitus)

Good Luck

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