Apple Hearing Study shares preliminary insights on tinnitus
apple.com
apple.com
AirPods Pro 2 adds 'clinical grade' hearing aid feature
Once I realised that I could also tune out tinnitus, I did just that - but a big part of that was just not thinking about it/dwelling on it.
Been nearly 20 years now and tinnitus rarely troubles me, in the way it used to really upset and stress me.
I've got some mild tinnitus. I always wonder if it's my brain listening to itself. That little recursive loop is enough to distract me, even if it's not true.
I’d love to know more about this if you have any info to share.
2. Earbuds fill your ear canal, and as your ear canal flexes slightly due to your heartbeat, the earbud rubs against the skin inside your ear, and you hear that.
Some days it's noticeable on its own, and on rare occasions, it's annoying.
I avoid alcohol, caffeine, heavy sodium, and (when possible) heavy stress, since I've heard those might be contributors.
I also try to avoid really loud noises (but that's impossible where I live in the city right now, and is an almost daily 'adventure').
You'll eventually stop thinking about it, and life will go on.
When I first started dealing with tinnitus, it sucked. Until I realized it didn't.
Would I rather not have it? Sure. But life is not near as bad as I thought it would be at first, and I'm perfectly fine several years after it started.
As with a number of things, I've found I can actually move the needle when I give myself grace to fail, as long as I can genuinely try again and resolve to do better. A recent example being stopping telling myself I'm tired in the morning. Such a bad habit that self perpetuated. I was always feeling tired, in part, because I was telling myself I was tired.
Chewing fingernails on the other hand, damn... that hasn't worked so far because I give myself grace, but never really resolve to do better. Someday I'll figure that out.
Of course I don't claim that's the universal fix for everyone. It sure helped me.
A few years later, it has basically zero impact on my life. I am not aware of it 99.9% of the time, and when I am aware of it, I don't go down the same psychological rabbit holes, and I quickly and reliably move out of awareness of it.
Obviously, everyone's experiences and particular symptoms are different. But I think it's really, really important to spread the message that it really can be a mild, almost inconsequential condition, for many people - even anxious, dare-I-say neurotic people.
There was no single silver-bullet treatment path for me, but a combination of very normal, mundane things like therapy, relaxation (massage, hot baths, exercise) and limited use of safe levels of white noise helped me. Perhaps the biggest thing was shrinking my time horizon from "how can I live the rest of my life like this?" to "how can I enjoy today as best as I can?"
The internet is full of horror stories from people, often written during their darkest moments, about how awful it can be. I could easily have written a hopeless, dark, scary account of my symptoms when I was at my lowest points.
Reading such accounts is of absolutely no utility to anyone. If anyone is struggling with this condition, I highly advise you to avoid reading such material at all costs. Try to maintain an awareness of the millions upon millions of people for whom tinnitus is a mild, transitory condition they almost never think about (and, as a consequence, never write about their experiences on the internet)
No I'm very expensive. Pay up!
(I grew up on 4chan and know better than to check back here for replies. Nice idea though!)
Last bad sickness hit was from Sable and Anti Chamber. There are few other indie games that effect me similarly. I thought it's lack of textures or crosshair in indie games, or may be it's the camera movement or both, not sure. But now, when playing first person games, i find myself worrying if it will make me sick. More I think, more I feel it. Yesterday I felt sick after playing Alien Isolation for the first time. It had textures, a crosshair, but camera was janky which made me worried and more I thought about it, worse it got and I end up deleting the game.
Also, ironically, I just played Alien Isolation, and the camera drove me crazy at first but stopped being a problem altogether after a few hours of gameplay.
Jokes aside, my tinnitus used to bother me horribly. It used to be all I could focus on, not just because it's loud and distracting at times, but because it triggered a severe case of health anxiety². I went through my regular GP, who referred me to an otolaryngologist and audiologist; that person found nothing physically wrong with my ear (which is usually the case for tinnitus) and referred me for an MRI; the MRI threw a big wrench in the works by discovering a brain tumor which turned out to be benign – a simple pituitary tumor which I just need to keep an eye on every few years. But again, still not the cause of the tinnitus.
Anyway, long story short, no cause was ever found for me suddenly developing this pulsatile tinnitus nearly overnight. It took a couple months to adapt to the new, constant sound in my ear, but I hardly notice it anymore unless I'm straining to hear something³. When I'm focusing on something like playing a video game, watching tv or listening to an audiobook, I don't notice the tinnitus at all. If the sound really starts to bug me, I've saved some brown noise tracks on YouTube that are particularly effective at drowning out the frequency of the whooshing sound.
¹ I also have the "regular", high-pitched whistling tinnitus, but I've had that most of my life.
² I've always had a health anxiety, learned behavior from my mother. This post makes me sound like a basket case, but I promise I'm a fully functional adult and these ailments I'm describing are trifles at the moment!
³ My wife and I have started to get into birding, so it does interfere a bit with my ability to hear some birds. More specifically, it interferes with my ability to locate where they are, I can't quite figure out if they're above me or behind me sometimes.
https://blog.klungo.no/2023/09/12/the-washing-machine-in-my-...
Blood pressure and muscle tension seem to be primary factors in my perception of tinnitus.
Did my hearing get worse? No, I was mostly at home.
The problem is my home office is too quiet. So now I open a window or put on some natural sounds or music and it goes away.
Those two things all but cured my tinnitus: 1. not obsessing about it and 2. avoid silent spaces
and forget about the hum the air conditioner in the house makes. Or that buzzing from the lights. hmmm... your computer isn't actually silent, is it?
As a long time sufferer, I want to support the general sentiment of this post, and I hope it helps someone who finds this that is currently suffering. My core message is that managing your psychological response to your condition matters immensely. I've noticed over the years that my perception of my tinnitus gets worse when my stress levels are high, even if for unrelated reasons. For example, reading about this post might remind me of it when I wasn't thinking about it for a long while. And suddenly this might bring back unpleasant feelings I have about it and it might suddenly feel very loud and overpowering when half an hour ago I wasn't even aware of it. But then an hour or two later I'll catch myself having a normal, quiet, unimpeded conversation with someone, which can feel like a contradiction.
Unmanaged, this kind of thing can turn into an unchecked, self reinforcing doom loop that's not always necessary or helpful. As with anxiety (another long term problem I manage), one unhelpful thing doctors might say when you first get tinnitus is that it doesn't go away - this is one of those technically true statements that patients can misinterpret. The reality is that just like anxiety, in many cases there's plenty reason for hope: it's often quite possible to improve quality of life that's mostly the same as it was before. It's still there if you check, and time to time you need to manage it, but also you might go days and weeks without even noticing, living a perfectly normal and happy life rather than a miserable existence.
On the other hand, leaving your primary care doctor with "yup, it's tinnitus" (my interpretation at the time: you're fucked for life, good luck) can lead to deep feelings of despair, panic, lack of sleep, over-sensitivity to noise of any kind even within normal thresholds, and many more terrible things. And "just ignore it, you'll be fine" is trite advice that can be difficult to achieve without help, like telling someone to ignore a siren in the next room. And it might be difficult for others to understand how debilitating it can be. But slowly and step by step it's possible to get there.
Sadly compassionate and competent care for tinnitus, even among audiology specialists, is few and far between and patients are left to suffer and / or try to figure stuff out on their own, which like a hypochondriac on webmd, can leave you feeling even worse. Luckily it is more possible to find tinnitus specific care these days and I encourage you to find a clinic that does this if you can - it's worth traveling for IMHO. There's a cocktail of potential causes that indicate different treaments so take this with a grain of salt but what worked for me was a combination of various things first to manage my current state and give me some relief during my initial crisis state (psychological help with how to deal with the reality of your condition, various things to help mask it and allow me to get normal sleep), clearing out wax (it's hilariously gross and also wild how it can affect your hearing perception and tinnitus in the most unexpected ways), common sense non-doomer information on the nature of the disease, what to do next and how to slowly transition to focusing on normal life ("playing playstation"): doing things with people, being outside, working out, focusing on your interests, as opposed to catastrophizing at home in bed. This feels like a non-cure cure but the results for me are night and day - if it's a placebo, I'll take it. I still have trouble with it time to time, but lead a normal happy life most days.
That aside, while we don't have the technology to make it fully go away yet, there have been a lot of recent changes and advances in our understanding of how it works which might lead to new therapies. Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor and might be butchering this so take this with a grain of salt: There seem to now be competing theories on the exact causes e.g. arguments about whether it's the the little hairs in the ear are sending no signal or incorrect signals. Also a recent understanding that you can have a seemingly unaffected hearing AND a normal audiogram but still have tinnitus is leading people to question if it's a different type of damage (different, larger hairs) that cause it which might mean different therapies. There's promising new treatments like Lenire which seem to be low risk and whose early study results seem to be much more promising than earlier versions of similar ideas (haven't tried it). I wouldn't be shocked if we eventually got much much more in our lifetimes.
TLDR: of course you'd rather not have it - please do be careful in protecting your hearing as much as possible. But if you're at the point where you do have it, just take a bit of solace maybe that it's not always a terrible prognosis and more improvement might be possible than you think. And the psychology and managing my emotional perception of it was very helpful for me. I hope this helps you, dear reader.
I can't comment on how mainstream of a scientific opinion his response is, but I know it certainly reframed the way I thought about my own tinnitus and inspired my original comment, including the Playstation bit. That was a lightbulb moment for me. "Wow, he's right, I NEVER think about tinnitus when I'm otherwise engaged mentally..."
Eventually my body got used to the local pollen, thank god. I haven't needed chemicals or lavage for months.
https://generalfuzz.net/acrn/index.html
I also had some other people give feedback that it helped them, so doing a little bit of cheat replying under the top post, in a hope it is useful for some. (I have absolutely no relationship with the target of the link, and I saw there were several paid apps that basically used the same algorithm)
A little anecdata for myself: I have had a mildly higher blood pressure and pushing it down to accepted limits by diet and ~daily 6km running seems to have reduced the incidence - but this is just a piece of personal made data, so FWIW.
Right now I hear it because we're talking about it. In five minutes when I'm back to thinking about work, it will disappear again until the next time I randomly think about it.
"just don't think about it, bro"
lol - they prescribe opiates for this condition.
noise machines are linked to making it worse. Humans may not be used to "silence" or whatever people are claiming in here, but we're also not used to broad-spectrum noise, either. Nature doesn't sound like a fan, or any other sort of "noise" except for, possibly, a few dBa around the floor of all noise due to echoes and reflections. Do you all ever go outside of the cities?
[0] i consider mine mild, i always know when i'm gunna suffer after a noise, my brain just knows the SPL that will trigger it in a few hours, so i generally try to be asleep before it kicks in. I do get the waves of tinnitus that i think most people say is "mild", it comes and goes; and yeah, that is easy to "ignore". I have friends with it that avoid certain foods and drinks (like red wine and whisky), where a bout of tinnitus escalates into a migraine headache, or worse, a cluster headache.
I don't think that works for everyone, but it's such a simple thing to try that anyone suffering should see if it works for them.
It turned out to be caused by an improperly filled root canal; some root material remained inside the tooth, the flesh above and around the tooth was inflamed and this was applying pressure inside the skull and bringing tissues which would otherwise not have been into contact, or firmer contact.
I had the root canal re-made, and the tinnitus ended.
Thanks!
He took an x-ray just of that tooth, and lo and behold, a big bloom on inflammation above and around the tooth.
So it was easy to find, if you looked.
Interestingly, the root canal re-drilling specialist who did the work told me he had over the many years a number of cases where patients had various issues such as dizzyness, where their issue went away when their improper root canals were re-made.
But I'm thinking the head is pretty much solid-state; everything is packed in there. Apply pressure is one place and it ends up somewhere else.
UGG. I've been experiencing noticeable tinnitus this motorcycle season. It is to the point I'm now actively investigating. Recently I read neck pain or tension can cause tinnitus. I have a terrible mattress. I'm contemplating a move, so I've been holding off on replacing it. Trying exercise and stretching in the mean time.
I also had a root canal in November 2023. The tooth was sensitive and this only abated somewhat after about six months, which is coincidentally when I noticed the tinnitus.
- First make sure that the frequency is not dancing around. If it is then probably it is one of those things your brain making up then it is relatively easier to fool yourself back again. Check it when it happens https://audionotch.com/app/tune/ (disclaimer I am not related to website, just first google result).
- If it is constant then try to counter it with noise especially when trying to sleep. Just give yourself one of those nice YouTube colored-noise videos like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SHf6wmX5MU
- Avoid in-ears altogether, especially the bass-boost ones make sure that it does not fit airtight. More bass does not mean you pulsate your ear-canal with an airgun. If you want proper bass sound, invest in hi-fi stereo and listen to it in a good room.
- As mentioned, distract yourself. Even if it is chronic and actually has a pathological cause, the brain finds a way to cope with it, like the glasses on your nose not noticing the weight.
At glance, again I don't see mention about that in this article. Apple has accelerometers on AirPods Pro, I hope they incorporate head position into the study.
Nothing helped until I got serious into fixing my posture. Now it's almost cured.
I was using just my laptop, purchased a stand, a keyboard and a mouse and always use my computer sitting properly.
I’m also doing neck exercises to strengthen my neck muscles, this one was a doctors advice.
Lastly, I no longer sleep on stress inducing position. I used to do that a lot, would not be bothered to sleep on a small couch at friends house, now I don’t do that. If it no bed is available, would sleep on the floor.
The AirPod Pro Max also get too loud, they are ok at low to mid volumes, high volumes = extreme tinnitus.
HomePods are similar, I can only have them on at volume levels I appreciate for short periods of time or I get tinnitus.
Compare this with my old sennheisers and audeze headphones, 0 tinnitus even at extreme volumes. Similar for my in ear Mochi headphones.
Or compare the HomePods to my Panasonic Surround Sound Speakers for my TV from 12 years ago that I still use, I can make the walls shake with no tinnitus. If I turn up my homepods to a volume close to that my ears will be ringing for hours or days after. It really bums me out, I wish I understood what is changing about the technology. Like are they going from Analog to Digital and is digital more harsh or something? I don't know.
I personally like to pick apart all of the layers of music and hear all of the nuance/production. At low volume this is generally not possible. Not all of us have audiophile tendencies though I suppose.
I've head some people suggest using AirPods Pro with ANC as a form of hearing protection at concerts--I think Apple might have even mentioned that in today's presentation.
To put it less bluntly: even if there is no evidence of harm, one can rationally decide to avoid these products out of caution.
If you do it from time to time and tinnitus eases even a little, it might come from how the AirPods or headphones press your ear or head causing tensions.
Its an analoge but digitally programmable hearing aid which needs to be replaced every 3-4 months or so.
I think it is pretty common that tinnitus gets better with any kind of hearing aid however some devices & hearing loss combinations tend to be more successful
It's so subtle that I don't really notice it in my day to day life, and with corrective lenses I experience almost no vision problems.
But God damn it, there was this one ophthalmologist I had. He became convinced that I was at high risk for glaucoma and kept subjecting me to visual field tests to assess my peripheral vision. The machine he used for such tests was so ancient it still took 5 1/4" floppy disks, and it worked by shining lights of various brightness onto a plain canvas. You were supposed to stare at a point and click a button held in the hand (like a Jeopardy! buzzer) when you saw one of these lights.
Well, this exercise presents pretty much the exact conditions for my visual snow to put me at a disadvantage, and that meant I had bizarre, inconsistent test results with strange gaps in my visual field. Of course, that only further convinced my ophthalmologist that I was a glaucoma risk, and when I told him about the visual snow, he just looked at me like I was from space and ordered more tests.
I was so glad to find a nice, 34-year-old ophthalmologist some years later who used the air puff machine during the standard eye exam to measure eyeball pressure and found I was nowhere near having glaucoma. No visual field tests, no visual snow confounding the results.
But at night it's a completely different story. With a quiet house and nothing to distract, it was causing a huge problem in my ability to get rest.
The solution was to play Spotify all night long at a low volume. The music keeps the ringing to a minimum. The genre of music doesn't really seem to matter. It all works.
Supposedly the mind doesn't think while humming, at least the inner monologue tends to cease, similar to meditation, and both can be used simultaneously:
https://www.livestrong.com/article/13771650-bhramari-benefit...
I find that even the act of beginning to hum, by tensing my throat without making a sound, quiets my thoughts.
Some other things you might try:
* tapping practice of the fingertips on temples, eyebrows, shoulders, etc for anxiety relief.
* consciousness brain hemisphere shifting (don't know the name), where you cross your eyes slightly to look at two different images, then concentrate on bringing one image to your attention and then the other, causing focus to move between hemispheres. doing this while meditating on difficult thoughts can help the non-dominant hemisphere solve the problem.
* head to toe relaxation: start with the top of your head and scan down your body, identifying any tense muscles and relaxing them, until fully relaxed. so real the forehead, drop the tongue from the top of the mouth, relax into the chair, etc.
Then COVID did some sh*t to my sinuses which left them changed.
Now I have relatively low tinnitus in one ear and very noticeable tinnitus in the other ear. The pitch is high... reminiscent to the squeal that an old CRT or tube TV would make if it had no signal.
The tinnitus is some function of my blood circulation, because I can clearly hear my pulse in the worst ear... just this constant pulsing squeal. On occasion it is so loud that I wonder if my head is about to blow open. Blood pressure is good when tested though.
Who knows... that's all so complex and interconnected, and then there's the possibility that some of it is imagined or phantom.
During the diagnosis phase of my vertigo I learned a few things about how primitive medicine still is when it comes to inner ear issues. If the problem isn't BPPV, some large growth they can cut out (e.g. a fistula) or something that can be "solved" by just destroying your inner ear (gentamicin therapy) there is almost nothing they can do -- and in fact they can't even really diagnose the issue, just test out different therapies to try to find anything resulting in some mild improvement. Most doctors have no idea what the possible diagnoses even are; the specialist who eventually helped me was a neuro-otologist, which already seems unreasonably specialized, and he said he only really had an idea because his son had the same issue as me.
GP didn't make a claim, they repeated a figure from the submitted article. Since you want to know where they drew the figure from, here it is:
> Cause of Tinnitus
>> While there’s no guaranteed method to prevent tinnitus given its complex causes, practicing hearing protection and managing stress levels can lower the chances of tinnitus. In the study, participants cited “noise trauma,” or exposure to excessively high levels of noise, as the primary cause of tinnitus (20.3 percent), followed closely by stress (7.7 percent).
Source: Scroll to the top and click on the link to the article.
Turns out my hearing was fine - the batteries in the hand-held device were nearly dead. (I do have some auditory-processing difficulties, but those were not measured by this test.)
One of the side effects is aggression. here i'll try this, anecdotally my neighbor was prescribed 5mg (20mg is max dose) for short term memory issues, and he said "it's a good thing i wasn't prescribed more, i would have killed my wife." This was so out of character for him, i've never heard him raise his voice or say anything in anger in the 10 years i've known him. He and his wife are a normal happily married (like 4 decades!) couple of awesome people.
So, yeah. I'm starting to notice a bit of a double standard on this site with more things than "google bad."
In regard to tinnitus, just a few weeks (3) could be plenty.
Amantadine could be a bit safer for longer-term use, but it too carries behavioral risks.
Verbal dominance (or slight verbal aggression) is actually not a side effect per se; it's IMO a primary effect, although its observance depends on the baseline state. It's a genuine state of power, of not putting up with bs. Unfortunately, however, this power will last only as long as the memantine intake lasts. The names adamantane diamondoid mean something. As for physical aggression, that should be quite rare indeed.
Calling it a side effect is like saying that feeling energetic is a side effect of caffeine. If you're already very tired, then you won't even have this effect anymore from caffeine until you're back to a baseline state.
2. What tone or tones are typical? What frequency or frequencies? Sine wave? Sawtooth?
3. Can anything shift the tone? Eg, drugs? Attention?
> To use Active Noise Cancellation with one AirPod only, use your iPhone or iPad to go to Settings > Accessibility > AirPods, and turn on "Noise Cancellation with One AirPod." Then press and hold the force sensor to switch between noise-control modes.
This information is tracked via the Health app.
I do not know if other devices have the ability to monitor this, but I have had the feature turned on since it was released, at OSHA 8-hour exposure safe limits.
they think airpods cause tinnitus? eh
unrelated: another big cause of tinnitus is Viagra. it drives too much blood to the sensitive ear arteries
Could pre-workout have these same effects? They usually contain vasodilators, although at much lower strengths than Viagra.
I mean, how would hearing aids help with tinnitus?
While Apple choices are sometimes dislikeable, I’m really happy that they seem to care about some social problems (accessibility, privacy) giving them so much screen time. They could just invest that time into something flashy and non-consequential and still make boatloads of money.