Hacker News Reader

Comment by guilamu | Hacker News Reader

A message of hope.

I got mine in my 30's too. The first week I thought I was going crazy, and this was the end of my life. I was shocked, I couldn't go to work for a whole week.

I then saw a doctor who said to me: "Man, I've got tinnitus since 20 years and I barely hear it anymore. The more you accept it, the more it'll fade."

A decade later, my own experience is exactly this. I accepted it as one of the body malfunctions that comes with age for everybody. I barely hear it anymore except in extremely low noise situations and it doesn't bother me at all.

I wish you well.

View on HN

I've always been someone who hears high pitched noises that "normal" people don't. I'm also in my 30s, and I'm sure those "teenage alarms" in Japan would work on me. I was the one who would walk up to a CRT and turn it off when everyone else thought it already was.

What helped me accept (and ignore) tinnitus was realizing that I had already grown accustomed to tolerating that sound indoors. When's it's something you have no agency over (like "it's an old house and the wires just make that sound sometimes"), you learn it's part of the environment.

Accepting it as part of the environment gets you past the "OMG my body is ruined forever" anxieties and back to normal life.

By the way, that CRT squeel is the sound of the flyback transformer, which operates at 15.625 kHz for PAL and 15.734 kHz for NTSC sets.

This is so relatable, though it has a strange downside. I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember and always thought I was some superhuman child who could hear electricity. Didn't actually realize it was tinnitus until I heard it at the top of a mountain I was hiking in remote New Mexico a few years ago. I probably got it from chronic sinusitis as a child, but I'm still not sure what to make of it.

That's actually not tinnitus but (from what I've been told) cochloreal hyperacusis, another form of hearing damage.

I always have that, but I only hear a random high pitched tinnitus noise in one ear, rising and falling in volume for max 10 seconds, about once every few months.

I can still hear old CRTs in my forties, although it's less maddening now. They had those mosquito devices, that are intended to repel kids, for a while at a shopping mall near me. They repelled me very effectively as well.

A friend once thought it was funny to try the 15.000Hz silent ringtone on me, although I had told him not to. It made me react without conscious input and I nearly broke his phone.

I only hear a random high pitched tinnitus noise in one ear, rising and falling in volume for max 10 seconds, about once every few months.

I get these, too. I just looked it up, and it's called "Sudden, brief, unilateral, tapering tinnitus (SBUTT)." That's quite an SEO-friendly name.

CRT's and coil whine used to drive me crazy as well. It was the number 1 factor in any electronics purchasing descision.

> I always have that, but I only hear a random high pitched tinnitus noise in one ear, rising and falling in volume for max 10 seconds, about once every few months.

Holy crap! I'm not alone! And now I have a name for it. They've always freaked me out and I don't even know how to describe it to people.

I assumed everyone has that.. and that its the last output of a receptor dying.

I hope you're wrong but that's probably what it is :(

Funny I could hear CRTs too. In teens could hear faint high pitched noise in extremely quiet outdoor settings. Bad tinnitus 15 years later. Slowly reduced and I’m less conscious of it now.

huh. I could hear that noise as well and I have had tinnitus for 30 odd years.

I'm 73, had tinnitus all my life, I am used to it. Some days it seems louder than others. When I was 17-18 I worked as a stock boy at a JC Penney store. I used to hear this high pitched squeal near the front entrance. I mentioned it to my compatriots who responded "What squeal?" I always found a way to avoid the front entrance on my rounds. So yeah, I get the alarms

I heard older TVs being turned on and off as well as CRT monitors. Now, its that very range I 'hear' all the time. Part of me wonders if it was sensitivity to that spectrum that damaged my hearing when I was around multiple CRTs so much.

I have known people that have it much worse than I face daily.

Me too!

I genuinely could hear CRTs when I was 5.

Tinnitus sound now is very similar for me too.

Hearing test showed high frequency hearing loss in that range which is well above human speech and a lot of music.

Yeah, for me it sounds almost exactly like the squeal that CRT TVs make. Like, it's basically indistinguishable from that for me.

I have a (completely unscientific) theory that my tinnitus is a result of early exposure to CRT TV's and my brain trying to compensate for the noise. The reason I say that is that it's roughly in the same frequency band as the PAL horizontal refresh. It's been with me basically my whole life, since long before any real hearing damage would have set in anyway - I remember asking friends when I was 9 or 10 whether they could hear it too. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a window of opportunity when the brain is still plastic for these kind of "adaptations" to set in place.

For me, after 20'ish years with tinnitus, the only thing that brings the buzz to the foreground is reading/hearing the word "tinnitus".

Almost the exact thing to me, 20+ years of tinnitus which sits calmly in the background most of the time except when I read the word tinnitus, or I'm feeling anxious for some reason: when I can't fall asleep when I need a good rest, life stresses, and those moments when a different pitch shows up in one ear and louder. In those occasions I can clearly hear the tone of mine.

It's mildly annoying but I've definitely learnt to live with it pretty ok.

Haha, its funny you say that because I've been reading a novel at the moment where the main character has debilitating tinnitus, and every time the author describes it, I can hear my own.

Same here! Just reading the title of this post made me aware of mine for the first time all day.

It's very much like eye floaters. They are always there, but you can tune them out most of the time.

Completely agree. I've had some light/moderate floaters in my left eye which were very noticeable under a white screen, clean walls, or full bright sky in the evening. It came pretty sure because of a very stressful period at 27.

Here I am, 31. I have to look for them really really hard to see if they are still there. Only when I have a streak of stressful days and bad night sleep, they will be visible again. It comes without saying that I had to change my life in many, many aspects, not only due to these floaters. A much calmer life, better food, gym, financial security, better friends and people around me, and cultivate a spiritual being in some sense. The mind can be shaped in many many ways it's fascinating.

Do check your eye pressure regularly -- if high, you have a higher chance of detached retina, and in that case more floaters all of a sudden warrant an immediate drive to the ER. This can apparently happen when youi fall or hit yhour head. Once that happens, up only have so much time to reattach the retina before it dies off. According to my eye doctor.

[Of course this is not be used as medical advice, as your LLM for that ;)]

my floaters showed up when i was 14- it was kinda shocking and scary at the time to be a freshman in high school and suddenly there were massive sensory disturbances in my eyes. ophthalmologists would just say to ignore them. apparently there's a pretty crazy surgery where they remove all the vitreous fluid from your eyeballs, but instead i decided to follow the ophthalmologist advice and they pretty much stopped bothering me.

tinnitus seems similar. maybe in the future there could be some kind of functionally guided high intensity focused ultrasound ablation procedure that could dull out some of the malfunctioning percept, but for now probably the best bet is to ignore it.

on a related note in interesting auditory neurotechnology, vestibular implants seem pretty cool!

I have both,

No you can't tune them out.

They are always there, sometimes if you are very lucky you can get engrossed enough not to have them as the first or second thing on your mind

But it is always in the top five you never can tune them out you have always be aware as not to to certainn things.

I have tinnitus, and this thread is probably the first time I've thought about it this week.

Lucky you

Brains crazy

I had a slight crack in my windshield right at eye level view. And after a minute of driving I don't notice it at all anymore

The fact we don’t notice our nose is crazy! It’s right in front of us!

We have a projector instead of TV in the living room, and there is a small outlet inside the projection area, top right corner. We can go months without realizing/remembering it's there, until it accidentally matches a shadow or object in a scene... the brain just deletes it.

I also thought I would go crazy when mine started after some ear infections in my 20s. It's gotten a lot worse over time but I mostly only notice if I think about it, and when I'm laying down to sleep, and when I wake up (it seems so strong). I've slept with white noise all my life, and without that I the tinnitus would definitely disturb my sleep.

Same exact story for me.

Audiologist suggested treating it like a rock in your shoe. At the time seemed like impossible advice but now I just live with it and it’s 100% fine.

Also the idea that it is actually made worse by anxiety was a game changer for me. Literally, “don’t worry about it” is the exact right advice.

I've had tinnitus since... At least my early 20s. Or that's the first time I found out about the concept. Until that point I assumed it's background noises everyone experiences.

I only notice it when it changes abruptly (very rare), but otherwise I just tune it out

I have had it since I was a teenager like 30 years ago. Honestly, I do not notice it unless someone points it out. Yes it is always there but there is nothing I can do about it so I don't worry about it.

I've had it for four years and I don't notice it most of the time anymore. But for reason just reading about it makes me notice it.

Yeah, it just blends into the background for me, I've had it for decades. I blame the loud music as a kid.

same here. now 51. I reckon i got it in my early 20's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com