Tinnitus Is Connected to Sleep
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
Got it randomly one day this summer.
It's impossible to describe how depressing it is to hear a sound non stop in your ears, night and day, wherever I go or whatever I do, it just never stops.
The brain started filtering it out a bit after months, but it's always there and you're often reminded of it when you're in a slightly more silent environment.
There are days where it becomes especially loud and falling asleep you'd just like to cry or something.
Don't wish it on anybody.
Doesn't seem to be a thing?
1. Airpods or ANC
2. WFH ->. Less movement -> stiff muscles around neck and head -> head trasnfer frequencies changing
3. Covid vaccine
2. WFH -> Less movement -> Decreased blood flow can contribute to the onset of tinnitus.
Long exposure to high volumes causes hearing damage. Many people set volume on headsets too high to hear better.
3. Many people are diagnosed with tinnitus every day, and some are bound to have it discovered after a vaccine shot. In the same way, some people will have tinnitus discovered after COVID. That doesn’t yet prove causation.
The same explanation goes for ANC - when you cut out all the noise, suddenly it’s way easier to notice the tinnitus you already had.
There might be something with the neck stiffness idea. I do get the feeling my tinnitus lessens when I’m using cervical traction and doing neck stretching regularly.
Whenever I do, I swear I feel increased pressure on my ears and my tinnitus temporarily gets worse. I've often wondered if I imagine it, but hearing from others here makes me think it isn't so strange.
Slight tinnitus here but had it for as long as I can remember.
ANC reduces background noise, which typically allows users to listen at lower volumes, thereby reducing total sound exposure to the ear. So if the user adapts their volume, that would lead to less risk of tinnitus. This works for me :)
But there are lots of people on forums suggesting that there is a link between tinnitus and ANC. One reason could be that ANC headphones allow you to listen very accurately to inner auditory signals, and if you already had some tinnitus, you might start to notice it.
A few weeks into it I noticed a persistent ringing and I thought it was some sort of electrical wine in an old house. A week later I realized it was permanent so I cut out my sound cancelling sleep routine, but the tinnitus has stayed.
It probably doesn’t cause tinnitus, but people grasp at straws about this kind of stuff.
When it gets to be too much, though, I can just go inside, and that's not something that you can do with tinnitus.
I'm sorry that you're going through that, that must be terrible. Have you tried adding white noise?
Sometimes I get a new frequency. Since 2000 it has gotten worse, since 2020, much worse. But changing my environment seems to effect it for better and worse.
No doubt mine is connected to my mental illness and probably temporal lobe seizures.
I’ve always wondered if that implied there must theoretically be a way to cure or reduce it by reducing pressure in there through surgery or stretching or something. I’ve done a bunch of neck stretches in the past that I think mostly relieved my anxiety about it, but may have helped. My motivation to fix it has gone down a lot though as I’ve gotten used to it.
Anyways, I've been to the oto doctor and after a few visits, tests and ct scan he believes it might be due to my jaw and bruxism I have at night. Not ear related. Next stop for me will be to visit a maxilo facial doctor.
A friend of mine has tinnitus and found out he has bad hearing. Hearing aids fixed zmthe tinnitus.
Another friend has the same, but no aids yet.
Oh, use a fan based white noise machine (or a loud fan) during sleeping, really drowns it out.
I also recall the days before I listening to music a lot with earplugs at rather high volume, like, 6/7 hours per day multiple days.
That's the only out-of-the-ordinary thing I did leading to it, it might be related or completely unrelated, who knows.
I once read something about the prevalence of depression in people with tinnitus. I was surprised by it, but I didn't really consider how disruptive it must be when you're accustomed to not having it. By contrast, I've had it basically my whole life. I remember laying awake at night, listening to the deafening ringing, thinking about how weird it was that silence isn't silent. It wasn't until later that I knew my experience isn't the norm.
I'd love to have a treatment or cure. Especially for folks like you that truly suffer from it.
Blindness isn’t “no sight” or pitch black, there’s visual snow.
If you pay attention, you can always feel your muscles/joints. Sometimes I smell burnt popcorn, but not usually, but maybe that’s because smell is always present. Similarly always taste saliva.
Also see sensory deprivation experiments. We don’t seem able to experience “absence of sensation”.
Unfortunately my mild tinnitus doesn't stop at the same time.
I can only sleep when there's another noise in the room for frame of reference, otherwise the tinnitus feels like the loudest sound in the universe. My current solution is an air purifier on its audible middle setting (basically white noise with a use), and a humidifier in winter.
Then I developed pulsatile tinnitus in my early 30s, which means I can hear my heartbeat in my (right) ear at all hours of the day as well. When I tell people about it, I like to describe it like the heartbeat from Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.
Developing pulsatile tinnitus really affected my mental health for a while, despite living my whole life with a constant buzzing and ringing in my ears. I couldn't get over the fact that there was now this loud whooshing sound in my right ear, 60+ times per second, and my doctors couldn't even tell me why after several MRIs. I thought I was going crazy, or that I'd developed some kind of brain tumor invisible to scans.
I don't have any great advice except to say that eventually (maybe six months to a year) my brain just adapted to the sound and I hardly ever think of it anymore. It's as much a part of my life as the buzzing and ringing I've had since I was a kid. It can be annoying when I'm trying to listen intently for something (my wife is a birder and it's hard to hear things she points out), but it thankfully doesn't affect my mental health anymore.
Changed my life, I thought I was living in a small crowd of fruit flies.
I have similar issues and 5 years in, problems are only getting worse (perhaps combined with pigment dispersion syndrom making it worse, but not on the path to glaucoma, at least not yet).
To be honest, I don't know where I'd rank on an objective severity scale. My floaters often make it difficult to read, and I've got one that can lodge in the wrong place for long enough to make driving feel a little scary. That's maybe not bad enough - given the risks, which I don't know right now - to argue against it. I'm not necessarily questioning the doctor's judgment - he's maybe right! - just mad that he didn't even tell me about this procedure.
I don't know if I have tinnitus. I had strong ringing in my ears every now and then as a kid. I once told a classmate about this, who said I should see a doctor, but I've had it as come up every now and then as long as I can remember.
I now have a continuous beep, but only really hear it when I intentionally tune into it. E.g. I can hear it now because I'm writing about it, but most of the day I simply don't hear it, because I don't tune in to it. Not sure if it was always there or just starting at some age. It is sometimes more present when I'm e.g. sick.
I have no idea if other people have this kind of permanent beep as well, because I never asked anyone.
(I just asked my wife and she doesn't have it.)
Tinnitus is like 30-50 times the volume of that, depending on how rundown I am or whether I have a cold. For me it's predominantly in one ear, though does sometimes change.
What he's describing is fairly normal and is just to do with blood pressure in your ears, from what I've subsequently read.
> Tinnitus is a condition when a person hears a ringing sound or a different variety of sounds when no corresponding external sound is present and that other people cannot hear.
That’s called tinnitus. And I agree, it isn’t rare. From TFA, roughly 15% of people have it (that report it).
Sounds like you may have severe tinnitus, which is more rare, limited to 1-2% of people.
Some people even have multiple frequencies of tinnitus at the same time.
We do. I've had tinnitus all my life, or at least I can remember it as far back as about four years old or so. It sounds to me like the whine of an old CRT. I thought it was just normal until I learned it wasn't. I used to think as a kid that it was what the Simon and Garfunkel song "The Sound of Silence" was talking about. Luckily for me it's just something that's always been, so it doesn't really bother me. I have no idea what it would be like to not actually hear anything at all. The one time I was in a sound isolation chamber, it just made my tinnitus scream.
My neighbor developed tinnitus later in his life and it drives him crazy. I definitely feel bad for him, and others who are similarly afflicted by it.
One day my kid brought a nasty flu from the kindergarten. My otolaryngologist recommended the strongest irrigation stream I can find to clean my sinuses.
Not only did it not help, but it also pushed some goo to the end of my sinuses, which resulted in pulsatile tinnitus.
After about 6 months my kid got sick again, so we all got sick, and I got rid of this tinnitus where I was hearing my heartbeat, by casually blowing my nose. The trick was having a stiff blockage, I guess, so the pressure builds up.
It sounds stupid and probably won't help you, but I wanted to share my story. I had no support from the people close to me and the heartbeat was driving me insane.
I'm sorry you have to go through this. Even though it's not a life-treating condition, it might be a life changing condition (QoL).
I have Tinnitus, which I first noticed when I was sick one time as a kid - probably 5-8 yrs old. Thankfully I have no other adverse experiences to report (related to this).
Anyway, I think I just have chronic inflammation.
It's not allergy either.
Edit: WHOOPSIE DAISY
On the plus side, plenty of employment opportunities in the US these days. They’re offering us all the former meatbag jobs :)
The doctor also told me that it's not an ear problem, but rather a brain problem. The brain is supposed to filter out this noise, in the same sense that it filters out the sounds from a (normal) digestion, our breathing, etc. I do have some (undiagnosed) hypersensitivity, so that sounds consistent to me.
nozzlegear: it gets better with time, the less you think about it. I know it's not a great consolation, but trust me, train yourself not to think about it, and it will go away for extended periods of time (and will come back from time to time)
In my right ear I have another sound regularly, that I went to the doctor for, and she immediately said "Oh, tinnitus, nothing you can do". But I'm pretty sure it is something else. It feels like spasmic tiny muscle fluctuating against my eardrum, and gets triggered by a low-frequency sound, esp. when at rest. Stops after 15-30 mins.
The brain definitely seems to get better at filtering it out over months/years though, at least until something makes you focus on it
I assume my brain is somehow able to filter it out, unless it’s too tired/busy.
But no matter how cliché it sounds, it does get better with time. The brain does get better and better with filtering it. I also discovered that my tinnitus gets worse with caffeine, stress and lack of sleep. In periods when I live a overall "healthy" lifestyle in respect to sleep, stress, food, working out etc. I forget that I have tinnitus. When I sleep to little and/or when I'm stressed, it comes back full force. I have totally cut out caffeine, which also happened to help with my migraine.
Now ~15 years later I'm in my early thirties and I rarely think about it tbh. However, after a bad cold about 5 years ago I got a secondary tinnitus which is a low-frequency humming. This set me back and cased me some sleepless nights but I have adapted to this as well.
The thing I miss the most is the concept of "total silence". I do envy my fiancé sometimes if we're out in the woods or whatever and I know that she can just relax while "hearing nothing".
Let time do its work and experiment with your body/health to find what makes it lessen. Chances are that de-stressing, sleeping well and eating and working out does make it better.
For some, perhaps, but mine (25+ years) has not improved one jot. At best I've learnt to manage it with masking sounds (thanks to MyNoise) but it's always there waiting for a quiet moment.
Might be to do with how well your general auditory circuitry was working in the first place, mind - e.g. I've always had the "two noises at once tend toward garbage in my brain" problem (which made most social conversations almost impossible. FUN TIMES.) Given that implies my brain was already fairly borked for auditory processing, that might have an impact on whether it can eventually cope with tinnitus and/or whether it is more susceptible in the first place[0].
[0] Although I am 99% sure it's due to a large amount of loud gigs in small venues without any ear protection causing "mechanical damage" tinnitus.
FWIW I still go to shows sometimes, and stand right in front of the stage to feel my eyeballs vibrating. I wear good ear protection, though, and feel no pain. Even though the music isn’t quite the same.
Yeah, I've got a variety of Etymotic "concert" ear plugs (mainly ER20s), a collection of Loop ear plugs, some from Flare (titanium, aluminium), and various other of differing construction that live in my "gig bag" (small bag that holds phone etc. without causing security to freak out.) I find that if I don't wear ear plugs at a gig or even the cinema, I'll have terrible pain overnight and I'll be useless the next day.
(Hell, even bus or train journeys can require ear plugs some days.)
The worst thing you can do is fixate on it. To avoid that, you want to make it so that you never hear it. Play some noise whenever you need it especially when sleeping. Then, over time, learn to accept it. And then the craziest thing happens: it does actually get better. You don’t just get used to it, it actually improves. It’s a profound connection of mind and body.
Its told you fix constipation, your ringing ears will get fixed.
I know its not 100% but try to fix your bowel movement if it isn't working properly already.
Tinnitus sufferers tend to experience symptoms their entire lives. Do you genuinely think that they’re all walking around continuously constipated for decades?
I have it too. I've taken the approach of truly accepting it: "I will hear these sounds the rest of my life, and I'm truly okay with that". As a result it doesn't give me anxiety or bother me, and I find it helps it fade into the background. The more you focus on it (and let it bother you) the more it stays in the foreground.
I know the advice of "just learn to be okay with it" is easy to communicate but very hard to actually do. I found mindfulness meditation helped me learn to accept things without judgement, including the presence of my tinnitus.
The Neuromodulator[1] is a random-ish noise field that ... confuses? the brain after a while and lets you forget the tinnitus - at lest temporarily. The noise isn't "real" it's the brain generating it due to faulty signals, so giving it a bunch of noise helps somehow.
Brown noise[2] was specifically suggested for older people as it has more stuff in the frequencies we still hear naturally :D
As a happy coincidence my partner AND dogs sleep better with the brown noise on, they all tend to wake up to the smallest of noises - this helps with it.
[1] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenera...
[2] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php
Having said that, I'm not sure how well it would do for high pitched tinnitus.
Edited to add - now listened to the neuro modulator, nice one.
e: btw tinnitus is considered hearing damage.
It also means the above experiment will not work since you lose the signal before you reach your tinnitus frequency.
I still have it, and now I know what it is. I think it’s worse now, but I can still unconsciously ignore it most of the time, although knowing what it is and that it’s aberrant and not something everyone hears has made it psychologically more irritating than when I was young.
But mostly I don’t. You do really get used to it. It won’t get better, but you will.
I don't know which is worse, but the combination has me contemplating euthanasia on a regular basis
It suddenly came one day I was more stressed than usual. Stayed since then.
I often catch myself falling asleep thinking: maybe when I wake up tomorrow, it’s gone. Just to wake up the next day and hear it again.
It’s very annoying. But I have learned to live with it. Some days are better some are worse.
Terrible first 2 weeks, then just kind of faded into the background. Humans are very resilient. Well, I am, I guess :)
After about 9 days one morning the right ear completely resolved and the left ear was at about a 5/10.
Very, very, very long story short, I did a ton of digging and experimenting and realized it was related to a neck injury (a lot of people with whiplash have short-long term tinnitus). Over a year of physical therapy later, the tinnitus in the left ear is usually gone and only flares up if I lift weights with poor form.
If you've had a neck/shoulder injury in the past 1-2 years, it's something I'd look into.
I know I can make it instantly worse by clenching my jaw, so that should have been a hint already.
There are some physical therapists (also dentists) that focus on maxillofacial dysfunction and TMJ disorders, so that's an avenue to go down as well.
The other two common reasons for tinnitus:
* Hearing damage (gunshots, explosions, etc.) and those are not reversible as of yet
* Ototoxic drugs. When I last did research on it it years ago, like hearing damage from gunshots, was also irreversible.
There is a well known phenomenon among people with (at least some types of) tinnitus that moving the jaw forward increases the sound, but that this also makes the tinnitus go away for a bit. The way my ENT explained it, it has to do with how your brain calibrates sound. Pushing the jaw forward makes the sound louder, which also causes your brain to adjust your hearing to be less sensitive. Or something like this.
With some types of tinnitus, there is a specific connection to the temporomandibular joint. My understanding is that the causes tinnitus are poorly understood, however. There are many hypotheses, but little solid evidence.
I've had like 2/10 tinnitus for all my life, can't remember the last time I heard "silence".
Got a C5/C6 hernia a year ago, about 6 months after that MASSIVE tinnitus in my right ear and clear increase in the left. Like "can't hear shit" levels of noise.
Eventually I figured out that doing a basic shoulder workout + going on a walk eased it off in a few hours. A month ago, due to a doctor's suggestion, I discovered that taking muscle relaxants just before going to sleep a bit, I've woken up with maybe 3-4/10 tinnitus a few times.
Definitely a neck thing.
1. Laterally sheared and rotated vertebrae in my neck that were causing compression and tension on nerves in my neck
2. Elevated first rib, which was also compressing and tensioning the nerves.
I was incredibly skeptical that PT would fix it even though I was sure it was related to my neck/shoulder. After a few sessions of working to push my first rib back down to where it was supposed to be and also press (quite hard) on my neck vertebrae to move them back into a normal position, the tinnitus went from a 5/10 to a 2/10.
The problem I had was getting the rib and vertebrae to stay put. They would, as a result of lifting things or sleeping funny, slowly start to revert to their original positions causing the tinnitus to get louder again. The PT gave me several exercises to help strengthen muscles to keep everything in place.
Mine fortunately isn't that bad; it's in my left ear, and about 95% of the time I can ignore it. It sounds almost exactly like the high-pitch squeal that CRTs make when you have them on without any input. The biggest thing for me now is that I can't really deal with "silence" anymore. I pretty much always have YouTube running, or some music playing, or some audio of rainstorms of thunderstorms going, because otherwise the squeal can be maddening. Fortunately, in 2026 it's never been easier to find a nearly infinite supply of ambient noise, so I can deal with it.
I'm extremely lucky that it doesn't appear to have disrupted my sleep much. I know some people have had their tinnitus ruin their sleep and I am in the happy few where that isn't an issue. I can go to sleep with the noise in my left ear and it doesn't take much longer than it did before I got the tinnitus.
I'd much rather it not be there, and I was really hoping it would go away after a few months, but after a year I suspect that it's something I am just going to have to live with for the rest of my life. I'm 35 now, and hopefully I got another fifty years or so left, so for the large majority of my life it's just going to be something I'm stuck with. I've just kind of come to terms with it.
[1] I mean, in net it's probably good that there aren't observable tumors in my head. At least I don't think I have brain cancer.
1. put your thumbs on your ears
2. rotate your hands so your index fingers are on the base of your skull, middle fingers just above
3. now put your index fingers on your middle fingers and "snap" them down on the muscle at the base of your skull some 10-15 times
4. if your tinnitus goes away or reduces, it's caused by muscle tension instead of nerves
This blew my mind when I first tried it, but looked into it and it makes total sense: we all work on computers all day, necks get fatigued, and the impact forces the muscles to contract until they force-release, alleviating the tension-caused tinnitus.
1. Straight body, drop your head all the way down, chin to your chest. 2. Place the palm of your hands on your ears, blocking them, with the fingers to where the back of your neck touches your scalp. 3. Tap your fingers on your stretched, rigid neck muscles.
Just sharing it here since it has helped me and it doesn't help to have many techniques to battle this.
But with your thumbs closing your ear orifices.
Now you have to hit the back of the neck with the tip of your middle fingers, and to get a harder hit you "snap" the fingers, putting the finger like "fingers crossed" position, and the pressing the middle finger towards the head. You should hear a big "thump!" inside your head.
It aleviates the tinnitus for a few seconds, but more likely due to the stapedial reflex than anything related to neck muscles.
Went to the doctor, did all those rounds. Once I saw the endemic existence of CBT and other psychotherapies as treatment it dawned on me that I might have to reconsider my relationship with this.
In reality I just got used to it and live with it. I have a tiny white noise sound that is always on my headphones while i work that is just enough and that covers me most of the day, but honestly even if I sit in an electric car that is fully stopped and it’s as loud as it’s gonna be, I notice it, absolutely, but it doesn’t really cause distress anymore.
The first six months were hell because I kept focusing on how awful it was. Eventually you stop noticing it. It just becomes part of the background – like how the sky is blue, grass is green, etc.
I strongly recommend reading "Living with Tinnitus" by Laura Cole. Tinnitus is a very poorly-understood condition, but hearing about the experiences of others helps a lot. I hope you feel better soon. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37707931-living-with-tin...
---
[1] Tinnitus Retraining Therapy
Source: have tinnitus for 2.5 years. Got used to it after 1.5.
> The Oxford researchers proposed that the large spontaneous waves of brain activity that occur during deep sleep, or non-rapid eye movement sleep (non-REM), might suppress the brain activity that leads to tinnitus.
https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/4/3/fcac089/6563...
I tried turning those off to have a look and my what a lot of ads. It sort of puzzles me that people put up with them.
Are you on Chrome?
it seems that these researchers think it's non-REM sleep that helps in prevention, not just sleep in general
I've been following the work of Auricle Inc., a company commercializing decades of neuroscience research out of Dr. Susan Shore's lab at the University of Michigan. (Full disclosure: I have spoken to their CEO about potentially helping with their funding, although my primary concern is getting their product to the public).
Instead of just masking the sound, their device targets the root cause using bimodal neuromodulation. It pairs specific audio tones with mild electrical pulses to the jaw/neck to desynchronize hyperactive neurons in the dorsal cochlear nucleus.
Here are the two papers that cover the underlying science, and go over the efficacy:
The foundational mechanism and Phase 1 trial showing how it induces long-term depression (LTD) in the brain circuitry: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aal3175
The Phase 2 double-blind, randomized clinical trial results showing significant reductions in tinnitus loudness and burden: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
I've had tinnitus for 25+ years and followed a lot of science. At some point some Brasil researchers found a drug that reduced tinnitus volume as a secondary effect. There wrote papers about it, but unfortunately, nothing came of it.
1. Place your hands over your ears such that your fingers are on the back of your skull - thumbs should be on your neck and middle fingers at the base of your skull.
2. Tap your middle fingers on the base of your skull repeatedly for ~30 seconds
It apparently doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s not permanent, but for me it greatly reduces the “volume” or stops it entirely.
I have no idea what the explanation is, but it’s free, safe, and you can try it right now.
Hope that helps! Tinnitus sucks.
Hold up. How do we know when ferrets have tinnitus???
If your tinnitus is at say 13khz, and someone turns on a sound at that frequency, you don't react to it because your mind is effectively masking it.
I once played my tinnitus tone from this site https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ for my partner, when i turned it off i had the odd sensation that i couldn't tell if the sound actually stopped or not.
I used to get some temporary relief from dialing in the tone on that site and listening it to a few minutes.
There are limits to dreams.
I have tinnitus. My theory of how it arises is the bit of the ear that converts spatial movement to electrical signals - some hairs tied to an ion channel basically - gets moved too far and breaks the thing in such a way that the channel jams open.
The noise pro stuff may be worse than regular loud noises as the ear recognises loud noises and tries to protect itself but may not do that with the noise cancellation movements.
(diagram of what the gear looks like https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/3-s2.0-B97801237494750...)
And this I can sometimes use to pinpoint my tinnitus tone(s): https://generalfuzz.net/acrn/
The surgeon dentist was really surprised by this and could not evoke any similar cases in their practice before mine.
(https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/spasmodic-dysphonia-re...)
I randomly get something in my head that sounds pretty close to coil whine, but definitely isn't coil whine — I've had it when I'm in the depths of the wilderness with no electronics.
It typically lasts less than 20s and I can go months between occurrences.
I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed this if I was trying to tune out tinnitus, but I’m just used to it? Not like anything is every quiet (my hearing is hyperactive), but, like, the tone and volume of it right now is “insufficient sleep but circadian forced us awake” so I need to be particularly measured and chill if I drive while it’s this loud.
I always thought that tinnitus is caused by a "rusted" acoustic nerve wire (here it's coexistence with hearing loss) no central mechanism is evolved. Linking non-REM sleep phase to tinnitus production is unexpected.
My brain eventually figured out how to tune it out and now it associates the sound with silence.
Now I've developed it again after feeling depressed and blasting music in my car. The new version crackles and alternates tones in my left ear. I have a doctors appointment coming up to hopefully figure it out.
There is a new expensive treatment for it called Lenore which works by playing sounds and stimulating your tongue at the same time. Those pathways are located close together in the brain and by stimulating both at the same time, it's supposed to train it to filter out the noise.
Unfortunately that is the truth of it. Sometimes tinnitus can be traced to other parts of the body, but more often it seems to be caused by the brain acting up. And we just don't have enough knowledge about the brain to fix things like that, so all you can do is try to habituate.
My tinnitus is much worse now, but I don't have a TV in my room anymore, so I just play a podcast on my iPad. That tiny built-in speaker doesn't really cover up the tinnitus, but the voices lull me to sleep (which is probably what the TV was doing all along).
Wonder if the root cause is inflammation, which might go up with stress, bad sleep, bad diet, etc
I wonder how you tell if a ferret is experiencing tinnitus? I did ^F on the paper for ferret but didn't find anything.
The first time I got sick and it started, I went walking around the neighborhood looking for the source of the noise until I realized I had tinnitus. Sounded like some kind of distant earth works / resonance thing.
Really feel for people who have it permanently.
The article briefly links to another article that Tinnitus triggers your fight-or-flight response and I agree. You need to get rid of this instinctive response by moving it more into your awareness.
My life is so much better now.
If my ears start ringing like I feel tinnitus has arrived, I've found it goes away by cycling this pressure a couple times.
YMMV
Always had trouble falling asleep though, ever since I was a young sperm.
But after that article I heard nothing more. I just looked it up and seems it may not be a reliable method.
But I noticed a side-effect: if I then turn off the tone generator, my tinnitus would disappear! Unfortunately that effect only lasts for a minute or less, so it is not really practical to get relief this way.
Note that I would be careful about using pure tones for too long. Pure tones end up focusing the energy in your cochlea towards a small area of hair cells. Since these cells don't regenerate, it may be wise to avoid overstressing them.
My tinnitus is fortunately not super loud; it's only noticeable when it's relatively quiet, or I'm blocking sounds (with ear plugs, or noise cancelling headphones without input, etc.). So it's not like I habitually blast my ears with loud sine waves out of desperation. But I can imagine it may be different for other readers, so that's a good caveat.
Like others pointed a bad night sleep definitely increases the perceived sound.
Also the stress in the shoulders doesn't help.
Unfortunately I don’t live near a coast so this is something I can regularly tryout.
Since then, I’ve realised that tinnitus is contagious! So I prefer not to talk about it just in case I pass it on.
Can confirm
But especially the coming and going and how it seems affected to level of tiredness or amount of sleep I got.. Of course, reading the article made me aware of it and now it's loud than before..
I've had strong symptoms of adhd my whole life, but never thought much of it (except as a lack of self dicipline and general failure of a broken robot to impersonate a real human), but as demands on my performance rose to real-adult levels with a young child and duties beyond not dying, I decided to tell the doc how it had generally felt like to be myself, at which point I was referred to someone with a specialty in broken brains, and we quickly agreed that while I wasn't going to become normal, certain stimulants at least provided me with sufficient energy to carry out most of the functions expected by an adult member of society with actual responsibilities.
And so, over the past.. more than a year, I've gotten to experience a little bit of everything as my brain gets to oscillate between being slightly oversaturated to absolutely drained of certain neurotransmitters in a way that at the same time feels slightly unsustainable and the only alternative where I get to not be absolutely miserable all the time.
The point of that story, being, these "phantom precepts", fits the bill somewhat well. I've always had a very conscious experience of common neurological phenomenon which are naturally present but largely-unnoticed by many (auras, visual snow, floaters, phosphenes, tinnitus, afterimages) so I'm probably a bit one the sensitive side, and, the medication seems to have a quite interesting effect on these as well, among them, I noticed the ABSENCE of noticing my clothes touching my skin.. I am no longer acutely aware of the cooling sensation of inhaling air through my nose, and I rarely hear the beat of my heart in my ears.. Maybe the weirdest effect is on saccades, in a conversation, looking from one person to the next seems to be as instant as before, but the blur of my eyes moving between points of focus is gone, it's kind of jarring, just poof, one picture, then another.. nothing in between.
I now seem to be able to influence my attention somewhat, that is, to do whatever that cognitive regulation is called, so that my focus shifts to a subject I need to do but have no interest in doing (oh wait, that's why I got the medication), but it does make me wonder, if tinnitus is just one of the more obvious (and therefore common) neurological processes that "pokes through" maybe perception of sound and attention (and maybe therefore also conscious experience of sound) have evolved to be more strongly linked (because if you notice the predator sneaking up on you, you get to not be eaten).
Maybe this stronger link is why tinnitus is so obvious, and maybe sleep is instrumental in regulating consciousness, so if consciousness is differently regulated, or less regulated, maybe it's easier for the phenomenon to "seep through".
seperately ... its clear that you recognise the incompatibility between sensitive individuals and a society designed to place the populace into constant fight or flight. youre still showing signs of blaming yourself. literally nobody is going to understand you (especially not doctors) and the sooner you accept this, the sooner you will free up a lot of trapped energy. id stop taking the stimulants regularly man ... even without their effect, barely anybody is going to understand your words, and the number of people who will appreciate your words is reduced when they are conveyed via essays (honestly i cant find the strength to read them properly) ... in general your expression has reminded me of the message behind the lateralus chorus
After an ear infection 30 years ago I lost most hearing in my left ear and my balance was affected. Not a massive problem most of the time but I regret not being able to read when travelling, even by plane or train. It’s audiobooks all the way…
It kind of fits with the patterns I and many other people describe, like the intensity varying with sleepiness and other mental state, and how it goes away if we hear _actual_ sounds of a broad enough spectrum..
It might be this little thing where it comes on by mistake, but it doesn't turn off again, and we latch onto it, and that's the feedback loop that enforces it.. I'm not saying we can "think it away" but I'm noticing in myself, that I didn't have any tinnitus _AT_ALL_ when I woke up, and now I'm almost consumed by this 20khz tone (my hearing stops around 16khz), and sitting here playing with that in my mind, I can certainly make it dim somewhat.
I wonder if there are some cognitive exercises that can be done especially for people who either don't have it, or have gotten it very recently. (Literature talks about some meditation and mindfulness, which I'm generally not a big believer in, but nevertheless, those do touch on the idea of messing around inside ones head in a top-down way).
I'm not too hooked on the idea that adhd is simply a "different kind of brain", I don't buy that we were the excellent survivors or hunters, I'm pretty sure I'd be the caveman who was eaten by a bear because I was too distracted by the pattern of shadows from two branches moving just the right way xD
I don't really blame myself, but I don't need to defend my condition (my personal condition, I'm not speaking on behalf of others), I've always been bothered by it, not simply when the mirror of expectation and society is held up against me, but even when left to do as I please, I find that while there are areas in which I function, and function well, there are areas where I'm so limited that it seems unreasonable even within my own framework. :)