I made tinnitus my friend, then it disappeared [video]
mynoise.net
mynoise.net
So there was a comment that claimed it was related to bad neck posture. Being a keyboard warrior in my late 30s at that time I suffered the same issue: Tinnitus and generally bad posture. I figured that even if that wasn't true, working on my posture might be a good invest either way. So a couple of YouTube videos later I started working on it. Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two. To my surprise the tinnitus was actually also gone.
As I haven't build a real habit around the exercises eventually a bad posture came back, and so did the tinnitus. Both are generally not as bad as they were before, though.
10/10, would do again.
And so was I when I first read about it! I just looked for random YouTube videos that walked you through exercises of how to get rid of your neck hump and bad posture. Most were a mix of exercises that had you basically do the opposite, like lay on your back with a rolled up towel under your shoulders and push your head on the ground, or some general posture exercises like pushing your shoulders back and tense up your neck in a straight position.
I'd recommend to look those up for yourself, as I am terrible at explaining and not a professional, haha. I can't give any specific recommendations as I simply can't find them anymore. But trying to look for them made me realize again just how many there are ...
You can often tell when people have a desk posture from their hips being tilted backwards and/or pot bellies (even if they're not overweight).
Where I don't agree is the following:
> Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two.
While you can make progress quickly (in the sense that your symptoms become less severe), fixing your posture usually takes much, much longer than that. In fact, if we're being honest here, it's never a one-time fix that you do for some $TIME and then stop doing. The reason being that forces & activities that cause or exacerbate bad posture (sitting, carrying a back pack, sleeping on the side, various sports, doing no sport at all, wearing shoes with a high heel drop, …) are not a one-time thing, either. They act continuously, and so "fixing your posture" must be a continuous life-long activity, too.
Very much so. Also applies to other exercises, for the back, joints .. if you make it a habit, you can do a lot of helpful things for your body, when you wait for something and can resist the urge to pull out your phone to distract yourself.
I forgot to, unfortunately.
By the way, do you have any youtube videos perhaps saved that you followed?
"Sitting" is just a stand in for "having a sedentary lifestyle". Anyone who doesn't exercise will have these issues.
You don't need to lift 300lb or whatever and weightlift max to make your body more efficient, you just need to weight lift just enough that you find yourself somewhat getting tired, I don't even work out until I am tired sometimes, and it still feels like it does a lot for my body.
So I've come to learn that in general exercise is good for you overall.
So don't ever sleep on exercise, my biggest take away is you don't need to be a super weight lifter or whatever, you just need to do enough every week that it keeps your body going.
You can actually build some muscle this way - nothing impressive, but way more than I had when I wasn't doing any upper body work.
Excruciating exercising with resistance bands is something she could do too - already started her on doing simple biceps exercises with small weights.
So now I marvel at how I used to be able to sleep without them and ponder over why we either have no fatty pads (or muscle, even!) on the inside sides of our knees or have reduced sensitivity in that region, since we’re clearly meant to be side sleepers (it’s the healthiest position, assuming you can find a rock or log to place under your head, or even just your hands folded together).
But it also said to sleep on the floor, and no thanks.
What does that mean for you in practice, how long and how many reps?
After my initial hearing damage from someone clearing a rifle before everyone put on hearing protection it took a while for it to attenuate to background noise but flares beyond that volume. Things that certainly avoid flares is when I have a good sleeping setup where I avoid being crumpled or my neck kinked. I have good posture in general but sometimes weird working locations, off site meetings, hackathons, etc would lead to my tinnitus getting worse.
I chalked that up to being physically tired from travel and lacking sleep (both of which seems to also increase my tinnitus)but when reflecting back I don’t recall having much Tinnitus when my son was a newborn through a one year old and I basically slept walk that whole year.
I think on the count back the neck posture and likely the muscles in my neck and head lacking tension is what is keeping it from being worse.
Our back should be subconsciously contracted. That's the opposite of how we develop and takes effort to develop and more to correct.
Could you provide some detail? Even YouTube links would be helpful.
It's mentioned when tinnitus comes up, or when dark mode isn't available. Couple months ago, someone recommended a supplement that it seems could easily(?) be DIY'd in case it's snake oil (even if it's more expensive, then they don't "win"!) :)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=3&prefix=true&que...
Thank you! Tested this time: “floaters”. As of now, top of page three has that potentially-useless supplement that caught my eye.
Before was a now-rare error :)
I cannot change them so I don't worry about them, they are just little my little floating jelly blobs friends that visit when I am at my computer.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-and-nutrition/pinea...
But if it did, I’ve got terrible collagen and so I won’t be eating pineapple everyday, regardless of what the Taiwanese pineapple council would like me to do.
There is no scientific consensus on it!
Although I doubt there's any harm in eating more fruit.
What I haven't seen is any properly controlled study proving it false. Just a cluster of researchers in Tiawan with flawed study construction.
He said, there may be some doctors who purport to do this kind of thing. The way he was saying it though was maybe you could floater removal, and a butt lift at the same time from a sketchy doctor.
With patentable drugs this isn't a problem, because big pharma stands to make billions if they discover a patentable treatment, but something like pineapples can't be patented or profited off of. For another example, in most of Asia you will see ginger recommended medicinally/prophylactically just about everywhere. I always assumed it was kind of hokey, but when you look at what studies have been done (e.g. as a treatment or prophylactic for colds), not only does it have an effect, but a rather large one.
(Law of headlines: No.)
For instance, Ginger and its pungent constituents non-competitively inhibit activation of human recombinant and native 5-HT3 receptors of enteric neurons, as they say. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nmo.12107
Ginger is a nausea receptor blocker. For one. It just… is. And it has to be a ton of other things too.
And it's very challenging to find the right words for this. This whole thing about propagation of information. "Hey did you know that humans don't read? They can but they don't, because if this or that was worth reading, someone would have told them!"
and yeah, almost no matter what I write on this subject I always sense a pungent bitterness in the words haha
You know what does bother me?
The scintillating scotoma as well as retinal migraine symptoms, the former starting in middle school and latter in my 20s. Fortunately neither is frequent now but damn I used to break into a cold sweat with either and to this day am a bit reluctant to drive because of both.
I've lived with my floaters for twenty years or more, but sometime on a recent holiday the biggest one moved slightly to obscure the central vision on one eye much more often. Now when a floater in the other eye drifts onto the central area, I just can't focus. I have to flick my eyes to the side hundreds of times a day, and it's annoying enough that I'm considering a vitrectomy.
And they're not "floaters" but look like old school TV statics. Easier to see over plain color (blue sky, night time etc.).
Nothing bothersome. Not having any tinnitus I could imagine (annoying constant ringing), but due to many rock/metal concerts spent in first row there is some base 'white noise' if I focus hard on it. So I don't, same with floaters.
I know I go through phases of noticing stuff. When I just get on with living I no longer notice them, unless I go looking for them.
Not exactly a revelation, I know.
I find that they mostly don't annoy me now, but it genuinely took almost ten years for me to get to that stage. I would focus on them all the time, in particular during a period where I suffered from severe health anxiety.
In general I feel much less anxious about everything now than I have previously, and incidentally now is also when I almost don't notice either the floaters or my (very) mild tinnitus.
Mine is high pitched, and varries in intensity but has gotten worse lately. Sometimes it makes jus existing down right hard, but usually it's only moderately annoying and I can mostly ignore it.
I've tried an assortment of sound based methods to mask it or train my brain to tune it out, but nothing has worked more than fleetingly.
The only thing that reliably gives me a break is if I can really focus on something. Music (passive or active), cooking, and programming are the most reliable, but sometimes reading, gaming, or good conversation works. Usually, though, everything is done with a constant backing track of flyback transformer whine.
Wear hearing protection, kids, or you may well live to regret it!
It was text back then but nowadays there are videos. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YyT9ZwWy5Jc
what the author is advocating for "befriending tinnitus" is a well established form of therapy (Acceptance and Commitment/ACT), it's generally very effective because avoidance or compensatory behavior ("trying to make the tinnitus go away / distract myself") is teaching the brain that tinnitus is a problem and is only going to increase the kind of alertness that leads people to focus on their tinnitus. It's the same way with insomnia, people who try to produce sleep efforts tend to worsen their insomnia, you need to befriend being awake.
There's a big psychological component to tinnitus that sustains itself because people view tinnitus as a problem, that's often larger than the physical impairment.
About 3 years ago I used a borescope and some tweezers as a sketchy endoscope and pulled out a hair that had somehow wedged itself in my ear canal. I don't recall how I figured out this plan, but it worked. The tinnitus has never returned since then.
I have no idea whether there's any causal connections between any of these events. It's a big mystery. But TBH I don't really care that much, I'm just super glad it's gone.
but I don't care fuck it
Unfortunately, I have a connective tissue disorder, which is the cause of the tinnitus and the cause of my hearing loss as well. The more my hearing loss goes, the more apparent the tinnitus is. IF you're in a position where it isn't a health related issue, you can prevent it from getting worse, or at least reduce the pace that happens at.
I have an orchestra of it going on with the high pitches, those that sound like a vacuum going off in another room and hearing my own pulse. I do miss silence!
Yeah, me too.
Mine is most likely from cumulative exposure to loud noise w/o protection before I was 20 (power tools, firearms, fireworks, live rock, punk, & heavy metal, etc.). That or the time I had a bad ear infection with a perforated ear drum (possibly cause by a Cacophony show in a little dive bar).
I used to hear my own pulse, especially when I would meditate, but no chance of that now, with my constant companion high pitched whine.
Stress, excessive alchohol, loud noises, or extended use of earplugs as noise suppression are all sure fire ways for it to make it more severe, but at least the latter isn't as bad, helps avoid the effects of loud noise, and usually the levels go back to "normal" soon after. Excessive alcohol is easy enough to avoid, so that just leaves stress. That's ... less easy to avoid.
Sorry to hear about your particular affliction. At least if it were just one sound it'd be a little easier to occasionally mask or tune out.
One thing that happens to me during particularly bad flare ups (like right now -- is it just me or does thinking about it make it worse?) is that I think I hear things nearby, but it's either mishearing something faint or complete audio hallucinations. One annoyance on top of another!
And yes, the best time to start wearing hearing protection is before your first exposure to potentially damaging noise, but the next best is now!
For myself, I noticed that observing it cheerfully, like “oh, hey, little whining sound!” makes it disappear into the background and I stop noticing it.
Ostensibly mine is from high frequency hearing loss, which I absolutely have, but I now wear hearing aids and it has no measurable impact from my point of view.
I take comfort in that I can go long periods of time without noticing it, and I know that even though I'm focused on it now and it's loud, it will slowly drift to the background and below conscious notice before too long.
I certainly don't befriend it, but I when I notice it, I acknowledge that I notice it and move on with whatever I'm doing. Eventually I'll notice again, days or weeks later and realize I hadn't noticed it at all in the intervening time. So I just relax and move on.
It drove me a bit mad at first, I wanted someone to 'cure' it and make it go away. Then I tried all sorts of things, I narrowed down the frequency (IIRC it's 13.5kHz) and tried masking by playing that in my right ear. I tried white noise. I tried 'notching' all my mp3s to remove that frequency band. I don't think any of it really helped.
But somewhere towards the end of all that I guess I started to accept it. It's here now because of this thread and sometimes it's present at night, especially if I drink too much, but most of the time I'm just not conscious of it any more. Occasionally I think it's actually gone-gone, but then if I 'look' for it then it usually returns.
The only way (for me) to proceed was to zen it out. Accept this is how it is and likely how it will be forever and suddenly it's just not very important.
Though I acknowledge that some folks likely have a harder time with that due to relative severity of the condition.
There are various professionally provided therapies of this style, but there are also simple self-therapy apps that find the perceived frequencies and then play white noise or a music library with the sound adjusted to produce the notched effect in that small frequency window. For example: https://audionotch.com/ https://www.tinnitusnotch.com/ https://www.tinnaway.com/
#!/bin/bash
HIGHFREQ=16000
LOWFREQ=-11500
if [[ -z $1 || -z $2 ]] ; then
echo "Usage: " $0 " <InputDir> <OutputDir>"
exit
fi
OLDDIR=$1
NEWDIR=$2
echo pushd $OLDDIR
pushd $OLDDIR
TEMP=0
BUFSIZE=1024000
CONCURRENCY=1
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
for file in `find |grep mp3`; do
mkdir -p $NEWDIR/"`dirname \"$file\"`"
TEMP=$(($TEMP + 1))
TEMP=$(($TEMP % $CONCURRENCY))
echo $TEMP $(basename $file)
if [ "$TEMP" = "0" ]; then
sox --multi-threaded --buffer $BUFSIZE --temp $NEWDIR/"`dirname \"$file\"`" -V2 "$file" -C -0.1 "$NEWDIR/$file" gain -hen sinc $HIGHFREQ$LOWFREQ
wait
else
sox --multi-threaded --buffer $BUFSIZE --temp $NEWDIR/"`dirname \"$file\"`" -V2 "$file" -C -0.1 "$NEWDIR/$file" gain -hen sinc $HIGHFREQ$LOWFREQ &
fi
done
wait
popd
cp -R --update=none $OLDDIR/* $NEWDIRAnd yes, this will do a whole nested collection, not just the content of a single directory)
It's never disappeared, but the "rain on a tent" sounds from mynoise.net, fan noise, and having a Twitch stream on in the background masks it enough that it's not bothersome during the day.
"Befriending" it though? Naah, I don't think so.
The high pitch is around 7000-8000 Hz with no single frequency that I can isolate. That means the cilia closest to the entrance got damaged.
So, f*ck you all the "audio engineers" who work around the bad acoustics of a venue merely by increasing volume. I hope you'll get the same suffering as you cause to others.
I love mynoise, and Neuormodulator masks my tinnitus, but the T is usually worse when I turn off Neuromodulator. The one that has worked for me is White Burst Noise (https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteBurstsNoiseGenerator....). I’m surprised Stephane didn’t mention it, but the first time I heard it, the response was immediate and very strong - during the silent phase, my tinnitus volume would audibly drop, to nearly gone. That was the first thing that gave me real hope I might be able to get rid of it.
Well, it’s not gone, and White Bursts aren’t as effective as they used to be, but “ignoring” the tinnitus does work okay-ish. The trick for me is to focus intensely on other sounds, to listen carefully to quiet things and try to hear them past the tinnitus.
I have high pitched 7k hz bi-lateral ringing, 24x7. I've had it my whole life. I am convinced part of it is due to being born very premature (I was 1 lb 11 1/2 ounces). I believe it may be cervical and/or neurological (vascular, specifically).
It's so frustrating because nothing has happened. Masking only does so much. Sitting around reading a book, or trying to sleep is almost impossible.
I've been wanting to make a documentary style video on this diagnosis/issue, because a more people suffer like this than people realize. One medical professional that was helping me passed away a few years ago and that still eats away at me, because he really cared that he wasn't able to help me and it ate away at him. I still miss him.
I can count on one hand the nights I've had restful sleep, and one of those was after got home recovering from a surgery. Who knows.
It looks like good old fashioned jQuery, so I'm surprised your browser doesn't like it, but it looks like the direct link for the video inside the iframe is https://iframe.mediadelivery.net/embed/570723/69b827da-0ce9-...
tinnitus also happens to be a very predictable signal, so the key is to convince your brain that it's noise to be filtered out. if you focus on it you will convince your brain of the opposite.
At the risk of a kind of odd tangent, I had a very weird experience a couple years ago where I woke up one morning and my entire body felt like it was "external" to my feeling, for lack of a better description. Getting up and walking around made me feel queasy because I could feel everything in my abdomen sloshing around, and lying sideways made me feel what I assume is how claustrophobic people feel in tight spaces because it felt like there were multiple surfaces around me instead of just the one I was lying on. I had severe brain fog to go along with it; the words coming out of my mouth felt like what I wanted to say, but it didn't feel like I was choosing them; normally my speech feels almost like a distillation of my thought process, but this felt like they were just spontaneously coming out without any thought process to generate them. My wife (still my fiancee at the time, but we had been together for several years) apparently couldn't tell anything different about me outwardly and said she wouldn't have been able to tell anything was wrong other than what I was telling her. The sensation didn't last all day, but after it left I had an odd numbness everywhere. The numbness was gone by the next morning too, but a couple weeks later the brain fog and numbness came back (albeit not quite as strong as it had been originally), and it's only been gradually fading away since then.
The experience (and the later experience that's still going on for a while now) has made me realize just how much my perception previously had been, let's say, "curated" by mind. One thing I've noticed is that even when the physical sensation isn't present, the "reaction" to the sensation will still occur. For example, I remember a time when I was shoveling large amounts of snow, and I suddenly noticed that I was taking large amounts of time between each shovelful, which had been happening instinctively due to how much I needed to catch my breath, but even then I still didn't physically feel tired or winded. Plenty of times I've woken up somewhat earlier than usual and tried to get back to sleep but not been able to, and eventually I realized there must be reason, so I'd have to actively think about whether I was thirsty or hungry or needed to use the bathroom, and then suddenly realized that one of them was actually the case. Pain is one of the weirdest cases, even with my numbness being a lot more mild than it was for the first year or so, because I still have the reflex that I'd expect from a sudden severe pain even if I don't feel it nearly as strongly.
I don't know for sure how much of this generalizes to everyone else, but the experience has definitely made me reconsider some cognitive theories that didn't seem plausible to me before. The idea that our brain basically tricks us into "remembering" feeling something as the reason for us taking a certain action seems pretty consistent with how I was would act the same way in circumstances where I normally would expect to have sensations causing me to act that way without being able to actually feel the sensation. In some ways the philosophical idea of consciousness being an illusion don't seem as crazy to me as before either, because it's clear that the reality I experience is only perceived through the lens of my biology, and I can't come up with a strong argument against the idea that my sense of "self" is just an evolutionary hack for handling some parts of my body (with the parts not benefiting from conscious management being actively hidden from whatever part of me feels like "me").
Later I switched to Bone Conduction headphones. I felt like BC Headphones has improved my condition a lot. No ear pain or puss or the humming noise. I hope it stays that way!
If you live in a noisy place, your noise levels might be high enough that you never even get the chance to notice it. AC alone might be enough to cover it if it's little.
The solution is to not wear them as long, especially right after a shower or the like, when there is extra moisture in your ear.
Alternatively you can put alcohol in your ears to kill the bacteria, sort of like you’d do with mouthwash. Any pharmacy will sell over the counter ear drops with alcohol, meant for drying out swimmers ear. You’d have to keep doing it once every week or two, but it would keep the infection away.
What's weird is sometimes I wake up and then all of the sudden I hear it starting.
Ever since I got better earplugs and kept them on my keyring for more routine use, the symptoms have dissipated over time
Not going to name a brand since aficionados all have opinions about their deficiencies in favor of another brand thats equally open to debate
But I’m glad my tinnitus symptoms haven't seemed to be permanent
I haven't had ringing after music festivals in years now, and I can hear people again in loud environments
I really identify with one of his comments that his anxiety (both general and about the tinnitus itself) made his tinnitus worse. Unfortunately, the most affective treatment for me has been benzos, which has lead to a 10+ year reliance on those drugs. Now I am in the very slow and long process of trying to get off of them. Benzos never cured my tinnitus, but they made me feel less crazy and more adept at ignoring or not noticing it. Now, I just want to get back to just having tinnitus and no drug dependency.
Just some information I wish I had known at the start of my tinnitus journey.
Always been confused about it.
You know, I wasn't focusing on my tinnitus until seeing this on page one. Thanks, OP.
It's unfortunate and surprising that there's still no effective drug, though lidocaine does, in fact, work. (Very temporarily, sadly.)
And time does help, at least sometimes. Over the past ten years, my tinnitus has gone from a 5/10 (highly annoying and noticeable above ambient noise, but not debilitating in any respect,) to something like a 1/10 (I don't even hear it unless I'm in an extremely quiet room and trying to sleep).
...But it sure ain't my friend, and never will be. It's hard to interpret it as anything but an annoying side-effect of self-inflicted nerve damage.
I'll be honest, this is the first time I'm hearing "just change your attitude towards it" though. It's like the terrible advice someone with depression gets- just be happy!
I have no idea how it happened - I never used headphones much, I don't work around machines or jet engines, etc. One doctor said it's just wear and tear.
It doesn't bother me though. I figure that nobody has a full stack of bricks when it comes to health, and here's one of the places I'm short. Compared to some of the places where other folks have health problems, this is not a biggie.
There's some research, but yeah, I'm surprised that something that affects so many people and in some cases affect them very severely isn't receiving more attention.
At least there are things one can do immediately after the fact to limit nerve damage (applying intratympanic steroids etc), but even these things are often missed and haven't become part of routine procedure yet.
And I'm very curious why Shore's device is still stuck in FDA hell while the (from what I've heard) inferior version, Lenire, passed a long time ago.
I have it. I've changed my attitude toward it and made it my friend. I don't really know what else to tell you, but if you want to, the way is open for you. Or you can continue to see it as an aversive thing, and it will continue to be so.
No amount of wishing it away is going to make it vanish in the same way if I really want to fly I just need to think I am a bird... at least in theory. ;)
It doesn't mean you have to be happy with it but just accept it, bring it out like a photo album of the family. 'Here is my tinnitus, it stays past its welcome but keeps me company.' 'There is my balding, society considered it ugly, I think it is just neat.'. 'Oh the knee that wants to play up every once in a while, yeah that happens, we work with it the best we can.'
There's also that surgery where they sever your auditory nerve and render you deaf. Some have done this in an extreme last-ditch effort to cure their tinnitus. Sadly, it doesn't always work -- many of those who tried became deaf and yet remained stuck with tinnitus.
I know what a variety of tinnitus is like (I've never known anything else) and I'm sure that other varieties can be horrendous. In my case time does not help.
Perhaps we ought to insist on a tinnitus spectrum, with multiple dimensions and some TLAs. I don't think that advice from a single data point is very helpful, or being charitable: annecdata. I'm glad it disappeared for OP.
Tinnitus ranges from, say, me (I'll live) through yourself (fuck! but I'll live) to committing suicide in despair at the extreme end.
ENT: Ear, Nose and Throat - a medical specialism.
My earliest memories are from around 18 months. I used to have very bad earache whenever I had a cold or influenza. My mother told me that I used to burst into tears, unprovoked or without any of the usual baby related reasons and eventually around age five or six I was diagnosed with "glue ear".
The way it was explained to me was: my eustacian tubes were too narrow. Speaking to children: "Your ears, nose and throat are all linked together and the tubes that link your ears to the rest of you are too small and get blocked easily".
I had surgery to insert "grommets" into my eustacian tubes. This was done twice. Grommets are tiny plastic, hollow tubes. From memory: about 3mm long and 3mm outer diameter but that is from a long time ago.
Now here is where it gets complicated! My dad was in the British army (so was my mum but that's another story). This means we moved house every two years or so. I can fix dates quite well.
The first operation was performed in Rinteln, West Germany at a British Forces hospital. We were stationed in Paderborn so it would be around 1976. I had a second set inserted in Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester (UK) in 1977 or perhaps early 1978.
I know that the second set of grommets were removed by a doctor (I think an ENT specialist) but I can't remember if the first set were removed in Manchester and replaced by the second pair at the same time.
I recall that the doctor used a black, plastic, bell shaped thing that fitted over my ear and wiggled some sort of hooked, metal probe within my ear to pull out the grommets. It was quite painful.
Even after the operations, I still got earache whenever I had a cold up until around age 20-25. That age range is a bit hard to pin down. I'll also note that when we were stationed in Cyprus in 1986-7ish, a lot of swimming and diving helped clear the tubes!
One of the nasty side effects of glue ear is that you have trouble with pressure changes. Airliners and swimming are the bane of your life.
There are some notes. Hope it helps.
How Golden Is Silence, Actually?
We aren't friends. Nor enemies.
Funnily enough I only just remembered it because of this post and yes the crickets are still there. Thanks for that OP.