As a musician and amateur sound engineer, the higher tinnitus was fairly manageable, but developing the lower tinnitus was pretty devastating and has largely ruined my ability to hear and mix properly. I've needed to read lips for several years now, as a double-check against what I'm hearing. Phone calls are very difficult, but the increase in video calling has helped.
Don't be me. Take care of your ears. Also, remember that noise-cancelling is NOT hearing protection. Buy some musician-quality earplugs (you still hear everything, it's just quieter) and have them with you at all times. Use them even when you think it makes you look dorky at the club or concert or sporting event. It's not worth the psychological torture that is tinnitus, I assure you.
I fell for this one as well. I wouldn't be to surprised if noise-cancelling could actually cause tinnitus, or make an onset of it worse (though I haven nothing but biased anecdata to argue the opinion).
(I mean active, "true" noise cancellation generating "anti-sound" for your eardrums, not the passive things labelled as "noise cancelling" because there's apparently no legal definition of the term and anyone can call anything "noise cancelling".)
Of course the morning it came on I was also recovering from being riotously drunk the night before, and I'm more inclined to believe something about that triggered it
Glutamate excitotoxicity is at the core of tinnitus, and this is why diet also effects the strength and appearance of my tinnitus.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6458046/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03785...
Yeah, but that's the problem, just like the Western world attitude to masks and COVID.
With COVID, all those Western big babies referring to masks as muzzles, nappies etc. and shouting about "muh freedom". All this despite indisputable objective scientific evidence to the contrary that masks work, let alone all the subjective evidence from countries like Japan where masks are the norm during cold/flu season and so nobody complained about wearing them during the COVID era.
Well its the same with hearing protection, people don't wear it because they consider it makes them look dorky and they care more about their perceived image in others eyes than their own personal health.
But equally, I think venues such as clubs, cinemas, theatres and operas have to take their part of the blame. Does it really need to be that loud ? Exactly what "experience" is your audience gaining out of the excess loudness apart from hearing damage ?
It's even noticeable, because a lot of venues have this really annoying practice of turning the system way down for the openers, thus hamstringing their set, and making the headliner look that much better. Believe me, artists can look really silly playing quiet elevator music while we wait for the real act. (what a fing rip if you paid $50-100+ on a ticket).
Loudness is a component to musical enjoyment. Very much like the carbonation, acid, and alcohol we add to drinks to make them fun. In those cases too, our bodies can be damaged too. Often times what's fun, hurts us. I do think it's stupid if they don't have hearing protection available.
Isn't this a good thing? I'd work with the speaker arrangement to improve perception, it might be more expensive to have more, quieter speakers than a few ear popping loud ones. My ideal venue would have the same loudness in every point, just not loud enough that you have to scream to the ears of your companions.
Above a threshold (about 90-100 decibels (dba or dbc - can't recall)) the vestibular system in the inner ear (the balancy bit) is stimulated, which ?induces dancing? and ?feels good? ...
https://sci-hub.se/https://asa.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1121...
It's that idiotic macho posturing crap, as is all too often the case. There are always muppets pooh-poohing even basic precautions like safety glasses because they're "sissy stuff." Well, you'll cry like a sissy when a metal chip from the grinder flies into your eye. Earplugs fit right into that category.
If you have to wear earplugs or whatever at a venue, the problem is that it's too loud.
It's a little more complicated than being "too loud" though. The problem for venue sound is that everything is being projected from a single stereo source at the stage, meaning it generally needs to be at the very least 6dB "louder" at the source to reach the back row, and it usually ends up being more like +12dB for a larger venue -- due to both natural air resistance and bodies soaking up sound. So if it's a high energy gig and people want to dance, they need to be hearing it at a minimum of ~95dB (and we're more accustomed to over 100dB at this point), which means the front row levels may already be upward of 112 or 118, which nobody should be listening to for prolonged periods.
But that's just the average SPL. The bigger problem this all leads to, is when things aren't hard-limited properly and every single snare hit for the entire night is spiking to 130dB and over. It would be nice if it were as easy as slapping a limiter on the master and calling it a day, but it takes some pretty intense math to do it properly, because there may be dozens of speakers even in a small venue, and all of those sound waves are intersecting with each other and bouncing off walls and people. And that's presuming the venue was properly sound treated in the first place -- if it wasn't, then all of those compounding sound wave situations are made so much worse and unpredictable.
Ultimately, the problem is laziness and greed. Venues absolutely need to invest in supplemental systems to provide reasonable SPL at the middle and back, rather than trying to push it all out of two speaker columns on the stage.
Or as a mild sufferer myself, use cheap wax ear plugs which is what I do. No one actually notices them and you can vary the sound blocking by how much you squish them in. I use a key ring thing to carry them https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/131545172517?hash=item1ea0b40a25:...
That being said, I have had tinnitus all my life, not knowing it even had a name until I was an adult. For me it's a steady ~9 kHz tone. If the 'phones are on and the music isn't playing, I hear nothing but EEEEEEEEEEE, much like how I felt when I walked into an anechoic chamber.
So I’ll share my positive anecdote.
I’ve dealt with it for over 10 years, and while I can’t imagine how happy I would be to find an effective treatment, I’ve learned to cope, and do what I can to protect hearing going forward.
And once you realize you can cope with it, it makes future coping easier. I have bad days, but by knowing they’re just bad days and that I have mostly good days helps the bad days also not so bad.
Try to focus on the other good parts/distractions about life.
Hope that helps someone.
Got tinnitus due to injury to auditory nerve.
Those who are just starting with overcoming Tinnitus - Make sure to give time. Human brain is amazing at latent inhibition, ie capability to ignore things that it learns to be irrelevant.
That is your largest medicine. In my country, there are sugar cane refineries/factories that emit very pungent small that is very strong and spans across miles in radius. People who live around in that vicinity develop ignorance to the smell in a matter of months.
All I can say is - whether it is a decision to try some experimental medication or surgery, or otherwise - give it 9-12 months time after you acquired Tinnitus. There will be bad days, but there is a good chance that you will realize you could live with it. With an inconvenience (for comparison) as severe as your car's "check engine" warning beeping every 10 seconds.
Tinnitus was keeping me awake at night, and like others said it made it hard for me to follow conversations in pubs/bars/busy places..
Then one day I read about the massive artery next to your ear, which you cannot hear (OK sometime you can when you are running or have a pounding headache) but the realisation that this sound was always there but you don't hear it, was amazing for me.
Within a week I'd largely tuned it out. It is still there and if I think about it I can always hear it. But it no longer upsets me and is just a thing and not an issue for me.
One of the things I've noticed people struggle with regarding any chronic illness is constantly feeling like they are "supposed" to be feeling fine and have more distress worrying about some perceived gap between their actual life and how they imagine life should be then the ailment itself(this obviously carrier over to things other than chronic illness).
Letting go of this imagined alternative life is the biggest first step towards accepting and dealing with tinnitus. I have tinnitus the same way I have all my other features, positive and negative. That's just the life I have and there is no alternate life out there.
I do still get a kick out of the look of horror on people's faces when I tell them I've had constant, changing frequency, ringing in my ear for two decades.
I also have tinnitus, mostly in one ear. It's difficult to have a conversation in a noisy place. My partner's voice frequency seems to resonate with the tinnitus ringing, so it's difficult to hear her sometimes!! I've had it for years but five years ago the ringing wound me up so much I went to the doctor. They did various scans but couldn't find any discernable cause. The doctor suggested I just try and live with it. Not really what I wanted but with no other options I took his advice.
I put in a fair bit of effort to try and cope with it and actually, now, most of the time I don't realise it's there. Only when 1) Someone is talking to me in a busy pub or restaurant or, 2) watching the TV on low volume in the evening, do I really notice it.
Getting to sleep used to be a nightmare but I genuinely don't have any problems now.
My advice would be to chillout and forget it's even there, and when you do notice it, just accept it and carry on. It could always be worse. Good luck to all tinnitonians.
It's easy to wind yourself up about, so I think most of what I've done to cope is just learn not to wind myself up about it.
I got rid of my tinnitus - which was not even the goal, it was not too bad compared to all the many other issues I increasingly had and which forced my hand - after removing the remaining amalgam fillings in my teeth and starting chelation treatment against mercury poisoning. The diagnosis was lab-supported (fortunately, there is no guarantee to get significantly elevated blood levels for low-level long-term chronic exposure) at a university clinic by a doctor not interested in making money from me, and not making any promises, always referring to this or that study for anything he suggested, and who also did not believe all my issues could be explained by the tested low-middlish mercury levels. With the last one he gave up after not finding anything else and the unexpected overwhelming success of chelation. For example, a nodule in the enlarged thyroid that I had had for two decades disappeared within weeks after i felt a lot of strange activity in exactly that area after the fourth DMPS chelation treatment, which made me go to see an endocrinologist to check again. That endocrinologist did not believe what he found - which was nothing - and had me lie down again and repeated the ultrasound, while consulting and comparing with his old printouts to make sure he checked the right area.
With my albeit limited bio-chem background I am well aware that there's thousands of ways for things to go wrong, so I'm definitely trying to advocate everybody with tinnitus has the same problem.
A list of conditions that I had, increasingly over the years, that all went away completely through chelation, is below.
Note that I thought of myself as "healthy" all those years (I would run a half-marathon without any effort and without pushing myself, just for fun), because I considered all my issues as normal part of life and had a brain-block preventing me from thinking about it.
- Jaw bone structure and integrity damaged in four sections - all of them where there had been amalgam fillings. Discovered when a doctor tried to inject something into the mucosa with insignificant pressure he ended up deep inside the jaw bone. He then tested and found the four sections.
- Tinnitus: I had a mild one, I only really noticed it at night. I didn't like it but I thought I could live with it. Well, turns out I won't have to: it is gone.
- Warts on the soles of my feet and on fingers. Their number steadily increased until I started chelating
- From year to year catching the cold was a worse and worse experience. The last 2-3 years (before chelating) when I got a cold in November I'd not get completely rid of it until April/May the next year!!! Needless to say, I don't care about colds any more. If I get one it lasts a day. - More and more times of being tired and needing sleep despite having had enough (sleep). I did LOTS of sports, still not enough. Completely gone, I'm never tired now except for the night!
- Phases of depression, esp. in winter: I seriously considered moving far south because I could not take winter any more. I remembered that as a child I had no issues and enjoyed winter, now I had gotten one of those daylight spectrum lamps to help. Completely gone! I have anxiety attacks, but decreasing in frequency and severity, and that's very different from depression.
- Occasional nose bleeds.
- Cramps. Legs, back, head.
- Digestion. HUGE improvement.
- Candida. A doctor even gave me a systemic anti-fungal medicine (I looked pretty yellow afterwards).
- Skin issues, especially on the head.
- Halitosis.
- BIG veins on my lower arms, ALWAYS.
- Lower urinary system/prostate effects.
- Significant brain improvements, which is subjective and I could elaborate but comment space.
- Speech issues: Occasionally (actually quite often, not a rare event) I'd use completely random words, realizing it only too late. People thought it was quite funny. I don't do that any more, and during the worst parts of my chelation (which I had started with some serious mistakes so that it was quite bad at the beginning) I had even more severe issues, and now also with writing (any text that I wrote, when I read it the next day I saw that often I wrote barely comprehensible sentences that made hardly any sense, but I felt 100% sure about them when I wrote them). All gone (or mostly gone? Well, you see what I'm writing here :-) ).
- Sleep. Both finding it and quality - and dreams, they are so very interesting now! - improved significantly.
- Computer worker issues: "mouse arm" and vision problems.
EDIT: You know guys, based on what exactly do you downvote this report of my clinical experience??? My tinnitus gone and the jaw bone structure damage a lie or what? Or that it healed by itself or was "psychological"?
I had a lot of your symptoms. Did you have the overwhelming urge to pee?
The cramps were hell. Completely random also. Did you also have trouble balancing?
I looked into chelation because I grew up next to a big lead mine. But the doctor talked me out of it, because this topic is mostly covered by pseudoscience. Do you have any recommendations how to not fall in the hypochondriac trap?
Most of the things you are complaining of are symptoms that many, many people have at one time or another. I have had most of them at one time or another.
So you are not particularly special, and should perhaps relax - a lot of these things can be brought on by anxiety.
I never had "anxiety". I never was stressed by life or my circumstances. I lived very comfortably.
I also did mention that I was at a university clinic and had a doctor, who even had actually suspected that I had more and did look for other causes. Do you think that doctor, who was a researcher too, was not capable? I also mentioned he did not have a financial incentive - when I was still searching for a cause after it had escalated and nobody could help I had plenty of doctors trying to sell me useless stuff. I'm not even mad, they did so after doing what they could with their training, if I had a specific problem within their field of expertise I would still go to each of them, just now better knowing how to use them instead of expecting a solution to all problems (just an aside, but we know financial incentives matter - plenty of reports and studies about useless overtreatment).
All those things I mentioned were stable and increasing for over two decades. And then they went away quickly after chelation therapy. They were not even on the radar!
And you seriously propose I suffered from "head stuff"???
Also, doctors look at symptoms as a whole. Sure you can ignore everything I wrote (and even more that only my doctor and me know) and try to refute every single system individually by claiming I must have about a hundred different conditions, one for every little issue. Or, you can accept that there was only one problem to begin with that caused them all.
What exactly is so outrageous about accepting heavy metals as a cause? "There is no safe level of lead" is official mantra, and I found a paper for training health workers on an NIH website saying mercury is an order of magnitude worse. So where exactly is it so unthinkable that that stuff actually does cause problems in the real world, and not just in theoretical medical papers?
After about a year both my doctor and I on the same appointment wanted (and di) to say to one another the same thing. I wanted to ask, because I was aware of the lab test values over time, and he said it before I could ask, that we had reached the end of treatment covered by medical science and the available studies. But he agreed I could continue under his now more passive and more observing guidance if I felt it still helped. It did so for years, and I had signs, not just symptoms, associated with continued use of chelators. That included reactions from within my jaw after chelation and a lot of other stuff, visible. If all of that was "psychological", then there really is no need for doctors any more and they can all retrain as psychologists because nothing is real.
But you know what? It actually really was in my head! mercury is a neurotoxin, so yes, there was definitely an impact. Brain is chemistry though! I'll never understand this "it's just psychological" mindset, which is the real unscientific esoteric quasi-religious stuff as far as I'm concerned.
I did have a hint before that: after a health escalation I suffered - visibly even (mouth) - from Candida. I even was prescribed, as I wrote, a systemic drug, which no doctor would ever subscribe for the "psyche" because that is serious stuff impacting the liver (and as I wrote, I got quite yellow after those two, or was it three?, weeks - but a lot of bowel issues and the feeling in my mouth were just gone). The problem: Candida has a deeper cause. It's immune compromised people. But there was nothing for me, and the only thing I found was heavy metals. So I went to a university clinic and got tested. Fortunately it showed up in the blood and urine tests, which is not a given if you have low-level long-term exposure and have most of the burden intracellular and/or stored away instead of moving around.
But not really figuring out a rhyme or reason. Fortunately at its worst it never seems to last more than a few hours, maybe a day max.
But as many have stated, your mind just moving to other things helps even when it’s bad. Figuring out that it’s possible to cope is the biggest help of coping and getting through the tougher hours/days.
I do hope there is a cure on the horizon.
If it does begin to annoy me I listen to something calming like ocean waves or raindrops falling (on relatively low volume). It does wonders, especially if I notice it while trying to sleep.
Tinnitus is a constant ringing in one or both ears. Constant, as in it is always there. There is no true silence anymore, because the ringing is always there.
There is also no cure, and really no certified treatment. All we can do is distract ourselves with other sounds and try not to focus on it, but it can still be very mentally draining. Without the right mindset, it’s an extremely hopeless and depressing situation.
I only hear my tinnitus when I think about it. Otherwise my mind filters it out.
ie. "Oh, that ringing? Yeah, it's been there for years, I barely notice it anymore."
I wonder what it is about tinnitus that makes it hard to adapt to (or filter out) for some people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSD2DAgaRys
Imagine this noise. Every. Waking. Moment. Repeat that minute 1,440 times. For some, the sound is loud enough to smother conversations; for others, a different frequency, or perhaps more a locomotive roar, or constant crash of ocean waves as though holding a seashell to one's ear.
Imagine trying to fall asleep when night has shushed the ambient sounds of city hubbub, leaving only the ceaseless onslaught of tinnitus for your own private enjoyment.
This doesn't necessarily directly cause depression but, for me, it does make me anxious a lot of the time since I am always on my guard for the next annoyance.
But as this is HN I wanted to share a technical detail: The device used for the stimulation is pretty new and, as all medical devices are, pricey. It is connected to a laptop through USB-C but not only for data, it‘s completely powered through it. Sounds neat, right. But what happens if either by accident or not knowing any better you unplug the cable? Then it dumps all the stored charge through the electrodes into whoever has them on their scalp at the moment. It‘s VERY uncomfortable and I am shocked (hahaha) that a device like this has such a failure mode and that this is even allowed.
At this point, it is likely cost prohibitive to make a proprietary connector that is not USB.
Perhaps the relevant standards body should take these sorts of needs into account for things like USB which are meant to be used universally. The last thing we need is 'medical grade USB' that costs 100x normal USB.
But I agree that for an expensive medical device, shocking its users is unacceptable.
YMMV but always worth a try!
My perception of the problem definitely improved, but I couldn't say for certain if it was the notched music helped or if just doing something while also slowly relaxing and accepting helped my mind adjust to its new reality.
Either way it's unlikely to hurt and might be worth a go.
Have ~10KHz very weak tinitus in left ear, and ~70Hz stronger but still "weak" tinitus in right ear. That combined with feet/legs/hands parasthesia (vibrations mostly, aka mostly no pain). It gets seriously worse during hot summers (reached tinglings and cramps). Ruled "idiopathic" by the docs (MRI scans show nothing "significant") but back and neck seem to be the culprit. Found only one med effective on it, and that only for the first months once the med concentration in the body is "enough": Amitriptyline (dangerous stuff, 2 times I tought it was about to kill me, because it seems my current biology is very sensitive to it). Did stop taking it because of the side effects and worn out effectiveness over time (and like 0 effective during hot summers). Impact, silence is the enemy: Falling asleep happens only when exausted, and intellectual focus is challenging. Usually, I am looking for locations with some some sort of "blank noise". When the parasthesia is too strong, I walk. Basically, only activities which are strong attention attractors are ok. Mindset: Accepted my disability for the rest of my life after years of looking for the causes, and still monitoring any news about it.
I have the equivalent of two jet engines in my ears, including the characteristic phase shifting. Managing it is basically mentally "locking it out", which has the side effect of becoming insensitive to real-world audio stimuli.
So when my SO talks to me when I'm off guard, I only realise that mid-sentence before I "unlock" my perception. The first few words are usually the essence which are lost, so I need to ask her to repeat the first few words.
But as a non-Tinnitus she does not understand, gets annoyed, and starts shouting the whole sentence exaggerated articulated which kinda hurts both my ears an feelings, gets me annoyed because I explained why hundreds of times. Basically ruining the the moment for both of us, especially in public.
Fighting over it isn't worth it, so now I'm more into nodding friendly and hope she doesn't notice that I didn't get what she said, which creates a whole new bunch of problems.
Assuming that you've sat down with her and clearly communicated exactly how you want her to handle situations when your tinnitus makes it hard for you to understand her, if she's still choosing to completely ignore that in favor of shouting and being unreasonable to the point it turns into a fight, that just reflects poorly on her and her willingness to be even minorly sympathetic and accommodating to a loved one's currently incurable medical condition.
I have great hearing. My mother in law is very hard of hearing and it's the same way - unless you're actively engaging in a face to face conversation with her it doesn't 'click' that you're talking to her until mid sentence. It's so just not a big deal - I learned really early (like the first day I met her) that if I want to say something to her I just have to pause and make sure I have her attention first. I couldn't imagine acting like your girlfriend if I forgot to get her attention first.
The only moment I am truly free of tinnitus is losing the fight against falling asleep. Seconds before I slip into a dream state there is silence. Most notable when falling asleep in the passenger seat of a car on a long trip. It's like I'm actually experiencing parts of my brain shutting down.
That was the one and only day I heard silence and it drove me crazy. I constantly made noises to make sure I wasn't completely deaf. The one thing I remember vividly actively hearing was the turning of a door knob. I could hear all the little individual metallic sounds instead of a single generic crunch.
The next day, the ringing was back and has never left despite further ear cleanings. I am 49 now.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6407646/
I have had it since I was a child and I have an anxiety disorder, Klonopin diminishes my tinnitus.
There was no treatment then and there is no widely available treatment now. AFAIK the cause of it is poorly understood and there can hardly be an answer is we don't know what questions to ask.
Do I wish this study leads to one? Absolutely. I would pay an equivalent of a used car to get rid of my tinnitus. Probably not more than that since my case is thankfully rather mild.
I think getting used to it is unfortunately the only way out. For the first few years, I've had occasional panic attacks. Nowadays, I am aware of it in the morning when I wake up, and later only when I stop to check if it's still there (it is).
Circling back to treatments, I do wish that one eventually comes out. My tinnitus has not become worse over the years but I suspect it might once I exit the middle age.
Does anyone else have tinnitus in specific locations?
For me, I swear I am constantly hearing high-pitched screeching, but only in apartments or offices. If I’m outside it goes away — even if it’s very quiet.
- https://trudenta.com/this-simple-trick-may-help-with-tinnitu...
First time I did it, it was profound. I hadn't realized how much I missed complete silence.
Now that I've read that noise cancelling doesn't protect from sound, I'll only use this for sleeping and use actual earplugs in other situations.
The alternative? Take them out and enjoy the rich, sonorous, ever-so-slow hearing loss!
I use acoustic sheep headphones, but I wish there were more options out there.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=tinnitus&filter=pubt.c...
