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.

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.

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).

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.)

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.

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinnitus

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.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patulous_Eustachian_tube

Edit: WHOOPSIE DAISY

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Oh, use a fan based white noise machine (or a loud fan) during sleeping, really drowns it out.

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.

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.

But mostly I don’t. You do really get used to it. It won’t get better, but you will.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

I assume my brain is somehow able to filter it out, unless it’s too tired/busy.

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.

Terrible first 2 weeks, then just kind of faded into the background. Humans are very resilient. Well, I am, I guess :)

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.

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.

Doesn't seem to be a thing?

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.

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.

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.

1. Airpods or ANC

2. WFH ->. Less movement -> stiff muscles around neck and head -> head trasnfer frequencies changing

3. Covid vaccine

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.

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.

It probably doesn’t cause tinnitus, but people grasp at straws about this kind of stuff.

Tinnitus sufferers tend to experience symptoms their entire lives. Do you genuinely think that they’re all walking around continuously constipated for decades?

> 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...

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.

There are limits to dreams.

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.

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.

I wonder how you tell if a ferret is experiencing tinnitus? I did ^F on the paper for ferret but didn't find anything.

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.

Can confirm

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.

And this I can sometimes use to pinpoint my tinnitus tone(s): https://generalfuzz.net/acrn/

Like others pointed a bad night sleep definitely increases the perceived sound.

Also the stress in the shoulders doesn't help.

Wonder if the root cause is inflammation, which might go up with stress, bad sleep, bad diet, etc

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).

Unfortunately I don’t live near a coast so this is something I can regularly tryout.

The surgeon dentist was really surprised by this and could not evoke any similar cases in their practice before mine.

Always had trouble falling asleep though, ever since I was a young sperm.

Since then, I’ve realised that tinnitus is contagious! So I prefer not to talk about it just in case I pass it on.

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.