I have mild tinnitus and the best advice I've ever read on the internet for it is: Stop reading. Don't look up information about tinnitus. Don't think about it. If you happen to notice it, try to distract yourself immediately. There maybe legitimate hearing damage but for the psychological aspect, the more you think about it the worse it becomes. I think I saw a quora answer somewhere where the doctor said "Nobody complains about tinnitus while playing Playstation". And it's very true. Until this post just now, I hadn't thought about it in weeks (months?).
This! Said it before here but also consider than right next to each ear drum is a huge artery. When you run you might hear your heart beating in your ears, but generally we totally tune it out. But it is always there.
Once I realised that I could also tune out tinnitus, I did just that - but a big part of that was just not thinking about it/dwelling on it.
Been nearly 20 years now and tinnitus rarely troubles me, in the way it used to really upset and stress me.
Decades ago I read about NASA's silent room, with the big wood spikes on the walls. All you can hear is your heartbeat and this high pitched whine. NASA figured out the high pitched whine was the nervous system (like, your brain).
I've got some mild tinnitus. I always wonder if it's my brain listening to itself. That little recursive loop is enough to distract me, even if it's not true.
1. Earbuds muffle external sounds, so you'll more likely notice internal sounds, like swallowing or your heartbeat:
2. Earbuds fill your ear canal, and as your ear canal flexes slightly due to your heartbeat, the earbud rubs against the skin inside your ear, and you hear that.
Or further, if you do read stuff about it and start thinking about it, don't sweat it.
You'll eventually stop thinking about it, and life will go on.
When I first started dealing with tinnitus, it sucked. Until I realized it didn't.
Would I rather not have it? Sure. But life is not near as bad as I thought it would be at first, and I'm perfectly fine several years after it started.
"Don't sweat it" is the most important thing, I've found, especially with tinnitus.
As with a number of things, I've found I can actually move the needle when I give myself grace to fail, as long as I can genuinely try again and resolve to do better. A recent example being stopping telling myself I'm tired in the morning. Such a bad habit that self perpetuated. I was always feeling tired, in part, because I was telling myself I was tired.
Chewing fingernails on the other hand, damn... that hasn't worked so far because I give myself grace, but never really resolve to do better. Someday I'll figure that out.
Re fingernails: I bought keep a set of sharp fingernail clippers at my work desk. Any time I notice my fingernails being more than tiny, I neatly trim them. It turns out I mainly just couldn't abide having long fingernails. When I stopped having them, I stopped reflexively nipping at them.
"Stop'n'grow" is a famous example product. Doesn't work for me, I'm apparently that determined to chew them, and clearly not bothered to the point of actually breaking that habit! I think part of the problem is, by the time I get the taste, I've cut the nail enough that I can't just leave it. Maybe I need to do both that kind of stuff, and ensure I have nail trimmers near to hand :D
When I first started experiencing tinnitus, it was a nightmare. I'm a naturally anxious, catastrophizing person. All the reading I did about it made it so, so much worse, both in terms of perceived severity of symptoms and psychological impact. It had a profound effect on my life. I genuinely had intrusive, obsessive "I'll never be happy again" type thoughts.
A few years later, it has basically zero impact on my life. I am not aware of it 99.9% of the time, and when I am aware of it, I don't go down the same psychological rabbit holes, and I quickly and reliably move out of awareness of it.
Obviously, everyone's experiences and particular symptoms are different. But I think it's really, really important to spread the message that it really can be a mild, almost inconsequential condition, for many people - even anxious, dare-I-say neurotic people.
There was no single silver-bullet treatment path for me, but a combination of very normal, mundane things like therapy, relaxation (massage, hot baths, exercise) and limited use of safe levels of white noise helped me. Perhaps the biggest thing was shrinking my time horizon from "how can I live the rest of my life like this?" to "how can I enjoy today as best as I can?"
The internet is full of horror stories from people, often written during their darkest moments, about how awful it can be. I could easily have written a hopeless, dark, scary account of my symptoms when I was at my lowest points.
Reading such accounts is of absolutely no utility to anyone. If anyone is struggling with this condition, I highly advise you to avoid reading such material at all costs. Try to maintain an awareness of the millions upon millions of people for whom tinnitus is a mild, transitory condition they almost never think about (and, as a consequence, never write about their experiences on the internet)
I have crazy tight traps & neck. I have started a routine of stretching and dead hangs and I'm interested to see what that does for my tinnitus. Like the poster above. I just try not to think about it. TBH this thread reminded me I had it XD.
Meditation helped me shift from resistance to acceptance. When it's quiet and still in the room and I hear The Whine, I greet it. "Hi there, little Eeeeeee!" For me, that demotes it to an innocuous background sensation no worse, or even different, than realizing that oh, my foot is pushing against the floor. Fighting it is futile. Accepting it let me stop caring about it.
Of course I don't claim that's the universal fix for everyone. It sure helped me.
I have a very mild intermittent tinnitus and I found this link (which I found on HN at some point), which definitely gave an instant (albeit temporary) relief:
I also had some other people give feedback that it helped them, so doing a little bit of cheat replying under the top post, in a hope it is useful for some. (I have absolutely no relationship with the target of the link, and I saw there were several paid apps that basically used the same algorithm)
A little anecdata for myself: I have had a mildly higher blood pressure and pushing it down to accepted limits by diet and ~daily 6km running seems to have reduced the incidence - but this is just a piece of personal made data, so FWIW.
I have mild tinnitus in one ear, and also mild/moderate hearing loss in the same ear. The way my ENT explained it, it's like the nervous system trying to compensate for lack of stiumlation. I've noticed when I wear my hearing aid, I do not notice the ringing very much. I would encourage anybody with tinnitus to get their hearing checked because you might benefit from a hearing aid.
Mercifully my tinnitus only happens when I have eustachian tube congestion. I have elaborate jaw exercises that open things up enough to stop it, and for a while before and then after I moved I had other daily rituals to keep my sinuses clear (I'll spare you the more medical options but it included daily mucinex, spicy food and hot tea to open up the sinuses and keep them open).
Eventually my body got used to the local pollen, thank god. I haven't needed chemicals or lavage for months.
Got mild tinnitus in 2016 after an ear infection, and for about 1 year I was really bummed out about it. Then I guess I learnt to ignore it and sort of "forgot" about it. Now if I am reminded about it (thank you :) ), I can 'concentrate' on it and realise it's still there in some capacity, but otherwise I go on about my day no problem and don't think about it.
Is this true for other things? I have started getting motion sick from some video games and noticed that it becomes worse if I am thinking/worrying about it.
Last bad sickness hit was from Sable and Anti Chamber. There are few other indie games that effect me similarly. I thought it's lack of textures or crosshair in indie games, or may be it's the camera movement or both, not sure. But now, when playing first person games, i find myself worrying if it will make me sick. More I think, more I feel it. Yesterday I felt sick after playing Alien Isolation for the first time. It had textures, a crosshair, but camera was janky which made me worried and more I thought about it, worse it got and I end up deleting the game.
You may have tried this already, but plain old Dramamine completely prevents screen-related motion sickness for me (as long as I give it 20-30 minutes to kick in). Without it I get queasy from VR in like five minutes.
Also, ironically, I just played Alien Isolation, and the camera drove me crazy at first but stopped being a problem altogether after a few hours of gameplay.
Supported by my experience too. My tinnitus is very real, but when I discovered just how much of a psychological component was there, it became more manageable. Little by little I thought I was losing my hearing until I had it checked—it was perfect. The audiologist helped me understand that my constant "tuning in" to the tinnitus was creating the perception that my hearing was being harmed by loud noises and leaving a high-frequency sound in its place. Which is there, but when ignored, it largely disappears.
I've got a strong pulsatile tinnitus¹, which means I can hear a strong whooshing sound (like wind) matched to the rhythm of my heartbeat. It's in my right ear and lasts all day, all night, day in and day out for the last three or four years. When I tell people about it, I like to compare it to the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Tell-Tale Heart," where the narrator hears the heartbeat of a person he murdered coming from beneath the floorboards, and it grows louder and louder. Then I laugh it off and say "at least I'm not that crazy!"
Jokes aside, my tinnitus used to bother me horribly. It used to be all I could focus on, not just because it's loud and distracting at times, but because it triggered a severe case of health anxiety². I went through my regular GP, who referred me to an otolaryngologist and audiologist; that person found nothing physically wrong with my ear (which is usually the case for tinnitus) and referred me for an MRI; the MRI threw a big wrench in the works by discovering a brain tumor which turned out to be benign – a simple pituitary tumor which I just need to keep an eye on every few years. But again, still not the cause of the tinnitus.
Anyway, long story short, no cause was ever found for me suddenly developing this pulsatile tinnitus nearly overnight. It took a couple months to adapt to the new, constant sound in my ear, but I hardly notice it anymore unless I'm straining to hear something³. When I'm focusing on something like playing a video game, watching tv or listening to an audiobook, I don't notice the tinnitus at all. If the sound really starts to bug me, I've saved some brown noise tracks on YouTube that are particularly effective at drowning out the frequency of the whooshing sound.
¹ I also have the "regular", high-pitched whistling tinnitus, but I've had that most of my life.
² I've always had a health anxiety, learned behavior from my mother. This post makes me sound like a basket case, but I promise I'm a fully functional adult and these ailments I'm describing are trifles at the moment!
³ My wife and I have started to get into birding, so it does interfere a bit with my ability to hear some birds. More specifically, it interferes with my ability to locate where they are, I can't quite figure out if they're above me or behind me sometimes.
I'm very much the same. This kind of feels like a tree falling in the woods thing. I cannot really tell you my tinnitus actually goes away. Just that 99% of the time I'm not experiencing any evidence of it existing. Whether it's gone or I've just entirely tuned it out... who cares?
Right now I hear it because we're talking about it. In five minutes when I'm back to thinking about work, it will disappear again until the next time I randomly think about it.
Your brain is constantly sensing things that you don't perceive because it is quickly filtered out. My guess is that tinnitus, at least at low levels, works much the same. So the more you think about it, the more you focus on perceiving in, the less your brain will automatically filter out the mild sensation, thus the worse it gets.
The best advice I ever heard was just to massage the back of your head and neck. One relatively common cause of it is muscle tension back there and a quick massage often makes it go away like magic.
I don't think that works for everyone, but it's such a simple thing to try that anyone suffering should see if it works for them.
"Ganbare!" doesn't make for particularly good advocacy though. It's a condition that by itself isn't life threatening, can be linked to lifestyle choices, and mostly doesn't affect children, so no halo effect.
That's pretty much it. It's like the nose in your visual area. It's always there but normally you don't see it. Focus on everything else. Let it be there but focus on something.
Thanks. Thanks a lot. Now I see my nose. But I guess it’s like being conscious of breathing to where you feel like you have to manually inhale and exhale; it eventually goes back to automatic.
Sadly, I have found this to be true for many things. Not dismissing any real, physical aspect, but there's always a psychological aspect that comes into play as well.
In this thread (and probably others): People who either aren't aware or don't care that some people actually suffer from tinnitus. Occasionally i get a burst of it where it is physically painful, and i wince, tears come to my eyes. [0]
"just don't think about it, bro"
lol - they prescribe opiates for this condition.
noise machines are linked to making it worse. Humans may not be used to "silence" or whatever people are claiming in here, but we're also not used to broad-spectrum noise, either. Nature doesn't sound like a fan, or any other sort of "noise" except for, possibly, a few dBa around the floor of all noise due to echoes and reflections. Do you all ever go outside of the cities?
[0] i consider mine mild, i always know when i'm gunna suffer after a noise, my brain just knows the SPL that will trigger it in a few hours, so i generally try to be asleep before it kicks in. I do get the waves of tinnitus that i think most people say is "mild", it comes and goes; and yeah, that is easy to "ignore". I have friends with it that avoid certain foods and drinks (like red wine and whisky), where a bout of tinnitus escalates into a migraine headache, or worse, a cluster headache.
> Nobody complains about tinnitus while playing Playstation
As a long time sufferer, I want to support the general sentiment of this post, and I hope it helps someone who finds this that is currently suffering. My core message is that managing your psychological response to your condition matters immensely. I've noticed over the years that my perception of my tinnitus gets worse when my stress levels are high, even if for unrelated reasons. For example, reading about this post might remind me of it when I wasn't thinking about it for a long while. And suddenly this might bring back unpleasant feelings I have about it and it might suddenly feel very loud and overpowering when half an hour ago I wasn't even aware of it. But then an hour or two later I'll catch myself having a normal, quiet, unimpeded conversation with someone, which can feel like a contradiction.
Unmanaged, this kind of thing can turn into an unchecked, self reinforcing doom loop that's not always necessary or helpful. As with anxiety (another long term problem I manage), one unhelpful thing doctors might say when you first get tinnitus is that it doesn't go away - this is one of those technically true statements that patients can misinterpret. The reality is that just like anxiety, in many cases there's plenty reason for hope: it's often quite possible to improve quality of life that's mostly the same as it was before. It's still there if you check, and time to time you need to manage it, but also you might go days and weeks without even noticing, living a perfectly normal and happy life rather than a miserable existence.
On the other hand, leaving your primary care doctor with "yup, it's tinnitus" (my interpretation at the time: you're fucked for life, good luck) can lead to deep feelings of despair, panic, lack of sleep, over-sensitivity to noise of any kind even within normal thresholds, and many more terrible things. And "just ignore it, you'll be fine" is trite advice that can be difficult to achieve without help, like telling someone to ignore a siren in the next room. And it might be difficult for others to understand how debilitating it can be. But slowly and step by step it's possible to get there.
Sadly compassionate and competent care for tinnitus, even among audiology specialists, is few and far between and patients are left to suffer and / or try to figure stuff out on their own, which like a hypochondriac on webmd, can leave you feeling even worse. Luckily it is more possible to find tinnitus specific care these days and I encourage you to find a clinic that does this if you can - it's worth traveling for IMHO. There's a cocktail of potential causes that indicate different treaments so take this with a grain of salt but what worked for me was a combination of various things first to manage my current state and give me some relief during my initial crisis state (psychological help with how to deal with the reality of your condition, various things to help mask it and allow me to get normal sleep), clearing out wax (it's hilariously gross and also wild how it can affect your hearing perception and tinnitus in the most unexpected ways), common sense non-doomer information on the nature of the disease, what to do next and how to slowly transition to focusing on normal life ("playing playstation"): doing things with people, being outside, working out, focusing on your interests, as opposed to catastrophizing at home in bed. This feels like a non-cure cure but the results for me are night and day - if it's a placebo, I'll take it. I still have trouble with it time to time, but lead a normal happy life most days.
That aside, while we don't have the technology to make it fully go away yet, there have been a lot of recent changes and advances in our understanding of how it works which might lead to new therapies. Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor and might be butchering this so take this with a grain of salt: There seem to now be competing theories on the exact causes e.g. arguments about whether it's the the little hairs in the ear are sending no signal or incorrect signals. Also a recent understanding that you can have a seemingly unaffected hearing AND a normal audiogram but still have tinnitus is leading people to question if it's a different type of damage (different, larger hairs) that cause it which might mean different therapies. There's promising new treatments like Lenire which seem to be low risk and whose early study results seem to be much more promising than earlier versions of similar ideas (haven't tried it). I wouldn't be shocked if we eventually got much much more in our lifetimes.
TLDR: of course you'd rather not have it - please do be careful in protecting your hearing as much as possible. But if you're at the point where you do have it, just take a bit of solace maybe that it's not always a terrible prognosis and more improvement might be possible than you think. And the psychology and managing my emotional perception of it was very helpful for me. I hope this helps you, dear reader.
I can't comment on how mainstream of a scientific opinion his response is, but I know it certainly reframed the way I thought about my own tinnitus and inspired my original comment, including the Playstation bit. That was a lightbulb moment for me. "Wow, he's right, I NEVER think about tinnitus when I'm otherwise engaged mentally..."
