I've got tinnitus, 38 male.

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.

I'll save you about 30 ad views:

> 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.

As somebody with tinnitus, forgive me, this seemed instinctively obvious. A very bad night of sleep raises the volume of the tinnitus substantially. Stress does the same.

I also have been suffering from tinnitus a little over a year now. It definitely has impacted my sleep, especially my mornings. It's the first thing I think about when I wake up.

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...

For people suffering from tinnitus, here is a technique that greatly helped me:

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.

I thought it was raining on our trip to venice: "you hear that dear, quite nasty rain". She looked at me puzzled, but hadn't noticed what I really heard. The next day was obvious... This now 15+ years ago. Some days it is bad, some days I hardly notice. It does not affect me that much: still hear near pitch perfect (work on music stuff as hobby), mostly a consistent hiss which can get annoying sometimes as it can distracts, mostly can ignore it. Some people can't, maybe lucky? Edit: Local doctor just once told me:just listen to music to drown it out, don't over do.... Keep enjoying it. never seeked further help.

The opening sentence “Those who have never endured the relentless ringing of tinnitus can only dream of the torment” does not mean what they think it means. Unless this is a very niche kink.

I have, I think, probably the most benign tinnitus I could imagine.

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.

Yes!! Sometimes it's much worse when either I don't get a full night's sleep or I wake up from a short nap. The latter is almost guaranteed to make it really bad.

> researchers found that ferrets that developed more severe tinnitus also showed disrupted sleep.

Hold up. How do we know when ferrets have tinnitus???

Got mine after my first Acid trip (still don't know if it was real acid). Its not debilitating for me, just annoying. So yeah, be careful out there folks. The Acid trip was very cerebral though and I consider it to be an important experience in my life so I am kind of on the fence that it might have been worth the trade off....

I’m sitting in a restaurant and didn’t notice the ringing until I read this article… but it is there. Usually I only really consciously notice it while falling asleep, never really thought anything of it.

I’ve been using my tinnitus to evaluate whether I got enough sleep or when I’ve become tired for years, so it’s nice to randomly trip over validation here that the link is universal to and not just a hyperlocal mutation. Thanks for posting this.

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.

>the ferrets that developed tinnitus showed overly responsive brain activity to sound

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 solved mine by chronically exposing myself to very low noise during sleep - wearing good earplugs in an already silent room. To the point where you can hear your eyeballs move etc. I guess this may be where the link to good sleep comes from, which implies a quiet sleeping environment

For me it's a strange experience: I notice it almost only when ready to sleep, by day even if I focus to check if I can hear it I don't. And when I'm hearing it at about bedtime, I start yawning continuously and very "strongly" because after some tries, it disappears. Do someone has an explanation to this?

I first got it in 2015 after playing Fallout 4 almost nonstop for the entire weekend. The game ran poorly and the low stuttery fps caused a massive migraine in my head. I took Tylenol and went to sleep and woke up with it ringing in one of my ears which eventually moved to both. The doctors were pretty useless and said they couldn't see anything wrong and to just live with it.

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.

This sometimes makes my tinnitus go away temporarily: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteBurstsNoiseGenerator....

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

In my 20s and 30s, I used to turn on the TV to cover up my tinnitus so I could fall asleep. The TV probably didn't help the quality of my sleep, so maybe that's why my tinnitus got progressively worse (especially in my right ear). Once I got a TV with a sleep timer, I would set it so the TV wouldn't be on all night.

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).

I've heard a scientist say tinnitus also happens after waking up from a nap, not from a night's sleep

Can confirm

I've had it for nearly 20 years, and I know it came from an incident shooting firearms with not enough (none) protection. Most days I don't think about it anymore. However if I am tired or stressed, it seems to turn up to 11. I've read many people get depressed or they can't get over it, luckily I seem to deal with it alright, but wouldn't wish it on anyone. Protect your hearing!

Sugar or alcohol kicks mine into high gear.

The best thing I did to help with my tinnitus what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. If you perceive the sound as something dangerous than it bothers you way more.

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

Also the stress in the shoulders doesn't help.

I have a mild case of tunnitus, and I can only blame myself. When a rock venue was packed, I gravitated to the area right in front of the speakers - where I also always had a good view of the band.

One thing I recently realised is that sticking my head under water makes my tinnitus basically disappear. At least I don’t “hear” it that intensely.

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

I got tinnitus from a failing Toshiba notebook hard drive. I can not sleep without masking noises. A real washing machine or dishwasher is S-tier, but more often than not the C-tier fallback has to be monotone Youtube autoplay lectures.

Personal anecdote: removing a lower wisdom tooth that was close to the jaw nerve nearly cured my tinnitus back in the day.

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

What's interesting for me is my tinnitus is off when I wake up, and then all of the sudden it turns on. Very weird.

A friend of mine who had it at night and who is not a smoker realized that smoking a cigarette would calm her tinnitus and allow her to sleep. Anyone had a similar experience with cigarette and/or nicotin ?

Sleep is one of the only things I’ve found can actually improve the tinnitus I’ve had for almost 3 years. Every other tactic I have is essentially avoiding making it worse.

Mine started whilst I was skateboarding with in ear headphones in listening to slayer full volume, had a big slam with headphones in, left side of head hit the floor and had a loud ringing in my ears ever since.

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

Just reading the title made my tinnitus come back.

Whenever I get less sleep, tinnitus gets really bad.

I don't have tinnitus (as in "chronic tinnitus") but sometimes I hear it for a few minutes after I have a poor night of sleep...

And sleep is related to air way/jaw/tongue/bite issues which causes mouth breathing and sleep apenia. Get it checked out by your dentist

I've long suspected that (at least my own) tinnitus was a neurological phenomenon, seeing how it's always been with me at various "levels of presence", from imperceptible to so loud I can't hear anything else, I've always felt it as an "inner sound".. Had multiple hearing tests, and nothing in particular showed up. It's also weird because it changes somewhat in frequency, both down to frequencies my 40 year old ears can register and up beyond what I can actually hear when doing a test..

But especially the coming and going and how it seems affected to level of tiredness or amount of sleep I got.. Of course, reading the article made me aware of it and now it's loud than before..

I've had strong symptoms of adhd my whole life, but never thought much of it (except as a lack of self dicipline and general failure of a broken robot to impersonate a real human), but as demands on my performance rose to real-adult levels with a young child and duties beyond not dying, I decided to tell the doc how it had generally felt like to be myself, at which point I was referred to someone with a specialty in broken brains, and we quickly agreed that while I wasn't going to become normal, certain stimulants at least provided me with sufficient energy to carry out most of the functions expected by an adult member of society with actual responsibilities.

And so, over the past.. more than a year, I've gotten to experience a little bit of everything as my brain gets to oscillate between being slightly oversaturated to absolutely drained of certain neurotransmitters in a way that at the same time feels slightly unsustainable and the only alternative where I get to not be absolutely miserable all the time.

The point of that story, being, these "phantom precepts", fits the bill somewhat well. I've always had a very conscious experience of common neurological phenomenon which are naturally present but largely-unnoticed by many (auras, visual snow, floaters, phosphenes, tinnitus, afterimages) so I'm probably a bit one the sensitive side, and, the medication seems to have a quite interesting effect on these as well, among them, I noticed the ABSENCE of noticing my clothes touching my skin.. I am no longer acutely aware of the cooling sensation of inhaling air through my nose, and I rarely hear the beat of my heart in my ears.. Maybe the weirdest effect is on saccades, in a conversation, looking from one person to the next seems to be as instant as before, but the blur of my eyes moving between points of focus is gone, it's kind of jarring, just poof, one picture, then another.. nothing in between.

I now seem to be able to influence my attention somewhat, that is, to do whatever that cognitive regulation is called, so that my focus shifts to a subject I need to do but have no interest in doing (oh wait, that's why I got the medication), but it does make me wonder, if tinnitus is just one of the more obvious (and therefore common) neurological processes that "pokes through" maybe perception of sound and attention (and maybe therefore also conscious experience of sound) have evolved to be more strongly linked (because if you notice the predator sneaking up on you, you get to not be eaten).

Maybe this stronger link is why tinnitus is so obvious, and maybe sleep is instrumental in regulating consciousness, so if consciousness is differently regulated, or less regulated, maybe it's easier for the phenomenon to "seep through".

I remember reading somewhere a Doctor found a way to 'cure' ringing in the ears temporarily for almost a year in some people by doing something with a tuning-fork.

But after that article I heard nothing more. I just looked it up and seems it may not be a reliable method.