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Sorry to hear. You’re not alone and I’m constantly surprised to learn how many people I know are dealing with hearing concerns once I started talking about mine more. My note to younger self is similar: get great earplugs and use them diligently.
> Sorry to hear. Phrasing…
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It's been with me for 20+ years now, originally triggered by a concert in Paradiso in Amsterdam that I got free tickets to on account of repairing a bunch of cabling under the stage. The next day there was a really loud buzz on top of everything else that only slowly went away. After that it periodically recurred, usually right after exposure to some loud noise (especially: grinder, that one does it every time). I do…
Do you have an audiologist regularly look at your ears? Obstruction and buildup can make tinnitus worse. I find I really should wear earplugs way more often than I think. Putting dishes away, shoveling snow, scraping ice, even just running a sink. For everyday wear I cut down cheap foam plugs to ~half length (and reduce the depth of insertion), and I also wash them beforehand/periodically with plant-based soap. This…
I did in the past, haven't in years so thank you for the reminder, I really should do that. I think in part it is because I've simply given up on ever seeing an improvement, just a very slow rearguard fight.
I can't say I buy that. I've got tinnitus. Also sometimes my brain has a loss of input as I can't see, hear of feel something and it's nothing like tinnitus.
It seems more likely to me that it's a problem with the gizmo that converts mechanical movement into electrical impulses. It consists of a string like thing, the tip link, between two hairs that pulls on an ion channel in a nerve cell wall to let ions in and trigger the nerve to give a sound signal. (pic here, fig 1 if you scroll down https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674%2809%2901170-2)
When you get an over loud sound it probably yanks that thing too hard leaving the ion channel stuck open some how or something along those lines.
The whole thing is tiny - the tip link is about 150nm long. Another pic here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2921850/ fig 1)
I developed tinnitus during a bout of COVID last week. On about the third day I had an earache in one ear. Earache went away after about a day but now I have pretty strong tinnitus in that ear. COVID symptoms long gone now but tinnitus remains. 'Volume' is negligible when I wake up but increases over the day. I still feel some 'pressure' in that ear (maybe residual sinus infection?) so I'm hoping it will heal on its…
My tinnitus started days after my first covid shot. Plenty of people have reported tinnitus after covid or the shots. Mine is very mild but it's still annoying.
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Yeah, I also use it for that. I've asked people the question, "can you click your ears"? Of course, they don't understand me, because it's such a vague question. I started asking, "can you relieve your ear pressure without moving anything else", and most people answer no. One person who dived, answered "yes, of course!" like it's something all people can.
I can do that, as well, and it has a practical purpose when going hiking in the mountains or scuba diving. But nobody I've talked to about it understand what I mean, and I can't even explain what the technique is; I'm tensing of some muscles, certainly, but I can't explain how and which ones they are.
Badly fitting earbuds (Samsung Galaxy Buds) gave me tinnitus in one ear. I still am not sure how that's possible, but wearing them for more than 30mn was hurting my right ear, tinnitus appeared shortly after and kept getting worse. Once I stopped using the buds, the pain went away and the tinnitus decreased, but it's still there one year later.
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Right. I can do it too - I can make them click/crunch and roar - which I'm sure is due to the sound muscles make when tensed. Squeeze your fist and hold it up to your ear. It's audible.
Click is from pressure gradient when opening/tightening the eustachian tube. If I switch to open I can hear myself breathing. Partially covering the outer ear makes the flow of blood audible. That's not tinnitus-related.
Hearing a crackling sound when you flex your ears is quite common. This noise typically results from the movement of small muscles around your ear, particularly the tensor tympani muscle in your middle ear. These muscles contract to dampen certain sounds, like chewing, but can also be voluntarily or involuntarily activated when you move your ears. This action can cause a vibration or movement of the eardrum, leading to the crackling sound. It's usually harmless, but if you experience pain, discomfort, or any other symptoms, it's advisable to consult a healthcare professional.
I have tinnitus, a 4khz tone on both ears, one more than the other. I have hearing loss at high frequencies (the curve of my hearing tests drops abruptively right around 4khz). The side with the worst hearing is also the one with worse tinnitus. My loss probably comes from many many ear infections as a child (plus hearing to loud music on a basement, and just bad genetics).
Things that make my tinnitus worse:
- Basically, any kind of "hearing effort" stresses me out and makes my tinnitus worse (busy places, bars, parties, etc. are the worse, but even music on my headsets, which I enjoy, make it worse). Maybe this puts some doubts on the "phantom limb" theory?
- Stress
- Not sleeping well
- After doing exercise. I play sports, run and lift light weights. After any of these exercises, it gets a bit worse
- Driving a car: the humming noise of car drive is probably the worse for me
- If I clinch my jaws (mimicking a strong bite) I hear another, surprisingly similar tone... However, I feel like it's a different thing, not related.
I wished I had a similar list of things that lessen it... I don't :-) However: I started using prescription hearing aids. And although they don't really help with tinnitus directly, I do feel much better: general noise doesn't bother me as much, and of course I hear better :-).
Recommendation: if you have some hearing loss, don't wait to use a hearing aid, just like you don't wait to wear glasses. They are expensive, but worth it. And no, they are not just simple "earbuds".
Confession: I play the drums, although very occasionally. I have no proof but I'm sure I had hearing loss way before I started playing. Playing my drums of course makes my tinnitus worse: probably due to the combination of the sound + "exercise".
I don’t know if this is a clue, but I can do muscle movements in my head/face/jaw to make the tinnitus worse (only as I make the movements, immediately reverting back to “normal” tinnitus as soon as I relax). Some examples: - jutting my jaw forwards - moving my ears back with my face muscles - pushing downward on the top of my head with my hands Another possible clue: this has been true since I can remember — even as…
Not everyone's nervous system works this way but for a significant portion of the population there is the capacity of the nerves to refer pain to other parts of the body, whether in the nerves themselves or signalling in the brain region itself cascading or both.
There also seems to be a lack of understanding or consideration that merely normal pressures on nerves, with subtle levels of additional pressure, will actually cause a pain signal or sensitization of that nerve line (either or both directions) to occur.
What you state could be a clue to pain somewhere in your body. It could be tooth pain, it could be jaw pain, it could be bite-alignment pain, e.g. where your jaw position and bite with teeth is causing pressure on nerves that it doesn't expect or want.
It could also instead be a hypersensitivity to sound you have, and so those nerve line(s) are amped up - so then anything connected or in close proximity to it will then
From my experience with pain, 99.999% of doctors have no real understanding of pain, and there's a whole body of work waiting to be written and to start being taught closer to properly; and the rest of them still only have a fairly niche but not holistic understanding.
There is a book called "Hearing Equals Behaviour: Updated and Expanded" that dives into a sound therapy developed 70+ years ago in France, called Berard AIT [Auditory Integration Training], for where you can do a non-standard audiogram to check for imbalances in the hearing - for which at certain frequencies you can with accuracy predict a set of behaviours that person will likely have. If such imbalances show up in these special audiograms then it's either a sign of damage or a sign of how the brain is processing audio-sensory signals, and which may been interfered with - proper development disrupted - if say you had painful ear infections as a child who's brain is rapidly developing, and now where your brain is abnormally associating sound as pain. Berard AIT can get rid of tinnitus, depending on its cause, essentially giving the brain an opportunity to recalibrate.
Did you ever have ear infections as a child, and do you remember if they were painful at all?