Ask HN: Anyone else suffering from tinnitus?

I had awoken one morning 6 months ago and I noticed a high pitched sound seemingly from my right ear. Over the next few days it increased in intensity. Causing much disruption to my life. The doctors could not fix it. Hearing tests indicated no hearing loss. I recently had a cold where congestion in my right ear exacerbated the tinnitus a week ago just as I was "habituating" (as they say) to it.

I grew up in the generation with iPod's. So I'm wondering if I am now paying for it.

Tinnitus has disrupted my life significantly and impacted my sleep/focus two key things needed to do my job effectively as a a software engineer. I'm now on antidepressants and cannot go to sleep without a noise maker. I'm concerned about the future when/if I loose hearing in old age if I will be able to tolerate it.

Anyone else have this issue? Anyone know of any clinical trials that I could join?

Yes, your earphone and earbud usage may have a lot to do with this. But, so can hypertension, jaw clenching, antibiotic use and in my case, going to see the original "Who" line up (with Keith Moon) at the glasgow Apollo in the seventies.

There's an electrostimulation trial I believe. Non-nvasive

https://www.lenire.com/what-is-lenire/#:~:text=Lenire%20is%2....

I recommend white/brown noise, natural sounds and CBT. Mine is a constant companion, made worse by being reminded about it gods curse you!

I had increasing tinnitus. Switching to bone conduction headphones really, really helped. Worth a try.

Only downside is they're not great for music (bass notes get muddled)

Yeah, I have Ménière's, so I also have tinnitus. An important part of my own habituation is that I quit paying attention to all pop science news about it, including upcoming treatments, prosthetics, and clinical trials.

If at some future time an actually effective treatment, prosthesis, or medication is developed, it will hardly be possible to hide from the news. Until that point knowing about all the things that were tried and didn't work doesn't really help me.

Also, hopefully this might help someone: For playing my ambient sounds on loop, I use an old first gen Raspberry Pi with a set of USB powered speakers running mpg123 (a command line audio app) which I edited into the RPi's rc.local script (run on boot) and yt-dlp (YouTube download and transcoding).

There are literally tens of thousands of different audio ambience tracks on services like Spotify and YouTube of every possible description. It's astounding really. So occasionally I ssh in to the RPi, grab some track off of YouTube, rip it to mp3, and then play it for a while. Otherwise it plays the same heavy surf track I've been listening to for over a decade. I know every moment of that track and there's something weirdly comforting to that.

Right now I am listening to "Rain on Tent" and on my laptop is some sort of upbeat morning Jazz cafe thing which is probably not entirely man made.

Try saying

"I reject that"

With "that" referring to the tinnitus.