About 95% of the time, I can fairly easily just tune it out and it's no different than any other background noise. Living in NYC helps, there's a fair amount of constant background noise even in the best of times. I've found that finding 10-hour videos on YouTube of TV static at a low volume can be helpful for the remaining 5%.

Still I would really prefer it wasn't there. The ringing in my left ear is still annoying, and I'm only in my mid 30's, so assuming an average lifespan I have anywhere from 40-60 years left to enjoy this constant ringing.

I'll play with this thing to see if it helps.

The doctors at urgent care erroneously diagnosed the problem as dehydration as a result of my telling them I had played tennis earlier before the incident. They sent me home with instructions to drink lots of water. After waiting another 48 hours completely unable to hear or even stand up, I went back to the urgent care. This time, they diagnosed it as an ear infection and gave me antibiotics. Over the next two weeks, my balance slowly returned, but what little hearing I still had slowly deteriorated further. About a month after it started, I finally was referred to an audiologist that concluded that I was completely deaf in my left ear, possibly due to a viral infection, but there isn't any way to know for sure the cause. Had it been treated with steroids immediately, it might have saved my hearing.

I am now 40 years old and have lived with being single sided deaf for half my life. Initially I didn't think much of it. I've slowly realized it has had a profound impact on my personality and sense of identity. I am much less social due to the difficulty I have hearing in group settings. Conversations are frustrating because it takes so much effort to hear the other person properly. I am reluctant to tell people about my condition because I don't want to be seen as handicapped in any way. Usually by the time I do end up telling someone, they say they had already figured as much.

Tinnitus is a major daily issue as well. I can’t seem to understand how this website helps though.

If you're suffering from tinnitus, remember, at least you're not bald and 5'2" tall.

Honestly, I never felt particularly negative about it.

I guess if you never know what true silence sounds like, you never know what you are missing.

The fans don’t totally block out the tinnitus, but they sorta act as an undistracting distraction.

https://treblehealth.com/tapping-technique-for-temporary-tin...

Neuromodulator certainly masks my tinnitus, but doesn’t reduce it. Sometimes I feel like it’s a little worse when I turn off the sound.

Mynoise.net is great though. The speech jammer is awesome in noisy places, and layering noise and thunderstorms helps me work. I’m a happy subscriber.

apparently the phenomenon is called residual inhibition. If only there was a way to make this work permanently...

I was thinking that maybe I cough something during my travels so I went to see a few specialists but they found nothing.

What I understand now is that the cause is probably all the vipassana meditation I did and some psychedelics I experimented with during my travel which opened some filters I had in my mind blocking sensor noise. It's the most plausible explanation for me.

The noise was probably always there, or maybe it got louder when I become older, but I never noticed it until it became disturbing.

A decade later the noise is still there, all the time, but it's not an issue at all anymore. It's not louder than before, and I have no negative feelings associated with it. I made peace with it and I can now easily ignore it, or to be more accurate, I can live with it and it'll disappear on its own after a short time until I put my attention back to it (voluntary or not).

As I'm writing this in a quiet room it's very loud, but that's fine, it just sensor noise. Soon enough I'll stop hearing it if I don't focus on it.

I hope reading this can help. I wish I had someone back then telling me that it would turn out okay to just accept it after doing some medical checks.

If you have tinnitus, it’s worth a try to massage or work on relaxing those areas.

First and foremost, ignore it. When you find yourself listening to it, distract yourself and immediately move on.

Secondly, add more white noise into your environment. The best approach I find is just opening a window or adding a little fan or water feature to your desk. White noise generators don’t work as well for me, but they can help in a pinch.

I believe that our modern day indoor environments are honestly just too unnaturally quiet anyway.

I’m not joking when I say that the only time I really get annoyed by my tinnitus is when the monthly “cure” for it gets posted on HN. ;-)

Lots of people giving good feedback on it, though. What exactly is it about this site that works for other people?

I'm really paranoid about giving them tinnitus. I am just back from holiday with extended family, I mentioned to my brother that the white noise he is using with his kids is extremely loud, he's using a phone app. To the point my daughter moved rooms out of his kids room. Google ai agrees with me that hearing damage is definitely a risk. I mentioned this to him and it went down really badly. I'll not mention it again.

It's like trying to put out fire by lighting more fire, what am I missing?

[0]:https://idiallo.com/byte-size/nightmare-on-ocean-street

I think actually stimulating the parts of your hearing that match the tinnitus is what helps. That's why this white noise thing works. But, also, listening to music or watching movies with the Airpods Pro (after configuring) -- I assume -- does something similar.

Mine was ear wax. I went to an ENT doctor for an unrelated issue, he pulled a big plug of wax out of my ear, and my tinnitus (which was quite bad and had a very sudden onset) totally disappeared.

If you have it, go get a doctor to look in your ear before you give up and decide to try to live with it.

it's not too bad, only one ear and it comes and goes pretty quickly.

For me the COVID correlation is 100%, but I haven't found too much literature about it and wonder if anyone experienced it as well

https://www.auricleinc.com/joinourmission

I've just downloaded this audio track with yt-dlp, placed it on an sdcard and I play it in a loop on a small speaker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfPqeZjc2c

I think I have always had it; I became more aware it was abnormal and unusual in my twenties when I realised that TV dramas use a similar high pitch sound to indicate someone who has had sudden hearing damage (after an explosion etc.) and then it really bothered me for a while because I was living in a very quiet area.

About six years ago now I was at a gig at a local venue when I experienced hearing loss due to a freakish bit of bass feedback. I was in a particular corner of the room and clearly experienced an overtone that almost nobody else heard at all, and at a volume nobody else experienced; pure bad luck. The sound made me run away automatically. I was thirty yards away before I even really comprehended that I was leaving.

I experienced considerable hearing loss — muffled, incomplete hearing — for several days. Nearly complete for the first day.

But when my tinnitus came back I realised I felt sure I was going to get my hearing back essentially entirely. It was curiously reassuring. I've never really been stressed by it since.

So I have what I expect to be lifelong tinnitus. But also earplugs now.

Anyone with tinnitus only in their right ear?

And yeah, I've had it since the early 90's and it mostly only bothers me now when someone brings it up. Thanks Hacker News!

I could not get to sleep because the noise was so loud and intense.

It reminded me of those spy films where they torture someone playing loud heavy metalcore all day and night.

I had a X-ray, ultra-sound and two Consultants had a look.

Both said that there was nothing wrong with my ear. No ear wax, no damage, no issues at all.

They both mentioned that tense facial and neck muscles may be a cause.

As well as the constant ringing, there is a sound like a central eating system, thumping and groaning away, in both my ears too. I initially thought the thumping and groaning was the Mrs snoring.

I bought some earloops thinking my ears were too sensitive and I was somehow hearing noises from the houses down the road and the motorway traffic 3 miles away. to no avail, even with the earloops blocking all exterior noise, I still had the high pitched and low piched internal noises.

I found a way to reduce the noise.

I was laying in bed one night and I was relaxing my jaw when I noticed that if I opened my mouth and let my jaw hang loose all the noises stopped.

So over a month or so I tried to train my jaw to be less tense and more relaxed.

For me it worked.

it was my jaw.