Posted by gregsadetsky 11 hours ago
What's weird is sometimes I wake up and then all of the sudden I hear it starting.
tinnitus also happens to be a very predictable signal, so the key is to convince your brain that it's noise to be filtered out. if you focus on it you will convince your brain of the opposite.
At the risk of a kind of odd tangent, I had a very weird experience a couple years ago where I woke up one morning and my entire body felt like it was "external" to my feeling, for lack of a better description. Getting up and walking around made me feel queasy because I could feel everything in my abdomen sloshing around, and lying sideways made me feel what I assume is how claustrophobic people feel in tight spaces because it felt like there were multiple surfaces around me instead of just the one I was lying on. I had severe brain fog to go along with it; the words coming out of my mouth felt like what I wanted to say, but it didn't feel like I was choosing them; normally my speech feels almost like a distillation of my thought process, but this felt like they were just spontaneously coming out without any thought process to generate them. My wife (still my fiancee at the time, but we had been together for several years) apparently couldn't tell anything different about me outwardly and said she wouldn't have been able to tell anything was wrong other than what I was telling her. The sensation didn't last all day, but after it left I had an odd numbness everywhere. The numbness was gone by the next morning too, but a couple weeks later the brain fog and numbness came back (albeit not quite as strong as it had been originally), and it's only been gradually fading away since then.
The experience (and the later experience that's still going on for a while now) has made me realize just how much my perception previously had been, let's say, "curated" by mind. One thing I've noticed is that even when the physical sensation isn't present, the "reaction" to the sensation will still occur. For example, I remember a time when I was shoveling large amounts of snow, and I suddenly noticed that I was taking large amounts of time between each shovelful, which had been happening instinctively due to how much I needed to catch my breath, but even then I still didn't physically feel tired or winded. Plenty of times I've woken up somewhat earlier than usual and tried to get back to sleep but not been able to, and eventually I realized there must be reason, so I'd have to actively think about whether I was thirsty or hungry or needed to use the bathroom, and then suddenly realized that one of them was actually the case. Pain is one of the weirdest cases, even with my numbness being a lot more mild than it was for the first year or so, because I still have the reflex that I'd expect from a sudden severe pain even if I don't feel it nearly as strongly.
I don't know for sure how much of this generalizes to everyone else, but the experience has definitely made me reconsider some cognitive theories that didn't seem plausible to me before. The idea that our brain basically tricks us into "remembering" feeling something as the reason for us taking a certain action seems pretty consistent with how I was would act the same way in circumstances where I normally would expect to have sensations causing me to act that way without being able to actually feel the sensation. In some ways the philosophical idea of consciousness being an illusion don't seem as crazy to me as before either, because it's clear that the reality I experience is only perceived through the lens of my biology, and I can't come up with a strong argument against the idea that my sense of "self" is just an evolutionary hack for handling some parts of my body (with the parts not benefiting from conscious management being actively hidden from whatever part of me feels like "me").
It's unfortunate and surprising that there's still no effective drug, though lidocaine does, in fact, work. (Very temporarily, sadly.)
And time does help, at least sometimes. Over the past ten years, my tinnitus has gone from a 5/10 (highly annoying and noticeable above ambient noise, but not debilitating in any respect,) to something like a 1/10 (I don't even hear it unless I'm in an extremely quiet room and trying to sleep).
...But it sure ain't my friend, and never will be. It's hard to interpret it as anything but an annoying side-effect of self-inflicted nerve damage.
I know what a variety of tinnitus is like (I've never known anything else) and I'm sure that other varieties can be horrendous. In my case time does not help.
Perhaps we ought to insist on a tinnitus spectrum, with multiple dimensions and some TLAs. I don't think that advice from a single data point is very helpful, or being charitable: annecdata. I'm glad it disappeared for OP.
Tinnitus ranges from, say, me (I'll live) through yourself (fuck! but I'll live) to committing suicide in despair at the extreme end.
ENT: Ear, Nose and Throat - a medical specialism.
My earliest memories are from around 18 months. I used to have very bad earache whenever I had a cold or influenza. My mother told me that I used to burst into tears, unprovoked or without any of the usual baby related reasons and eventually around age five or six I was diagnosed with "glue ear".
The way it was explained to me was: my eustacian tubes were too narrow. Speaking to children: "Your ears, nose and throat are all linked together and the tubes that link your ears to the rest of you are too small and get blocked easily".
I had surgery to insert "grommets" into my eustacian tubes. This was done twice. Grommets are tiny plastic, hollow tubes. From memory: about 3mm long and 3mm outer diameter but that is from a long time ago.
Now here is where it gets complicated! My dad was in the British army (so was my mum but that's another story). This means we moved house every two years or so. I can fix dates quite well.
The first operation was performed in Rinteln, West Germany at a British Forces hospital. We were stationed in Paderborn so it would be around 1976. I had a second set inserted in Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester (UK) in 1977 or perhaps early 1978.
I know that the second set of grommets were removed by a doctor (I think an ENT specialist) but I can't remember if the first set were removed in Manchester and replaced by the second pair at the same time.
I recall that the doctor used a black, plastic, bell shaped thing that fitted over my ear and wiggled some sort of hooked, metal probe within my ear to pull out the grommets. It was quite painful.
Even after the operations, I still got earache whenever I had a cold up until around age 20-25. That age range is a bit hard to pin down. I'll also note that when we were stationed in Cyprus in 1986-7ish, a lot of swimming and diving helped clear the tubes!
One of the nasty side effects of glue ear is that you have trouble with pressure changes. Airliners and swimming are the bane of your life.
There are some notes. Hope it helps.
There's some research, but yeah, I'm surprised that something that affects so many people and in some cases affect them very severely isn't receiving more attention.
At least there are things one can do immediately after the fact to limit nerve damage (applying intratympanic steroids etc), but even these things are often missed and haven't become part of routine procedure yet.
And I'm very curious why Shore's device is still stuck in FDA hell while the (from what I've heard) inferior version, Lenire, passed a long time ago.
I'll be honest, this is the first time I'm hearing "just change your attitude towards it" though. It's like the terrible advice someone with depression gets- just be happy!
I have it. I've changed my attitude toward it and made it my friend. I don't really know what else to tell you, but if you want to, the way is open for you. Or you can continue to see it as an aversive thing, and it will continue to be so.
No amount of wishing it away is going to make it vanish in the same way if I really want to fly I just need to think I am a bird... at least in theory. ;)
It doesn't mean you have to be happy with it but just accept it, bring it out like a photo album of the family. 'Here is my tinnitus, it stays past its welcome but keeps me company.' 'There is my balding, society considered it ugly, I think it is just neat.'. 'Oh the knee that wants to play up every once in a while, yeah that happens, we work with it the best we can.'
I have no idea how it happened - I never used headphones much, I don't work around machines or jet engines, etc. One doctor said it's just wear and tear.
It doesn't bother me though. I figure that nobody has a full stack of bricks when it comes to health, and here's one of the places I'm short. Compared to some of the places where other folks have health problems, this is not a biggie.
There's also that surgery where they sever your auditory nerve and render you deaf. Some have done this in an extreme last-ditch effort to cure their tinnitus. Sadly, it doesn't always work -- many of those who tried became deaf and yet remained stuck with tinnitus.
There are various professionally provided therapies of this style, but there are also simple self-therapy apps that find the perceived frequencies and then play white noise or a music library with the sound adjusted to produce the notched effect in that small frequency window. For example: https://audionotch.com/ https://www.tinnitusnotch.com/ https://www.tinnaway.com/
#!/bin/bash
HIGHFREQ=16000
LOWFREQ=-11500
if [[ -z $1 || -z $2 ]] ; then
echo "Usage: " $0 " <InputDir> <OutputDir>"
exit
fi
OLDDIR=$1
NEWDIR=$2
echo pushd $OLDDIR
pushd $OLDDIR
TEMP=0
BUFSIZE=1024000
CONCURRENCY=1
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
for file in `find |grep mp3`; do
mkdir -p $NEWDIR/"`dirname \"$file\"`"
TEMP=$(($TEMP + 1))
TEMP=$(($TEMP % $CONCURRENCY))
echo $TEMP $(basename $file)
if [ "$TEMP" = "0" ]; then
sox --multi-threaded --buffer $BUFSIZE --temp $NEWDIR/"`dirname \"$file\"`" -V2 "$file" -C -0.1 "$NEWDIR/$file" gain -hen sinc $HIGHFREQ$LOWFREQ
wait
else
sox --multi-threaded --buffer $BUFSIZE --temp $NEWDIR/"`dirname \"$file\"`" -V2 "$file" -C -0.1 "$NEWDIR/$file" gain -hen sinc $HIGHFREQ$LOWFREQ &
fi
done
wait
popd
cp -R --update=none $OLDDIR/* $NEWDIR