Most people having a peeep tone tinnitus including myself can experience complete silence for a few seconds (up to 30) by listening to a tone at the specific frequency of their Tinnitus.
This is called residual inhibition.
You can Google "tinnitus residual inhibition" and find many papers about it.
Benzodiazepines work also very well in some cases, when taking them I have no Tinnitus at all, but that's ABSOLUTELY NOT a viable long term solution because of the long term negative effects.
I am not sure about this paper, but what I've read and believe the most is that the Tinnitus is caused by neurons in the brain, that have lost nerve input signals from the ear (due to hearing loss, nerve damage etc..), and start to emit parasite signals.
Benzodiazepines reduce the brain activity thus reducing/silencing the tinnitus. Residual inhibition seems to work by stimulating the region where the hearing loss has occurred, the neurons responsible for the Tinnitus all the sudden get stimulated and stop emitting noise signals for a few dozens of seconds then resume. But so far there is still a lot of research to be done and we are decades away from a cure that is SAFE enough. Benzos work but are just not worth it, this is like fighting back pain with opoids.
Until then I think it is best to protect our hearing, you can buy custom made earplugs which are comfortable to wear, last about 5 years and cost around 200 USD. I use them when I am in loud environments like on an air plane, train, at a bar etc...
Also it is best not be in completely silent environment as this is where you will notice the Tinnitus.
When listening to music with headphones it is important to take regular breaks and not to push the volume too high to give your ears some rest.
Edit: Last advice, don't try to listen to your tinnitus, but focus on other noises/sounds, if you are listening to the Tinnitus you are telling your brain that the signal is important, when you should be telling it, that it isn't.
My tinnitus has a very recent onset. So far it’s pretty mild but I expect it to get much worse. Your advise is the most practical, at least for mild cases: baby the ever living shit out of your hearing (I have spent decades in the underground metal scene and didn’t wear ear plugs until the past 5 or so years. What a colossally stupid thing to do. Please: if you’re young, remember you are not invincible, you’re merely borrowing heavily from future you) and avoid complete silence. I’ve also noticed that it will occasionally hit me hard in bursts. When that happens, I can make like I’m covering my ears with my palms and tap my finger tips on the back of my head for a few seconds and the roar will die down. Doesn’t go away permanently but so far it provides a little relief from those painful stabs.
Agree. I also made poor choices, drumming as a kid without hearing protection. By time I was in high school I already had tinnitus. Since then I’ve also babied my hearing (earplugs at concerts, playing music in headphones as quietly as possible or avoiding headphones), it’s fortunately stayed about the same over the ensuing years.
Given how spread tinnitus is, I wish there were more campaigns to help to spread awareness. Funny thing, ghe first gike I remember developing tinnitus, was following a evening where the fully pressurized soda stream bottle was not fully closes, so it emmitted this wheezing sound all evening, high pitched. I was too tired to figure out the source, or even if it was real up until the next morning.
Same story here. I'm pretty young and I'm quite concerned about it as I age, but since I stopped drumming about 10 years ago, it hasn't progressed at all.
Well if tinnituses arises from the brain not having an input, then it seems like the proper way to fix it is to restore the input. Now restoring damage to the nerve or those little hairs inside the ear, I'm sure that's tricky, but it also seems like it should be quite doable if you just throw resources at it.
Mammals cannot restore hearing, but other animals such as Chicken can.
A few years ago there was a drug called FX-322 that was able to regenerate inner ear hair cells in guinea pigs, it made it into human trials, but was unable to improve hearing, meaning that the cells were probably not functional.
It was shown in a couple of papers that we can restore hair cells in mammals. Damaged hair cells are the root cause for the majority of people with hearing loss & tinnitus. The most promising path seems to use so called supporting cells in the inner ear and convert them into hair cells. Researchers are getting closer and closer every year. I think we are now at a point where it's not a question of if but rather when.
Here is a quote from one of the leading scientist in the field:
What is needed to help make HRP goals happen?
Frankly, funding to keep our research moving forward. A postdoctoral fellow with five to six years of training starts out on a modest salary of about $45,000, plus $12,000 in benefits. So that’s $57,000 before they even pick up a test tube in the lab. Each person will typically use between $15,000- $20,000 a year in supplies and chemicals. Simply maintaining a single cage of mice for one year costs $210, and my lab can use between 300-500 cages of mice for our experiments! HHF and its donors have been extremely generous in their support, however with additional funding the output from the consortium could be significantly greater and accelerate the pace to a cure.
Overall the field of hearing restoration still only receives tiny amounts of funding (<200 Mio). The research is in a vacuum phase. It's not proven out enough for Big Pharma to come. Relying on small government grants makes it difficult to get the research to a stage where it's attractive enough for Big Pharma.
Best bet at this point is probably when a former big tech executives would get hearing loss/tinnitus and then decides to put real money behind the problem. Bryan Johnson who created the Blueprint program has hearing loss but I guess he is not wealthy enough to make a difference.
EDIT (to put numbers into perspective):
The size of the problem:
Sensorineural hearing loss disables over 360 million people worldwide. Irrespective of its cause and severity, hearing loss can have a large impact on people’s health and well-being. The treatment of hearing loss is currently limited to the use of hearing aids or devices surgically implanted in the middle or inner ear. These devices often perform poorly in noisy environments and can be very costly. It has been estimated that the costs of untreated hearing loss are €213 billion in Europe alone each year.
The funding (EU):
An international consortium of 7 partners has been awarded a €5,8 million European Commission Horizon 2020 grant to develop and test a new drug to treat hearing loss caused by the loss of sensory hair cells.
I tried the YouTube video and was slightly alarmed to discover that I appear to be deaf above about 13.5KHz. I wondered if it might be the frequency response of my laptop speakers, but according to this site [0] it's pretty flat up to 20KHz.
It didn't make the tinitius go away, but perhaps subdued it slightly. Hard to say.
But if as one of the other posters suggests tinnitus is a neurological response to lack of input, deafness in higher frequencies tallies. Like others though, jutting my jaw forward makes the tinnitus louder, so not sure how that interaction works for something originated in the brain.
Something I haven't seen mentioned here is _very_ occasional short periods (seconds) of apparent deafness, typically at night, in a quiet room, and only when very tired or sleep deprived. I say apparent because since it's quiet, it's hard to know if it's the tinnitus momentarily stopping, or all sound; and the presence of sound may prevent it from happening.
> Most people having a peeep tone tinnitus including myself can experience complete silence for a few seconds (up to 30) by listening to a tone at the specific frequency of their Tinnitus.
What "works for me" but your kilometrage may vary...
i listen to LOTS of white noise. All night when i sleep, when i'm out and about and might normally listen to music, and sometimes just randomly throughout the day.
For whatever reason, listening to white noise over long periods seems to tone down the volume of my beeping, _sometimes_ to the point where i have blessed silence for several days at a time (recently a full 2 weeks, though that was a new record in my 13-ish years of beeping).
Whether or not the white noise _genuinely_ plays a factor is difficult to say, but it's been my experience, the past three or four years, that the volume of The Beep and the duration of the rare Quiet Periods seems to be affected by how how much white noise i listen to.
(Sidebar: "quiet" is never quite silent, but The Beep sometimes (thankfully) fades to the point where i have to actively listen to hear it, exactly as it was when this all started out around 2010.)
(Sidebar: though the tone of my beep is near-constant, wavering only very slightly, the volume varies wildly, from minor background noise to headache-inducing and concentration-shattering.)
That said: "white noise" is a generic term here. i often get better results with what my phone's white noise app call "pink noise" or "blue noise" - they're just different frequencies of the same style of noise.
Edit: FWIW, i've heard from two other tinnitus sufferers that white noise has a similar effect on them. That doesn't mean that it definitely helps, but it seems to help for some of us.
My tinnitus, both the one that's always present and the one I can provoke with my jaw muscles, is not a single-pitched tone but more like band-limited noise. I did a hearing test and we tried to match it to various frequencies. None of the models they had really fit, but the best one was a sort of moderately-wise noise.
Heh. I felt it so strongly that I built my own subwoofer. I get noise complaints if I set it anywhere near half volume. At least a transducer really helps, and doesn't often result in complaints.
I've always assumed the tinnitus arises from some sort of AGC, automatic gain control, in the auditory system, such that when something is damaged and the signal disappears, the brain will just turn up the gain until the noise is about the level it expects the signal to be.
At least my experience with AGC is that it's useless because times of silence ends up just being filled with noise... "audio system tinnitus..."
For example listen to the following, at a level that it isn't uncomfortable and your Tinnitus might be gone for a short time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNf9nzvnd1k
This is called residual inhibition. You can Google "tinnitus residual inhibition" and find many papers about it.
Benzodiazepines work also very well in some cases, when taking them I have no Tinnitus at all, but that's ABSOLUTELY NOT a viable long term solution because of the long term negative effects.
I am not sure about this paper, but what I've read and believe the most is that the Tinnitus is caused by neurons in the brain, that have lost nerve input signals from the ear (due to hearing loss, nerve damage etc..), and start to emit parasite signals.
Benzodiazepines reduce the brain activity thus reducing/silencing the tinnitus. Residual inhibition seems to work by stimulating the region where the hearing loss has occurred, the neurons responsible for the Tinnitus all the sudden get stimulated and stop emitting noise signals for a few dozens of seconds then resume. But so far there is still a lot of research to be done and we are decades away from a cure that is SAFE enough. Benzos work but are just not worth it, this is like fighting back pain with opoids.
Until then I think it is best to protect our hearing, you can buy custom made earplugs which are comfortable to wear, last about 5 years and cost around 200 USD. I use them when I am in loud environments like on an air plane, train, at a bar etc...
Also it is best not be in completely silent environment as this is where you will notice the Tinnitus.
When listening to music with headphones it is important to take regular breaks and not to push the volume too high to give your ears some rest.
Edit: Last advice, don't try to listen to your tinnitus, but focus on other noises/sounds, if you are listening to the Tinnitus you are telling your brain that the signal is important, when you should be telling it, that it isn't.