Hacker News Reader

Comment by eliseumds | Hacker News Reader

I've done pretty much everything I could imagine to try to identify the root cause, no doctor could give a reasonable diagnosis. My tinnitus started after a night with earplugs, but it could have been a coincidence since I also used noise-cancelled Sony headphones. Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

View on HN

Not to be rude but you ascribing an equal likelihood of causing tinnitus to one night of using earplugs(which BLOCK sound from your ears) vs presumably regular/sustained use of noise cancelling headphones(which BLAST sound into your ears) borders on ridiculousness and make me think you're just trolling..

Earplugs go into the ear similar to earbuds, but are squishy and meant to be rolled thin so you can get them in a bit further (then they decompress halfway inside your ear and fill in the gaps). If you push them in too far I imagine they can damage the eardrum, which could cause tinnitus.

After trying earplugs myself a few months ago, I decided it was too risky to sleep with them due to the pressure I felt in my ear (the one against the pillow) when I lay on my side.

You would have to push your ear plugs in so far that you couldn't take them out to get anywhere near the eardrum though.

My tinnitus started after a night out with earplugs. Basically the earplugs pushed wax buildup deep into my eardrum. It took quite a while to remove that wax, and while that improved things a lot, the tinnitus stayed after that.

Noise cancelling headphones definitively promote tinnitus

Interesting, I've seen the claim of NC induced tinnitus a few other times. In terms of noise induced hearing loss it the canceling should not be an issue (since in the worst case of a complete misprediction you get only a doubling in intensity which), but since no canceling is perfect maybe the residual ends up adversely affecting the auditory pathways at a neurological level somehow.

Maybe you first noticed it while using earplugs (since they’d block out basically everything else) and now it’s become difficult to ignore? I had something similar happen with noticing floaters in my eyes constantly over the pandemic

Reply on news.ycombinator.com