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Comment by _fs | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused as to how earplugs help with Tinnitus. The sound is coming from within your ears. At least in my case, the external world has no significance in the volume of the tinnitus. In fact, cutting out noises makes Tinnitus more apparent. Something like a white noise machine helps marginally, as it gives the brain something else to focus on.

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Putting the earplugs in doesn't make tinnitus go away. But overstimulating my ears seems to aggravate tinnitus. For example, I worked for 9 months mixing my sister's CD, 6-8 hours/day. I liked the work, but there's no way I could do it for a career because it caused my ears to ring even more when I wasn't mixing. Earplugs give my ears a respite from high-frequency noise, which for me, over time, seems to calm down the tinnitus a bit; it lowers the volume if you will. It doesn't ever go away though.

I typically rely on keeping background noise going to drown out the tinnitus, but I’ve also found that earplugs can work.

I don’t use them as much, but in my case, yeah, they’ll increase the volume of the tinnitus. In a weird way though, I’ve found that if that’s all you’re hearing then you can kind of get used to it and your mind starts to kind of drown out the noise. You can also meditate and focus on the tinnitus with the same effect, and there too the earplugs can help.

I don’t tend to wear them for more than an hour or two since even the soft ear plugs seem to make my ear ache.

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