Ask HN: Can a tinnitus be triggered by high frequency noises? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can a tinnitus be triggered by high frequency noises?

10 pointstinnitus_crazy18 comments

Not exactly technical, but HN feels like the correct crowd to ask because asking anywhere else I would be considered mentally ill.

I have a tinnitus that seems to stay 99,9% of the day, it’s away for some minutes sometimes and it’s very high frequency. Imagine a power supply coil whine.

Now the mentally ill part: the tinnitus can change position (left/right ear) and change volume. I didn’t hear the tinnitus on the right ear for some days, now it’s back on it (and still audible on the left ear) after sitting on the couch again.

The couch, you ask? Two weeks ago, when the tinnitus started, we changed the layout of our living room. The couch was now located next to our WiFi router. The tinnitus started shortly after that. I never had tinnitus before. Guess what, the router makes the same noise (even my partner can hear it). After some days of realizing it might be from the router, I changed the position of it to the other side of the room, but now somehow I can still hear the high frequency from the router from 3 meters apart. And as soon as I start sitting on the couch, the tinnitus gets much worse. Even disabling electricity in the full house I still hear that WiFi router noise in my ear.

Am I insane? Is this a thing? Can some frequency cause a tinnitus which can be re-triggered by the same frequency? Can it have a memory effect? Could it be it doesn’t go away even if I don’t sit on the couch for days because all these power supplies have high frequency coil whine in each and every facility these days, which trigger it again?

I feel like Neo from The Matrix who got enlightened and now can hear electricity, but without the rest of the super powers :(

PS: I visited a doctor and am doing the usual medical procedures to deal with tinnitus (Prednisolone 60mg/day), but it doesn’t help in any way.

I've had tinnitus that acts like that for 20+ years. Maybe you're really lucky and it is your WiFi, but that all sounds like a coincidence rather than a cause. It probably just made you notice it. Were you in a band or anything? Listen to loud music on headphones when you were younger?

I'm really sorry to tell you this, but you've got two choices:

- accept it, you can't fix it

- try and fix it, fail, accept it, you can't fix it

There is no cure for tinnitus. The quicker you get to accepting it, the better your life will be.

Therapy and CBT can help.

Carry on trying to fix it for a few months by.all means, but I'd advise you give yourself a deadline to switch from 'fix it' mode to 'learn to live with it' mode.

By complete coincidence, yesterday my tinnitus went so quiet I thought it had gone. I have a new type of glasses that don't hook behind your ears. "Oh my god, was it my glasses all along?", I thought immediately.

My tinnitus is loud today.

Even after 20 years there's part of me looking for a fix. But it's about how you deal with it, this morning I had a little chuckle at myself, put all thoughts about my tinnitus aside, picked up a book to read and moved on with my life.

This advice is unfortunately spot on. I've tried my fair share. Found a well researched piece on acupuncture. Didn't work. But, they did stick needles in my head which was an experience in itself.

From my several visits to the audiologist, it still seems noise therapy is the most highly regarded therapy.

Get a white noise machine for sleeping. Hands down the best thing for me until I just got used to it always being there.

I absolutely love going to the beach. White noise masks the tinnitus so well I can't even hear it when I self-test. It's the only time I truly get a break from the sizzling and squealing.

True, it isn't likely going to go away. My hearing aids help immensely, but mostly with tolerance, and not occurrence. It is pretty much background noise to me nowadays, although some things can really set it off. It doesn't drive me batty anymore, at least!

Most patients get tinnitus after hearing degradation. So my first advice is to do a hearing test. You mentioned you visited a doctor, was your hearing normal?

Tinnitus is still in the early stages of research. But the notion of just accept it, it can't be fixed will not be true forever. Researchers just recently started to cure some form of genetic hearing loss. That means one part of the puzzle of transporting gen editing viruses to the inner ear is solved. Next up is figuring out what gen edits are necessary. The field gets surprisingly little funding even though we have an aging population and lots of veterans with hearing issues. Many labs have tiny budgets <1 Mio per year but are making good progress every year. My guess is when one of the rich founders gets it (Elon, Sam, Larry, Brin etc) and decided to do something about it we will see real progress.

Yes, it totally can.

I have severe tinnitus. First, I had a minor variant for many years. But what I didn't realize is that I was slowly losing my hearing in one side. Then I had surgery (tympanomastoidectomy) to remove the cyst that grew to the point it dissolved my stapes altogether, and now I have a severe variant, and significantly less hearing in that side. My tinnitus ramped up to a whole new level after that surgery.

I tried a phone app where you would play a tone that approximates the current tinnitus tone, or white noise lacking just that frequency area. In every case, all it would do is change the tone my tinnitus was making. Sometimes it made it worse than it ever gets on its own.

Likewise, in the summertime my tinnitus is regularly set off by the sound of cicadas. That tinnitus sounds so similar that at times I have to do an ear-plug test to see if it is just cicadas, or if is just in my head. No joke! I hate it big time.

Having said that, I now wear hearing aids (including for my ear that wasn't operated on, just to round out the age-related hearing loss), and this surprisingly makes it WAY more manageable. When I've been wearing them, I still always have tinnitus, but it is relegated to background noise. When I don't wear them for a long time, I'm usually punished for it. It takes days of proper hearing before the tinnitus goes back to background noise level sometimes.

BTW: I also get other types of tinnitus, which makes it worse. For example, on waking it is a really low sound that sounds like an idling diesel motor. I can even feel that one. I got that really bad after surgery, and I get it now when I'm ill. All of this was really debilitating for a couple years post-surgery, but I've come to grips with it now.

Just about anything can set it off. Cicadas, as I mentioned, but also rapid temperature changes, exertion (although weirdly I never notice it at the gym. It's just noisy enough there to mask the squealing I guess.), hearing something unexpected at a really high pitch, and being tired pretty much guarantee a hell of a racket in my head.

I'm not a doctor so all I can do is point you to places like [1] though I've had tinnitus for 30 plus years. I worked around loud equipment with inadequate ear protection - but the defining blow was having my head beside a push bike tyre when it exploded resulting in partial deafness for a day or so.

It's different for everyone, mine is actually damage to the small hearing hairs so no cure hope at all. It takes a while for the brain to adjust and slowly ignore the noise but only to a point. Different things work and you've probably been told about white noise could could help out.

For a start my tinnitus was like standing on the tarmac beside a jet screaming its engines ... making any conversation a great deal of effort trying to ignore the loud whine. It eased over the years where I could almost mistake it for a loud chorus of crickets or cicadas at night, which strangely was more easy to think that's just what it was. Mostly though lately I can ignore it or simply forget it's going on.

[1] https://hearingandme.com/can-tinnitus-be-cured-what-science-...

Try moving your couch. It's possible that you're sitting in a resonant part of the room that amplifies background noise through room modes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_modes

That's a long shot, though.

I’ll definitely try, thanks! As a pre-measure, I won’t go to the living room for some time and closed the door, as it’s easier to test.

If the sound comes with you when you go into another room its probably you tho. If it follows you

Corticosteroids suppress the immune system, you might want to avoid that.

Electrosensitvity is a thing - people can sense and be affected in different ways by EMF.

Also the solar system is now transiting the galactic current sheet, a zone of more highly energized particles. This is causing more energetic light to arrive at Earth and it's affected people in various ways. Tinnitus is a common one. It's your body adapting to this incoming increase.

1) Do you hear it away from your home? If yes then it’s in your ear not your router.

2) The only solution to tinnitus is to stop fixating on it and eventually stop thinking about it completely. The only way to do that is to make sure you can never hear it. Learn how to mask yours with music or white noise. Especially while sleeping. It will eventually calm and might even go away. 3) Do not seek tinnitus support groups/subreddits online. They are fully fixated by definition and just reading their posts will make your symptoms worse.

1) Yes, I do hear it away from home. I was thinking of it could be triggered by coil whine / high frequency noises like the router produces, then stays for some time and then gets re-triggered by the next coil whine.

Then acceptance is probably all you can do.

I know that sucks to hear, but accepting tinitus actually makes it better. If you can’t find a definitive trigger (which I think is unlikely) then you should give up and begin masking it at all times.

what changed is your hearing position. different rooms have different sound levels and different acoustics which make the tinnitus much more noticeable. Some people may choose a noisy apartment on purpose for the city noise.

The tinnitus didn't start because of the wifi, but because you are getting older. People notice the tinnitus a lot more in the first months that they get it. Over time people adapt to its constant presence

Music all day long diverts attention.

There's an oldies station nearby, and's it's very effective and uplifting.

Music at bedtime to mask odd country noises of unknown origin.

funny enough i thought i was getting tinnitus, something that was bothering me for almost a year. turned out it was my power adapter’s coil whine

That’s easily tested though, right? As you can just change rooms and it’s gone.

Coil whine is in a lot of places though. I was going to say follows us everywhere, but there are some places still without it. If you're particularly sensitive, it can be a problem.

One of the blessings of old age is my frequency response curve has diminished and it's been a long time since I went into a shop or a restaurant and noped out because of coil whine. But I did stay at a hotel recently with a noisy usb outlet in the headboard. I was able to block that out with the notepad, thankfully.

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