Tinnitus Is Connected to Sleep

jmclnx

I remember reading somewhere a Doctor found a way to 'cure' ringing in the ears temporarily for almost a year in some people by doing something with a tuning-fork. But after that article I heard nothing more. I just looked it up and seems it may not be a reliable method.

mynameisash

I'll save you about 30 ad views: > The Oxford researchers proposed that the large spontaneous waves of brain activity that occur during deep sleep, or non-rapid eye movement sleep (non-REM), might suppress the brain activity that leads to tinnitus.

epolanski

I've got tinnitus, 38 male. Got it randomly one day this summer. It's impossible to describe how depressing it is to hear a sound non stop in your ears, night and day, wherever I go or whatever I do, it just never stops. The brain started filtering it out a bit after months, but it's always there and you're often reminded of it when you're in a slightly more silent environment. There are days where it becomes especially loud and falling asleep you'd just like to cry or something. Don't wish it on anybody.

getnormality

> researchers found that ferrets that developed more severe tinnitus also showed disrupted sleep. Hold up. How do we know when ferrets have tinnitus???

m3kw9

And sleep is related to air way/jaw/tongue/bite issues which causes mouth breathing and sleep apenia. Get it checked out by your dentist

glimshe

I don't have tinnitus (as in "chronic tinnitus") but sometimes I hear it for a few minutes after I have a poor night of sleep...

nabbed

In my 20s and 30s, I used to turn on the TV to cover up my tinnitus so I could fall asleep. The TV probably didn't help the quality of my sleep, so maybe that's why my tinnitus got progressively worse (especially in my right ear). Once I got a TV with a sleep timer, I would set it so the TV wouldn't be on all night. My tinnitus is much worse now, but I don't have a TV in my room anymore, so I just play a podcast on my iPad. That tiny built-in speaker doesn't really cover up the tinnitus, but the voices lull me to sleep (which is probably what the TV was doing all along).

cassepipe

A friend of mine who had it at night and who is not a smoker realized that smoking a cigarette would calm her tinnitus and allow her to sleep. Anyone had a similar experience with cigarette and/or nicotin ?

ericpp

I first got it in 2015 after playing Fallout 4 almost nonstop for the entire weekend. The game ran poorly and the low stuttery fps caused a massive migraine in my head. I took Tylenol and went to sleep and woke up with it ringing in one of my ears which eventually moved to both. The doctors were pretty useless and said they couldn't see anything wrong and to just live with it. My brain eventually figured out how to tune it out and now it associates the sound with silence. Now I've developed it again after feeling depressed and blasting music in my car. The new version crackles and alternates tones in my left ear. I have a doctors appointment coming up to hopefully figure it out. There is a new expensive treatment for it called Lenore which works by playing sounds and stimulating your tongue at the same time. Those pathways are located close together in the brain and by stimulating both at the same time, it's supposed to train it to filter out the noise.

posix_compliant

Sleep is one of the only things I’ve found can actually improve the tinnitus I’ve had for almost 3 years. Every other tactic I have is essentially avoiding making it worse.

rheng

I also have been suffering from tinnitus a little over a year now. It definitely has impacted my sleep, especially my mornings. It's the first thing I think about when I wake up. I've been following the work of Auricle Inc., a company commercializing decades of neuroscience research out of Dr. Susan Shore's lab at the University of Michigan. (Full disclosure: I have spoken to their CEO about potentially helping with their funding, although my primary concern is getting their product to the public). Instead of just masking the sound, their device targets the root cause using bimodal neuromodulation. It pairs specific audio tones with mild electrical pulses to the jaw/neck to desynchronize hyperactive neurons in the dorsal cochlear nucleus. Here are the two papers that cover the underlying science, and go over the efficacy: The foundational mechanism and Phase 1 trial showing how it induces long-term depression (LTD) in the brain circuitry: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aal3175 The Phase 2 double-blind, randomized clinical trial results showing significant reductions in tinnitus loudness and burden: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

altairprime

I’ve been using my tinnitus to evaluate whether I got enough sleep or when I’ve become tired for years , so it’s nice to randomly trip over validation here that the link is universal to and not just a hyperlocal mutation. Thanks for posting this. I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed this if I was trying to tune out tinnitus, but I’m just used to it? Not like anything is every quiet (my hearing is hyperactive), but, like, the tone and volume of it right now is “insufficient sleep but circadian forced us awake” so I need to be particularly measured and chill if I drive while it’s this loud.

arnonejoe

Just reading the title made my tinnitus come back.

owlninja

I've had it for nearly 20 years, and I know it came from an incident shooting firearms with not enough (none) protection. Most days I don't think about it anymore. However if I am tired or stressed, it seems to turn up to 11. I've read many people get depressed or they can't get over it, luckily I seem to deal with it alright, but wouldn't wish it on anyone. Protect your hearing!

RockstarSprain

Personal anecdote: removing a lower wisdom tooth that was close to the jaw nerve nearly cured my tinnitus back in the day. The surgeon dentist was really surprised by this and could not evoke any similar cases in their practice before mine.

Fire-Dragon-DoL

As somebody with tinnitus, forgive me, this seemed instinctively obvious. A very bad night of sleep raises the volume of the tinnitus substantially. Stress does the same.

dahart

This sometimes makes my tinnitus go away temporarily: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteBurstsNoiseGenerator.... And this I can sometimes use to pinpoint my tinnitus tone(s): https://generalfuzz.net/acrn/

PeterStuer

I got tinnitus from a failing Toshiba notebook hard drive. I can not sleep without masking noises. A real washing machine or dishwasher is S-tier, but more often than not the C-tier fallback has to be monotone Youtube autoplay lectures.

uptown

Sugar or alcohol kicks mine into high gear.

jdenning

For people suffering from tinnitus, here is a technique that greatly helped me: 1. Place your hands over your ears such that your fingers are on the back of your skull - thumbs should be on your neck and middle fingers at the base of your skull. 2. Tap your middle fingers on the base of your skull repeatedly for ~30 seconds It apparently doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s not permanent, but for me it greatly reduces the “volume” or stops it entirely. I have no idea what the explanation is, but it’s free, safe, and you can try it right now. Hope that helps! Tinnitus sucks.