I've had pretty severe tinnitus since my 20s (early 40s now), during my early 30s I got very serious about diet/health due to unrelated health issues. I only drink water or coffee, I eat a clean diet with almost no processed sugars and minimal meat, etc etc.

My tinnitus is still absolutely horrible, almost always there in some fashion, strong nearly every night, and drives me to near-insanity half a dozen times a month.

Just for another perspective.

Agreed, tinnitus can have many causes. Myself, I played drums for a while without ear protection, and viola.

I don’t think this treatment would help me. My understanding is there are little hairs that pick up sound waves, and excessive noise can destroy those, and you don’t get them back. The brain fills in with the ringing noise. But I don’t see how the stimulation would reset that process.

> I played drums for a while without ear protection, and viola.

Ear protection is of course a requirement when playing a drum kit, which is very loud. But when playing viola?

Not sure if you’re compounding on the typo and making a joke, but op meant voilà.

No doubt violin and viola can cause hearing damage too, it doesn't take much. And it will be mostly in one ear.

Sometimes, you don't even need a reason. I have had a constant high pitched tinnitus since my late 20s and it just started without any reasons I can think of for I think I have never actually abused my ears much...

What I've noticed is that the level at which I perceive it is completely linked with my anxiety level. I always ear it but when I'm tired or anxious, it's loud while when I'm really relaxed, it can become very faint.

Unfortunately, I must be a pretty anxious person as it's loud most of the time.

There's a lot of diet advice out there. If minimal meat didn't help you, it's not unthinkable that e.g. maximal meat might. (I'm only making this point because a nudge to try other diets might be helpful to you, and can be done safely. Apologies if it's annoying.)

The minimal-meat thing for me personally is about environmental sustainability and ethics, so not really something I’m willing to sway from. If anything I’m constantly moving more towards less and less meat, even if the opposite could help my tinnitus.

I’ve tried lots and lots of different diets (in the balance-of-foods type) over the years though and nothing really helped or harmed the tinnitus in any noticeable way.

I've said this elsewhere in the thread, you need to learn to accept it and ignore it. Habituation it's called.

It shouldn't be bothering you at all at this point if you've had it that long.

That's really about as helpful as telling someone with depression to stop being so negative all the time. The spirit of what you're saying is nice, but that advice is not gonna help anyone.

No it's not, it's a learned technique.

If you want to keep on suffering, go ahead, or you can learn to live with it.

I got tinnitus due to some health problems caused by bad diet. Got 100% off sugars, alcohol, bread, milk products for 3 months, and most of my health problems went away.

I got to warn you, stopping sugar consumption cold turkey is not easy and not nice. That stuff is like (what I imagine) crack. First two weeks were awful.

> I got to warn you, stopping sugar consumption cold turkey is not easy and not nice.

Just for another data point, when I moved to the US I did not like the taste of processed sugars in a lot of the standard supermarket food here and found it pretty trivial to give it up.

I found that replacing sugar with a Keto or Paleo (or both) diet and daily green tea, then those diets + green tea's appetite suppressant satiated me enough that I never had any sugar cravings and was able to wean myself off it relatively painlessly.

It is called keto flu, iirc. As they say, your body undergoes a metabolic transformation (it knows how to do it from evolution/genes) when you miss carbs and sugar for a while. When I found out, it was so cool that our body can just reconfigure itself for a completely different diet. That is, if it is true, of course, because the entire keto-thing seems to be surrounded by some fog and doubt, for some reason.