As a tinnitus sufferer, I’m glad Cecil covered this phenomenon. (Actually, he wrote the column five years ago, but it’s on the home page today, so…)
Me, I’ve found an electric fan will do the trick. In fact, I find it nearly impossible to fall asleep nowadays without a fan.
As I indicated in the thread title, it sounds to me more like the whining buzz of a mosquito. It can be much louder when I’m very tired and have gone too long without sleep.
At the moment, it’s tolerable, but if it gets worse, perhaps I’ll have to resort to the hearing aid-type device Cecil mentioned.
Feel free to correct me at any time. But don’t be surprised if I try to correct you.
In this case, I think Cecil’s answer of “What causes ringing in your ears?”, was a slightly different question than was being asked. The question was about “that tiny pitch you may hear in one ear that temporarily blocks out sound” (my italics and bolding). However, Cecil’s answer was about standard tinnitus.
What the question was asking about is something maybe everyone doesn’t get. Standard tinnitus is fairly steady and longterm, and, at least in my experience, usually affects both ears, plus it doesn’t muffle your hearing. What the question is asking about is a sudden onset of a high-pitched tone, only in one ear, which muffles the hearing in that ear, but quickly fades away in about ten seconds.
You have my sympathy jab. I also have to sleep with a fan, but it is just because I seem to have a problem with the little noises in the night, so I use the white noise of a fan to block it out.
“The truth does not make a good story; that’s why we have art.”
Actually, it seems like chronic tinnitus goes with hearing loss. I have both the continuous buzz (which sometimes I don’t notice, or don’t have) and the occasional minute-long (or I guess, more like 20-second) louder buzz.
I got tinnitus from my computer.
It bugged me for 6 months.
I didn’t realize it was the cause until one day when I turned off my computer and could still hear the low whirr of the disk, but it was the identically pitched noise in my head.
Moving the computer inside the credenza next to my desk helped, but it took weeks for the tinnitus to go away completely.
First, the serious part. I have had tinnitus for several years, accompanied by a slight hearing loss in the higher frequencies. Fortunately, I have come to accept the ringing. It doesn’t keep me awake. The hearing loss is an inconvenience sometimes. Most human speech is in the midranges that I can still hear, but a conversation with a high-voiced, quiet person is perplexing. Protect your hearing, folks!
Now, for the other part… Rock musicians often have tinnitus, due to the high onstage noise levels. For them, sleeping with a fan usually doesn’t help them get to sleep. The little sweethearts don’t really want to sleep.