Thankfully, the younger you get tinnitus, the easier it is to ignore. Unless someone mentions it, I don’t notice.

I've listened to worryingly loud music throughout high school and didn't know until I got a smart watch yelling at me about it

I'm Indigenous Canadian and I grew up in a traditional lifestyle of hunting and trapping. I was about 8 when my hunter/trapper father taught me how to use a shotgun to shoot geese. No ear protection and spent a month out in the bush every spring and a week in the fall shooting at animals. I was about 12 when he took me out for my first moose hunt with a high powered rifle. No one knew that we were destroying our hearing with every shotgun or rifle blast without ear protection. I can remember shooting my single shot shotgun and then listening to my brothers on either side of me ring out shots on their pump action or semi automatics right next to me .... and then talking to everyone in that muffled deep tone and everyone's distorted voices for an hour after. Then the high pitched ringing that would last a day or two after. Didn't know it at the time but I had destroyed my hearing. The ringing subsided after the hunt and I never knew I had done permanent damage, not until years later. I was about 25 when I noticed a constant high pitched ringing and it has grown louder since then. I'm almost 50 now and the ringing sometimes drives me nuts but I just live with it now.

Copied and pasted my comment above:

Tinnitus life hack. Temporary relief though.

Cover your ears with your palms and have your fingers on the back of your head. Then tap for 10-15 seconds and make sure you hear those thumps. Afterwards your tinnitus goes away.

It works for a while and it is only 'temporary' because if you keep doing it too often, your brain compensates and starts ignoring this treatment ... so realistically it only works two or three times a day. I know because I've tried.

For those suffering with a lot of terrible tinnitus ... a more permanent treatment (and I mean treatment because it isn't a cure or solution because there isn't one yet) is to study, understand and rationalize the condition. I read up a lot on science behind it hoping to find some sort of research or study or something that could possibly be a cure but sadly, the science is still in development and there is not much they can do.

From what I've read ... tinnitus is partly the actual hearing mechanical parts not working properly, the hearing organs build inside that are no working, the wiring leading up to the brain not working or a combination of all these systems. Regardless of where the damage is, ringing occurs and this where the weird science comes in.

Hearing is a sense that is directly wired into the most basic animal parts of our brain. It's wired this way because of our evolution of survival. Our ancient, prehistoric ancestors from millions of years ago were tiny mammals that lived in the ground in the dark and they needed acute hearing senses in order to survive. They lived in the dark so they had to have good hearing. Over millions of years, that important sense directly evolved alongside our sense of fear and apprehension.

Which is why when we get upset, angry, afraid, frightened or scared our old animal brain kicks in and turns on all kinds of emergency systems ... especially our sense of hearing. Which is also why when those of us who have tinnitus when we get upset or in a negative mood, tinnitus will increase .... the more tinnitus, the more upset, the more tinnitus ... a vicious cycle. It's like the feedback that happens with speakers and microphone ... the more you turn up the sound, the sound goes to the mic, the mic pumps it out to the speakers and the sound grows louder ... until it starts screeching.

So the remedy is ... relaxation, awareness and meditation. Lower the stress in your life and when you do get under stress, be aware of it and do things to make yourself comfortable and at ease ... otherwise you will have runaway tinnitus that will drive you mad.

It works, that's incredible..

Doesn't last long unfortunately