Could occlusion effect have damaged my hearing? I did stupid tinnitus relief "trick" that included sealing my ears with my palms and then tapping fingers in the back of my head. After doing this my tinnitus became permanently louder.
My answer to this question I received on Quora…
If you did all that with your own fingers/palms, then the good news is you’re highly unlikely to be able to cause physical damage to your ears/eardrums. Also, you would experience pain if you had caused barotrauma (damage caused by different pressures).
This doesn’t explain why your tinnitus is more prominent at the moment for you, I know. If you had experienced a pressure change, and felt it, leaving your ears feeling “bunged up”, that would account for it, and I would tell you that it would likely settle down in the coming days. I would also advise you to have more background sound available while your hearing returns to normal.
However it is much more likely, in my opinion, that this combination:
1) doing this deliberate manoeuvre
2) fearing having done some damage
3) thinking about your ears/tinnitus more than usual
Has simply triggered a prolonged ‘spike’ in your tinnitus perception. Once some days have passed, I think you’ll forget/move on. As you reassure yourself that you are not hurt, and turn your mind to other things, the T will likely go back to its usual baseline.
It’s important to break the cycle of thinking about it, which will feed into it and tell your brain that it’s important. The more you do this, the more your brain will highlight it to you, and the louder it will seem.
Reassure yourself that no pain/discharge means no damage, and return to normal activities. Your brain will receive the message that the T is not useful, and should forget to listen for it.
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