New hope appears for hundreds of millions of people who suffer from constant ringing in their ears.

Tinnitus , better known as that persistent ringing in the ears , involves perceiving sounds—whistling, clicking, whistling, or hissing—with no external source; a constant noise that often affects sleep, mood, and productivity. It's impossible to ignore or tune out.

Furthermore, one in two people with tinnitus also suffers from sound hypersensitivity, which can turn the sound of a door closing into a sharp stab of pain. It often appears as a symptom of another condition: age-related hearing loss, circulatory disorders, or ear damage. Although there is no definitive cure for this condition, the therapeutic approach focuses on relieving the discomfort and treating the underlying cause. But what if there were a new possibility for treating tinnitus effectively?

“Animal studies have shown increased activity in the brain's auditory center, but emotional and cognitive areas may also contribute to reinforcing tinnitus,” explains Christopher Cederroth, a researcher at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Karolinska Institutet, in his work published in the journal Brain Communications . “If we feel stressed, anxious, or think about tinnitus, activity in the brain's auditory center increases, and the accompanying stress is exacerbated.”

Now, a recent study from the Swedish Twin Registry adds another key to the equation: genetics . In men, tinnitus affecting both ears shows a high hereditary component, indicating that biology may be as decisive as environment in the risk of developing this persistent ringing. Precisely this genetic background could be the key to understanding why two friends leave the same concert and, years later, one enjoys intact hearing while the other endures an incessant ringing.

Poor sleep doesn't help either. Lack of rest can cause brain plasticity to skew in the wrong direction, further blocking the faulty loops in deep sleep waves. The result is that waking up sleepy, due to not having rested well, also feeds into a horrible cycle: being tired also increases stress, and being stressed intensifies the ringing in your ears, and so on and so forth.

How to reduce the effect of tinnitus?

Above all, prevention . “Many people use headphones at high volume in noisy environments, even though their phones alert them with a red light when the sound exceeds 85 decibels. This isn't good, especially if you're young,” adds Cederroth. Using earplugs when necessary, getting enough sleep, and not over-volume the music, programs, or movies we watch also count.

A solution? Some teams, like Cederroth's, are testing portable sound devices that trigger clicks synchronized with the oscillations of deep sleep, with the hope that these nocturnal rhythms will reconfigure brain plasticity toward calmer auditory "maps." In parallel, other groups are exploring everything from focused magnetic pulses and vagus nerve stimulation to drugs capable of calming the overactive auditory cortex.

“Thanks to our discovery, I hope to develop an effective drug for tinnitus. But we also know that tinnitus is maintained and intensified by thoughts and emotions,” concludes the Karolinska Institutet expert. “Therefore, I believe that, to offer optimal treatment, we must approach tinnitus from an interdisciplinary perspective and consider addressing the problem from several angles simultaneously.”

The brain isn't designed to remain on constant alert ; it needs breaks, whether through sleep, meditation, or simply disconnecting. However, chronic tinnitus prevents that relief: it forces us to focus on the ringing every waking minute, which ultimately saps our mental and physical reserves. The result is a spiral of fatigue, irritability, insomnia, and general exhaustion. This initiative offers new hope for all those struggling with tinnitus.