How Random Coffee Talk Fixed My Brain Piercing Ear Ringing

Hi, I’m Max from Baltimore.

After I got hearing loss at 54, I developed brain deafening tinnitus.

For years I tried every single thing I could get my hands on to get relief:

- Sound therapy and apps
- Ear health sprays
- Herbal solutions
- Different supplements
- Meditation and habituating

...And nothing gave me real and lasting relief.

But desperation led me to never stop and keep pushing.

One day, I went to my usual coffee spot to drown out the ringing, because if I don’t… it’s unbearable.

That’s when I spotted my old college roommate. Only now, decades later, he was a doctor.

And what he told me next sent me down a path I never imagined.

We caught up and laughed about old college stories.

At some point I couldn’t help but joke:

"Don’t suppose you’ve got a cure for this ringing in my ears?"

He smiled, shook his head, and said:

"Listen, ENTs and audiologists agree on two things..."

First, when you get acoustic trauma or hearing loss, the brain has no information to tell the ear what sounds to make.

So it tries to fill in these missing sound signals.

That's the ringing, buzzing or hissing you hear.

The second thing they all agree on is...

"There's nothing we can do. There’s no cure."

But that's not what they're really saying.

He said: "Doctors are limited by what insurance covers... what fits into billing codes... and what’s FDA-approved…"

"That doesn’t mean the science isn’t there. It just means most patients never hear about it."

He went on saying: "In Europe and Asia, though? Doctors are already recommending different approaches to relieve tinnitus."

I raised an eyebrow. "Like what?"

He pointed me toward research about neural stimulation of the "trigeminal nerve" and "vagus nerve".

"They’re like high-speed highways carrying signals that connect your face, ear and head deep with your brain."

He said: "They're powerful regulators. They hold the keys to silence."

I couldn’t shake what he said.

And on the drive home, it kept circling in my head.

That night, I dove headfirst into research.

I stayed up until 3 a.m.

Reading neuroscience papers. Tracking clinical trials. Digging through posts and comments.

And again and again, I found the same thing he’d told me:

Real science. Real results. Just not mainstream yet.

One study from Frontiers in Neuroscience in 2022 showed that:

87.5% of patients (49 out of 55) using trigeminal nerve stimulation got their tinnitus much quieter. Their pain scores dropped from 7.13 to 0.60.

Another study published in Scientific Reports in 2017 showed that 50% of patients using vagus nerve stimulation had big improvements in tinnitus that lasted even one year later.

Post after post from sufferers just like me telling remarkable stories:

"After just two days, the ringing softened."

"By week two, I had moments of complete silence."

"I’ve had tinnitus for five years. This was the first thing that made a real difference."

They were talking about the so called "Relieva" device.

I spent two days researching this thing before I ordered it…

It’s a soft, handheld device that uses minimal air pressure to lightly pull the eardrum in and out.

It's gentler than what you experience when you're in an airplane...

Or when you yawn and your ears pop.

Just enough to send a calming signal through those nerve pathways that reach the brain’s auditory center.


And it was designed by a team of neuro-focused engineers who wanted to make this technology available to everyone.

The instructions were almost embarrassingly simple:

Lightly press the bulb for 10 to 15 seconds
Or put it in your ear no deeper than an earbud, make an airtight seal and let the bulb fill back up naturally.

Use for 1 to 2 minutes on each ear per day. That’s it.

The difference was immediate and undeniable.

After the first 2-minute session, I noticed the ringing getting quieter by about 30%.

And by week 2, my tinnitus was down by more than half.

I didn’t need background noise. I didn’t need distraction.

The change was remarkable:
- I could fall asleep without white noise. Just quiet.
- I sat outside one morning and actually heard birdsong for the first time in years, not filtered through static.
- I was finally able to focus at work without that underlying hum driving me to the edge.

It felt so peaceful that I could’ve cried.

I’ve now been using it for 2 months. The noise hasn’t gone away completely — but it’s down by about 80%.

Sometimes it feels so subtle I think I might be imagining it.

It was about the constant battle to stay focused.

The fear that I would never be able to rest...

The anxiety that comes from knowing any day the sound could become louder or another high pitched tone could come in.

The weight of it all was too much…

I was seriously thinking about medication. I’d already spoken to someone.

But now? I feel like myself again.