Got a buzzing or ringing in your ears? Here’s what the experts say

Diane Green can recall exactly the day unbearable tinnitus entered her life. On December 27, 2025, she suddenly experienced both the loss of hearing in one ear and the unpleasant acquisition of a constant and loud ringing noise that she describes as sounding like Big Ben. She was rushed to hospital in Brisbane, where they tested her every which way for two months, only to conclude they didn’t really know what was causing the problem, just that it wasn’t life-threatening. “They don’t know,” she tells us. “It just happened.”

Fellow sufferer Jennifer Bettess dates her tinnitus back seven years, a noise in her head that sounds like “a thousand cicadas”, an ordeal that has yet to relent. When it appeared, she says, “I thought I had a tumour, I was dying or something.” Emergency examinations quickly ruled out anything sinister. So why couldn’t they figure out what was causing the phantom sound?

Paul Maye’s tinnitus also emerged suddenly, caused, he deduces, by his taking a new medication in 2022. “One day my hearing was fine, the next there was this extremely loud, relentless sound in my head, like a steaming kettle that just never switched off, and I had no idea what it was. At first, it was overwhelming. The noise would not stop. It followed me into work, into conversations, quiet relaxing evenings were now gone. I tried to keep myself busy every minute I could. Living with tinnitus changed every part of my day. Every waking second was now torture. I had to find a completely new way to live.”

Tinnitus, generally described as experiencing a sound that has no external source, affects about one in eight people worldwide, possibly more. For many, the condition is mild, typically a gentle ringing or buzzing usually experienced in particularly quiet times, a sound the brain can often mostly ignore.

For some, though, it can be chronically debilitating, affecting sleep, relationships, work and even the will to live. While the word itself is derived from the Latin for ringing bells, tinnitus can also sound like a jet engine, a fire alarm, escaping steam, buzzing mosquitoes: inescapable, unrelenting and infuriatingly difficult to overcome. What do we know about tinnitus? What are the causes? How is it best treated?

Tinnitus may well be triggered or exacerbated by the audible intrusions of modern life – ear-splitting cinematic sound effects, live music amplified up to 11, constant headphone use and anything else that contributes to hearing loss, one of its main causes (more on that below). But it is far from a contemporary phenomenon. In 1853, Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar) observed tinnitus patients describing the sound as like hearing “water, birds, bees, trees”, if they hailed from the country; “while in towns [people] say that they hear the rolling of carriages, hammerings, steam engines”.

The ancient Egyptian tome Ebers Papyrus contains passages describing ringing in the ears and “a buzzing in the ear like the roar of a waterfall”. Babylonian clay tablets mention ringing, whispering and roaring in the ear, write Doreen Huppert and colleagues in the Journal of Neurology .