Reminds me of advise someone gave me. Deadlifting gets rid of back pain. So I don't have an insane amount of weights, but I have roughly 30 to 40lb I can deadlift at home, which does not sound impressive at all, but coincidentally, mundane tasks that would give me back pain no longer did. Also coincidentally, my ability to do pull ups went from 0 to several reps per day. When I stopped, the back pain came back, but now I just deadlift once a week, I picked a mundane amount of weight that is easy, I take my time unless I feel like I can do it quickly with the smaller amount of weight.

You don't need to lift 300lb or whatever and weightlift max to make your body more efficient, you just need to weight lift just enough that you find yourself somewhat getting tired, I don't even work out until I am tired sometimes, and it still feels like it does a lot for my body.

So I've come to learn that in general exercise is good for you overall.

Totally agree. I'll add as an aging "woke up sore" guy, side-sleeping with a knee pillow (just a regular pillow to prevent your knees from aching from pressure) was an enormous improvement.

I (lifelong side sleeper) started using a (dedicated) knee pillow about a decade ago and I am completely torn about them. On the one hand: amazing. Better spinal alignment, zero sensitivity or soreness where the knees meet, better sleep, easily the best $10 I ever spent. On the other hand: I can no longer tolerate the weight of my knees on each other for even a minute. Can’t sleep or even just side-lay for more than thirty seconds without a pillow or a folded blanket or something between my knees without it aching like hell and being too uncomfortable to bear. From speaking to others that adopted knee pillows, it seems to be the same: once you use them, you can never go back.

So now I marvel at how I used to be able to sleep without them and ponder over why we either have no fatty pads (or muscle, even!) on the inside sides of our knees or have reduced sensitivity in that region, since we’re clearly meant to be side sleepers (it’s the healthiest position, assuming you can find a rock or log to place under your head, or even just your hands folded together).

The book I have on how to sleep properly says that on your side you hook your big toe around the Achilles' tendon of the other foot, this offsets the knees.

But it also said to sleep on the floor, and no thanks.

Yes, I found that as a workaround but I can't help but feel it's maladaptive since your spine is no longer aligned.

I also hear that resistance bands as gimicky as they sound, they can be helpful especially for the elderly who have lost mobility, physical therapists on YouTube will say things like: elderly people who cannot go up or down the stairs after using resistance bands find they've regained mobility.

So don't ever sleep on exercise, my biggest take away is you don't need to be a super weight lifter or whatever, you just need to do enough every week that it keeps your body going.

I'm 43 and do mostly stretchy band exercises for upper body workouts to help my neck, shoulder, and arms where I have chronic pain. Takes up very little space, I can do 5-10 minutes throughout the day, and 20 minutes after doing a few sets my pain is much better.

You can actually build some muscle this way - nothing impressive, but way more than I had when I wasn't doing any upper body work.

You have me a good idea. My granny can barely walk. She recently started getting constant alarms on her apple watch about Atrial fibrillation - poor cardiovascular shape.

Excruciating exercising with resistance bands is something she could do too - already started her on doing simple biceps exercises with small weights.

> I take my time unless I feel like I can do it quickly with the smaller amount of weight

What does that mean for you in practice, how long and how many reps?

The more weight the better. There is an expression: break your comfort zone. But more important is an (almost) perfect exercise technique. Then resistance training makes unexpected wonders in all ages.

Agreed, bad posture (not just neck but in general) can cause both tinnitus and RSI-like symptoms in my experience and I have been able to tackle both with proper exercising.

Where I don't agree is the following:

> Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two.

While you can make progress quickly (in the sense that your symptoms become less severe), fixing your posture usually takes much, much longer than that. In fact, if we're being honest here, it's never a one-time fix that you do for some $TIME and then stop doing. The reason being that forces & activities that cause or exacerbate bad posture (sitting, carrying a back pack, sleeping on the side, various sports, doing no sport at all, wearing shoes with a high heel drop, …) are not a one-time thing, either. They act continuously, and so "fixing your posture" must be a continuous life-long activity, too.

It's because of fascia. Special cells called fibroblasts continuously create long fibers forming your fascia. So if you are sitting there with a hunched back, it will eventually stay that way with enough time as your fibroblasts form your fascia into that form.

That anecdotally matches my experience thinking about it.

After my initial hearing damage from someone clearing a rifle before everyone put on hearing protection it took a while for it to attenuate to background noise but flares beyond that volume. Things that certainly avoid flares is when I have a good sleeping setup where I avoid being crumpled or my neck kinked. I have good posture in general but sometimes weird working locations, off site meetings, hackathons, etc would lead to my tinnitus getting worse.

I chalked that up to being physically tired from travel and lacking sleep (both of which seems to also increase my tinnitus)but when reflecting back I don’t recall having much Tinnitus when my son was a newborn through a one year old and I basically slept walk that whole year.

I think on the count back the neck posture and likely the muscles in my neck and head lacking tension is what is keeping it from being worse.

Could you explain more about what "straightening the neck" entails in terms of exercise? I'm interested.

This worked for me: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u9OQMBPrFgI

> I'm interested.

And so was I when I first read about it! I just looked for random YouTube videos that walked you through exercises of how to get rid of your neck hump and bad posture. Most were a mix of exercises that had you basically do the opposite, like lay on your back with a rolled up towel under your shoulders and push your head on the ground, or some general posture exercises like pushing your shoulders back and tense up your neck in a straight position.

I'd recommend to look those up for yourself, as I am terrible at explaining and not a professional, haha. I can't give any specific recommendations as I simply can't find them anymore. But trying to look for them made me realize again just how many there are ...

I can give another recommendation; while you may feel the effects in your neck, it can start well further down from your feet up. Do calf/thigh stretches, tilt your hips "back" (tense your buttocks, do kettlebell swings, dead lifts, squats), shoulder exercises (rows), etc.

You can often tell when people have a desk posture from their hips being tilted backwards and/or pot bellies (even if they're not overweight).

"with just some casual invest everyday only"

Very much so. Also applies to other exercises, for the back, joints .. if you make it a habit, you can do a lot of helpful things for your body, when you wait for something and can resist the urge to pull out your phone to distract yourself.

For me it was related to some benign brain mass'es arm touching my ear nerve. This causes me some hearing loss, and also it was causing tinnitus. However I realized tinnitus directly correlated with my blood pressure. So If I control my blood pressure I don't have it.

Bad posture, and perhaps even more importantly, sitting is a really, really bad thing. There is a reason why taxi drivers have massively shorter life spans than the general population - sitting all day and the following poor circulation is one of the worst things you can do to your body.

By the way, do you have any youtube videos perhaps saved that you followed?

The taxi driver claim is not really supported by any evidence. There was an article going around in 2024 claiming something like "taxi drivers die at 68", but the study it referenced had all kinds of methodological problems and was not actually designed to estimate occupational life expectancy.

"Sitting" is just a stand in for "having a sedentary lifestyle". Anyone who doesn't exercise will have these issues.

That fact doesn't check out. They will have health problems from sitting but it isn't killing them.

jealous. i've had tinnitus ever since i had memories. my literal earliest memories are laying down when i was put down for a nap and vividly paying attention to the sound. dunno if i was born with it or had some crazy ear infection or what but ive just given up that anything can be done. i'm fortunate it's not all bad but i can't sleep without a fan. i sometimes get sad that i genuinely don't know what no sound is like. i've never experienced true silence :/ when im super tired i get some weird auditory effects like the tinnitus sound gets super choppy almost like a rumbly gating flutter like the tubes deep in my ear are spazzing out as im drifting off to sleep. im probably gonna die idk

I'm lucky in that I learned to ignore it over time, so I'm not too bothered by it when I go to sleep. But when I'm particularly mentally exhausted it's much louder than even my retro fridge. Got a noise combo too, as my eyesight is also full of TV static.

I am in the same condition of not knowing silence. My sympathies.

Never too late to see a doctor about it.

Sadly there is - as far as commonplace medicine goes - very little knowledge of what causes tinnitus and doctors have dismissed me multiple time with a consternated shrug.

Exactly, that’s what my doctor did then asked if there’s anything else otherwise it’s 30€ the visit. Worst investment ever.

Opiates allegedly work for tinnitus, I know two people who were prescribed it. If you're ever prescribed any, remember to log how your tinnitus is.

I forgot to, unfortunately.

that seems like a risky move though, doesn't it?

There is no cure for tinnitus, only coping strategies.

> Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two

Could you provide some detail? Even YouTube links would be helpful.

They use to call it rounded shoulders then labeled it as upper cross syndrome.

Our back should be subconsciously contracted. That's the opposite of how we develop and takes effort to develop and more to correct.

Mine is pretty light and I am sure it's neck related because I can change its frequency by moving my neck. However this doesn't mean everybody has this.

"straighten your neck" is not the right phrase. Your neck has a natural curve and it actually becomes straight with bad posture.

I was told this last week, my neck is too straight, probably due to muscle spasms.

I think the vagus nerve is often implicated and probably highly stressed by keyboard warriors from neck to arse.

For how long you had tinnitus before making it disappear, if I may ask.

what sorts of exercises did/do you do for the posture and neck?