The tinnitus tapping trick has never been tested in a study, but it most likely borrows residual inhibition — a sound briefly suppressing tinnitus — which works for some people, not all, and lasts seconds to minutes.
That is a less exciting answer than the video gives, and a more useful one. The effects the trick most likely draws on are well studied, and they would explain both why some people get a moment of quiet and why the quiet does not stay.
What the trick asks you to do
The version that spread on Twitter and Reddit in 2022 is simple: cover your ears with your palms and thump the back of your head with your fingers for 15 to 30 seconds. A longer version, which the Reddit post appears to have been adapted from, has you rest your fingers on the back of your head, place your index fingers on top of your middle fingers, and snap them down onto the skull to make a loud drumming noise, 40 to 50 times.
By 2024 a version was among the viral TikTok tinnitus exercises, and a 2024 article on those videos gave it a technical name, "suboccipital muscle release", passing on the suggestion that tension in the muscles at the base of the skull and top of the spine is linked to tinnitus and that tapping relieves it.
The Reddit post at the centre of the 2022 wave claimed it made tinnitus go away for a while for most people, and sometimes for the rest of the day for its author. Neither claim came with any data.
Has anyone tested it?
No. A search of PubMed for this article, in September 2026, found no trial, case series or survey of the tapping trick, of drumming on the skull, or of anything close enough to stand in for it. Nobody has measured how many people it helps, by how much, or for how long.
What exists is research on the effects the trick most plausibly relies on. None of that research involved tapping, so everything below is inference from neighbouring evidence: reasonable inference, but not a result.
The likeliest explanation: a sound that briefly silences tinnitus
Covering the ears and drumming on the skull makes a loud noise inside the head, and a loud sound followed by quiet resembles the setup for a well-studied effect: residual inhibition, the brief suppression of tinnitus after a sound stops.
A systematic review of 17 studies and 1,066 patients found that sound produced complete residual inhibition in 34.5% of them, with a range across studies from 5.6% to 72%. Counting partial suppression as well, a 2026 study from Regensburg summarises earlier work as finding that 40–90% of people with tinnitus experience some brief suppression after sound, and describes the effect as lasting from seconds to minutes.
One account of how tinnitus arises is that after damage to the ear, the central hearing pathways turn their own activity up to compensate, and the brain is thought to read that overactivity as sound. A 2019 review in Hearing Research sets out that account and describes how, in animals, a sound suppresses that spontaneous firing for a short time afterwards, in a way that closely resembles residual inhibition in people with tinnitus.
Two findings from this research explain why the trick would work patchily at best:
- The kind of sound matters. The review found residual inhibition more often after pure tones and narrowband noise centred on the person's own tinnitus pitch. Finger drumming is not tuned to anyone's tinnitus.
- Duration matters, and the drumming is short. Residual inhibition tends to last longer when the sound producing it lasts longer. The Reddit post suggested 15 to 30 seconds of drumming; the Regensburg study used sounds lasting 3 and 20 minutes.
Even with minutes of carefully chosen sound, the relationship is not simple. The Regensburg team found the best of eight sounds for each of 33 participants who had experienced suppression, then played it for 3 minutes and for 20. At group level the longer sound made no significant difference: 12 people had better suppression after 20 minutes, 12 had worse, and 9 showed no clear change.
Silencing tinnitus with sound is individual even in the laboratory, so a one-size video trick should be expected to work for some people and not others.
A second route: touch to the head and neck
The trick also presses on and taps the back of the head, and that matters because tinnitus is not only an ear signal. In somatic tinnitus, the sound changes with physical contact or movement. A 2017 scoping review traces the most likely mechanism to the dorsal cochlear nucleus, a brainstem relay where signals from the ear interact with signals from other senses, including touch.
This is common, and not confined to people who seek help for tinnitus. In a study of 163 patients who performed 19 neck and jaw manoeuvres, tinnitus changed in 57.1% of ears tested. A 2004 study found that about 80% of people recruited outside the clinic who had tinnitus at the time of testing could change it with forceful head and neck contractions, and that over half of those with no tinnitus could bring on a tinnitus-like sound the same way. Its authors concluded that somatic influence on hearing appears to be a fundamental property of the auditory system.
The back of the head is part of standard testing. A 2022 review that catalogued 35 somatic manoeuvres across the jaw, head and neck, eyes and limbs lists pushing against resistance with force applied to the occiput, the back of the skull where the trick is performed, among them.
Two cautions belong with this. These studies used forceful muscle contractions and sustained pressure, not light tapping, so they show a plausible route rather than proof that tapping takes it. And the change can go either way: in the 163-patient study, neck manoeuvres generally made tinnitus quieter while jaw manoeuvres made it louder, and loud tinnitus and low-pitched tonal tinnitus were more likely to get worse during testing.
A third ingredient: expectation and natural drift
Anyone trying the trick has just watched a video promising relief, and tinnitus ratings can move without any active treatment at all. Placebo arms improve too: a 2024 meta-analysis of the placebo arms of 23 randomised drug trials found that tinnitus handicap scores improved by 5.6 points on the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory with a dummy treatment, and loudness ratings by 0.8 points (p = 0.05), a change at the edge of statistical significance. That change mixes expectation with natural fluctuation and regression to the mean, which those trials cannot separate.
Those were placebo pills and ear injections in drug trials, not a single round of drumming, so the figures do not transfer. The point is only that how someone rates their tinnitus after trying something reflects more than the thing itself. What happens if you do nothing covers the forces that make tinnitus scores drift.
The three explanations are not rivals. A single round of tapping could involve all of them, and without a study nobody can say how much each contributes.
Why it does not last, and why repeating it is unproven
Residual inhibition fades, and the systematic review concluded that evidence for using it as a management option is still pending.
The somatic route has been tested for repetition. In a 2007 study, 38 people with tinnitus performed 9 head and neck muscle manoeuvres, were tested and retested, and then practised the manoeuvres for 2 months. Modulation during the manoeuvres was consistent: 57.9% at the first test, 63.2% at retest and 55.3% after training, and after training the pattern shifted towards more improvement and less worsening. Their daily perception of tinnitus was unchanged.
A 2022 review notes that some studies have suggested repeated manoeuvres might ease tinnitus, but concludes that evidence that the manoeuvres themselves bring relief is still lacking, with few studies and inconsistent results. No study has tested repeating the tapping trick, so doing it many times a day has no evidence behind it as a treatment. At best it offers a short quiet spell.
Is it safe to try?
Nobody has studied its safety, so there is no evidence either way. A few sensible limits follow from what is known:
- Keep it gentle. The trick's own instructions centre on the drumming sound, so there is no reason to hit hard.
- Stop if it hurts, or if the tinnitus gets louder. Head and neck stimulation made tinnitus worse for some people in the manoeuvre studies above.
- Skip it if ordinary sounds are already a problem. With hyperacusis, a drumming noise inside covered ears is not a comfortable experiment.
- Try it a few times, not all day. If it does nothing, you are in good company: across the studies in the review, most people did not get complete suppression from sound. Checking again and again whether the sound has gone keeps attention on it, the loop tinnitus flare-ups describes.
If tapping or pressing changes your tinnitus
A consistent change when you press on or move your neck or jaw is useful information. It suggests a somatic component, and somatic tinnitus explains how to check for one.
When that component is clear, a 2023 review describes musculoskeletal physical therapy aimed at the neck, the jaw joint or both, combining counselling, exercises and hands-on techniques. It reports that in people correctly diagnosed with somatic tinnitus, this usually reduces tinnitus severity or loudness, with total remission rare. The benefit may not hold: in a randomised trial of 38 people with tinnitus and neck complaints, 53% had a substantial improvement in their tinnitus straight after six weeks of neck physical therapy, but only 24% still did six weeks later. Physical therapy for somatic tinnitus sets out the trials. Describing exactly what changes the sound, and in which direction, gives an audiologist or physical therapist something concrete to work with.
Why the video's popularity is not evidence
The trick is free, takes seconds and spread widely, but none of that says how often it works.
When researchers rated the first 100 YouTube videos returned for tinnitus searches, the 66 they analysed had been watched about 12.8 million times between them. Their overall reliability was poor, and popularity did not track usefulness: videos with more views, likes and comments tended to score lower. Tinnitus myths checks other popular beliefs against the evidence, and checking a treatment yourself shows how to judge one with no studies behind it.
What helps for longer
NIDCD states that there is currently no cure for tinnitus but there are ways to reduce symptoms, naming sound therapy devices including hearing aids, behavioural therapies and medications among the common approaches. Sound therapy, hearing aids where there is hearing loss, and CBT each have their own article, and the treatment comparison sets the evidence side by side.
For a bad moment right now, background sound and a few minutes of guided breathing are alternatives that do not depend on a trick working.
When to see a clinician instead
NIDCD's advice for anyone with tinnitus is to start with a primary care doctor, who will check for earwax or fluid from an ear infection. How tinnitus is diagnosed describes what an assessment involves.
Tinnitus that arrives with a sudden drop in hearing is different. NIDCD advises treating sudden deafness as a medical emergency and seeing a doctor immediately, and sudden hearing loss explains why the first days matter. Tinnitus that pulses with your heartbeat, or sits in one ear, has its own articles in pulsatile tinnitus and tinnitus in one ear, and the when to seek care checker sorts symptoms by urgency.