Rare but useless Voluntary tube opener here. Ask me anything.

https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/voluntary-eustach...

ball_of_lint 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ooh! I also have this (but didn't know the name)!

For me, I'm pretty sure it's related to having just awful seasonal allergies as a child - I'd quite often get stuffed up and have an unfortunate amount of pressure in my sinuses and ears. So then I'd pinch my nose and try to adjust it, eventually realizing I didn't need to pinch my nose.

	▲	adamgordonbell 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My story is similar!

▲

vesterde a day ago | parent | prev [-]

My friend who does free diving would kill to be able to do it! She can't learn it.

▲

andai 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

My mum taught me the ear popping thing, while we were traveling by air, to relieve the ear pressure.

I can do it on command but never paid attention to how before.

It's basically "yawning manually". There's a couple different muscles activating at the same time, most irrelevant to the popping, I can't control them individually yet. (Probably learnable, if I practiced I could probably get the pop more efficiently.)

But yeah, just yawn real wide, that should do it.

A lot of stuff is learnable, like I couldn't move my ears but taught myself how to do it because I was bored.

▲

adamgordonbell a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not a diver but I suspect it can be learned. I have allergy issues that cause my ears to not equalize when allergies are hitting and I think I just learned how to do this. its just sort of muscle that can sort of be lightly controlled. Controlling one side vs the other I can't really manage.

	▲	vesterde 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ye ye, she is frustrated it's taking so long to learn it. It's so valuable for divers.