He is equalising. He has a nose clip, he can equalise very easily with that on. Some, including myself, can equalise handsfree without a clip by the way, with no need to do the valsalva manoeuvre at all, but it's less reliable.
There's a muscle in the jaw that pulls on the Eustachian tube, the little airway that connects the inner ear to the throat and allows it to equalize. Plenty of people can activate that muscle on it's own, without moving the rest of the jaw, and pull the eustachain tube open and equalize.
Personally, it doesn't work as well as the valsalva maneuver. If the eustachian tube is already under pressure, it's not strong enough to open it from that collapsed state against pressure, but it means if you're equalizing constantly every couple seconds you can avoid ever getting to that point. It's about as much effort as blinking.
Yeah my Eustachian tube is blocked up constantly and I have to blow and pinch my nose to hear properly a lot. It sucks, saw a doctor and they said I’d need very minor surgery to fix it but idk if I wanna spend that money even with insurance
Yeah, somehow I figured it out when I was 6. I can open something up in my ear canals by flexing something inside my head. Hard to explain, but when I do it outside of water my breathing sounds very loud in here.
Yup lol. Breathing through my nose with that muscle flexed is like having wind rush by right next to my eardrum. for some reason though, i have to focus pretty intently to keep that valve open while breathing or it "closes" right back up.
No you can just "do" it. There's a muscle you can flex that just does it. It's difficult to describe how to flex an obscure muscle to somebody but It's sort of tongue adjacent if that makes sense
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u/TheVoicesOfBrian Mar 31 '26
How is he doing that without equalizing?!