Comment by andai
7 hours ago
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.
For me I describe it more as trying to open your jaw with the muscles near your ear, while holding the jaw in place with the main jaw muscles. Like an isometric hold.
I actually didn't know I could do it until now, I could always get the click and it's how I clear ear popping sensations but I didn't realize it I push it harder I get the hollow voice thing and apparently it's useful for diving. Cool.