The world has gone quiet. Your own voice sounds like you’re speaking from the bottom of a well. Every step you take is accompanied by a faint, squishy click deep inside your skull. You are, for all intents and purposes, a human submarine with a stuck hatch.

But on the way down? That’s the trap. The air pressure outside your eardrum is now higher than the pressure inside. Your eardrum gets sucked inward like a dented ping-pong ball. The Eustachian tubes, being the lazy gatekeepers they are, don’t want to let higher-pressure air back up into the ear. They collapse shut. You are now a prisoner of the vacuum.

You’ve survived the middle seat. You’ve forgiven the toddler who kicked your chair. You’ve watched the GPS map trace a lazy arc across the country. Now, you’ve landed. You gather your bags, step into the jet bridge, and realize something is terribly, cosmically wrong.

Most people panic. They jam a finger in their ear and wiggle. They yawn aggressively at strangers. They chew gum like a stressed-out cow. And sometimes, nothing happens. The ear remains stubbornly, infuriatingly stuck .

If you feel sharp pain, liquid leaking from your ear, or if the blockage lasts longer than 48 hours, see a doctor. You might have actually ruptured something, or have a middle ear effusion (fluid trapped behind the drum) that requires a steroid or a minor procedure.