Protecting your hearing is much like eating right. It sounds smart, but not many of us have a good idea of where to begin. This is particularly true if you don’t consider your daily environment to be very noisy and there aren’t any noticeable dangers to your ears. But your ears and senses can be stressed by daily living, so doing these hearing protection tips can help preserve your auditory acuity.
The more you can do to slow down the deterioration of your hearing, the longer you’ll be able to enjoy the sounds around you.
Tip 1: Ear Protection You Can Wear
The most basic and sensible way that you can safeguard your ears is to protect your ears. This means that lessening loud and damaging sound is a basic step you need to take.
This means that when it’s required most people will want to use ear protection. Hearing protection generally comes in two basic forms:
- Ear Plugs, which are placed in the ear canal.
- Ear Muffs, which are put over the ears.
Neither form of hearing protection is inherently better than the other. There are advantages to each style. Your choice of hearing protection should, most importantly, feel comfortable.
Tip 2: Be Aware When Sound Gets Harmful
But how do you know when to use hearing protection? We’re used to connecting harmful noise with painful noise. But much lower volumes of sound can damage your ears than you might believe. After just a couple hours, as an example, the sounds of traffic are enough to injure your ears. An important step in safeguarding your hearing, then, is recognizing when sound becomes harmful.
The following threshold is when sound becomes harmful:
- Over 100 dB: Your ears can be very rapidly injured by this. Anything above this limit can damage your hearing in minutes or seconds. As an example, jet engines and rock concerts will injure your ears in 30 seconds.
- 85 decibels (dB): After around two hours this level of sound is dangerous.Your hairdryer or a busy city street are both circumstances where you will find this volume of sound.
- 95-100 dB: This is the normal level of your earbuds or the level of farm equipment. This level of sound becomes harmful after 15-20 minutes.
Tip 3: Your Phone Can Be a Sound Meter
Now that we have a basic understanding of what volume of noise might be harmful, we can take some precautions to ensure we limit our exposure. The trick is that, once you’re out in the real world, it can be difficult to gauge what’s loud and what isn’t.
That’s where your smartphone can become a handy little tool. There are dozens of apps for iPhone, Android, and everything in between that turn your device’s microphone into a sound meter.
Having a dynamic sound meter with you will help you measure everything you’re hearing in decibels, so you’ll have a far better idea of what harmful levels really sound like in your everyday life.
Tip 4: Keep Track of Your Volume Settings
A smartphone with earbuds is normally the way people listen to music nowadays. Your hearing is put at risk with this combination. Your hearing can be considerably harmed if you set your earbuds to high over a long period of time.
That’s why protecting your hearing means keeping a focused eye on your volume control. You should not increase the volume to drown out sounds somewhere else. And we recommend using apps or configurations to make sure that your volume doesn’t unintentionally become hazardously high.
If your hearing begins to wane, earbuds can become something of a negative feedback loop; you could find yourself consistently raising the volume of your earbuds so that you can make up for your faltering hearing, and in the process doing more damage to your ears.
Tip 5: Have Your Hearing Tested
You might think that having a hearing exam is something you do only when your hearing starts to wane. The issue is that it’s not always easy to detect a problem in your hearing without a baseline to compare results to.
Generating data that can be used for both diagnostic purposes and for treatment can be best accomplished by scheduling a hearing exam and screening. This will give you some extra context for future hearing decisions and ear protection.
Keep an Eye on Your Ears
It would be ideal if you could continuously safeguard your ears without any hassles. But challenges are will always be there. So anytime you can and as often as possible, protect your ears. You should also get your ears examined regularly. Use these suggestions to improve your chances.