Eating right and protecting your hearing have some similarities. It sounds smart, but not many of us have a good idea of where to start. This is especially true if you don’t consider your daily environment to be very noisy and there aren’t any noticeable dangers to your ears. But daily life can put stress on your ears and your senses, so doing these hearing protection tips can help preserve your auditory acuity.
The more you can do to delay the impairment of your hearing, the longer you’ll be able to enjoy the sounds around you.
Tip 1: Hearing Protection You Can Wear
The most basic and practical way that you can safeguard your ears is to protect your ears. This means that diminishing loud and dangerous sound is a basic step you need to take.
For many people, this will mean wearing ear protection when it’s warranted. Hearing protection commonly 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 benefits to each type. Your choice of hearing protection should, most importantly, feel comfortable.
Tip 2: When Sound Gets Harmful, be Aware of It
But how can you be sure when to use hearing protection? We’re used to linking dangerous noise with painful noise. But much lower levels of sound can damage your ears than you might realize. After only a couple hours, as an example, the sounds of traffic are enough to injure your hearing. Recognizing when sound becomes dangerous, then, is a necessary step in safeguarding your hearing.
Generally sounds become dangerous at the following levels:
- Over 100 dB: This is where you can damage your hearing very quickly. Injury is done in about thirty seconds with anything over this threshold. For example, jet engines and rock concerts will damage your ears in 30 seconds.
- 95-100 dB: This is the typical volume of your earbuds or the level of farm equipment. This volume of noise becomes harmful after 15-20 minutes.
- 85 decibels (dB): This level of sound is harmful after roughly two hours of exposure. This is the level of sound you’d expect from a busy city street or your hairdryer.
Tip 3: Turn Your Phone Into a Sound Meter
We can take precautions to limit our exposure, now that we have a concept of what levels will be dangerous. The trick is that, once you’re out in the real world, it can be challenging to determine what’s loud and what isn’t.
Your smartphone can now be used as a handy little tool. Sound meter apps exist for every type of smartphone.
In order to get an idea of what harmful levels of noise really sound like, use your sound meter to confirm the decibel level of everything you are hearing.
Tip 4: Keep Track of Your Volume Settings
A smartphone with earbuds is commonly the way people listen to music nowadays. This creates a dangerous scenario for your hearing. Over years of use, earbuds set to a substantially high volume can cause considerable damage to your ears.
Somonitoring the volume control means safeguarding your ears. In order to drown out noises somewhere else, you should never increase the sound level. in order to make sure that volume doesn’t get too high, we recommend using volume settings or app settings.
Earbud use can become something of a negative feedback loop if your hearing begins to wane; in order to make up for your declining hearing, you may find yourself constantly increasing the volume of your earbuds, and in the process doing more harm to your hearing.
Tip 5: Have Your Hearing Examined
You may think that getting a hearing exam is something you do only when your hearing begins to decline. Without a standard to compare results to, it’s not always easy to detect a problem in your ears.
Scheduling a hearing screening or exam is a good way to generate data that can be used for both treatment and diagnostic purposes, making certain that all of your future hearing (and hearing protection) decisions have a little bit of added context and information.
Pay Attention to Your Hearing
In a perfect world, protecting your ears would be something you could do constantly without any difficulty. But challenges are will always be there. So anytime you can and as often as possible, protect your ears. Also, get routine hearing exams. Hopefully, these tips will help you get a good start.
