Eating right and safeguarding your hearing have some parallels. It sounds good, but not many of us have a good idea of where to start. If there aren’t any obvious noise risks and you don’t think your environment is very noisy, this is especially true. But your ears and senses can be stressed by day-to-day living, so doing these hearing protection tips can help preserve your auditory acuity.
If you want to continue to enjoy the sounds around you, you need to do everything you can to slow down the deterioration of your hearing.
Tip 1: Wearable Hearing Protection
Using ear protection is the most sensible and simple way to safeguard your hearing. This means that decreasing loud and harmful sound is a basic step you need to take.
For most people, this will mean using hearing protection when it’s called for. Hearing protection generally comes in two basic forms:
- Ear Plugs, which are put in the ear canal.
- Ear Muffs, which are placed over the ears.
Neither form of hearing protection is inherently better than the other. Each style has its positive aspects. Your choice of hearing protection should, most importantly, feel comfortable.
Tip 2: When Sound Becomes Dangerous, be Aware of It
But
Generally sounds become harmful at the following thresholds:
- 85 decibels (dB): After around two hours this level of sound is damaging.This is the level of sound you’d expect from a busy city street or your hairdryer.
- Over 100 dB: Your ears can be very quickly damaged by this. Injury is done in around thirty seconds with anything above this threshold. For instance, jet engines and rock concerts will injure your hearing in 30 seconds.
- 95-100 dB: This is about the noise level you’d expect from farm equipment or the normal volume of your earbuds. After around 15-20 minutes this level of noise becomes harmful.
Tip 3: Make Your Phone Into a Sound Meter
We can take steps to limit our exposure, now that we have a concept of what volumes will be hazardous. But in everyday life, it can be challenging trying to determine what is too 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 actually sound like, use your sound meter to check the decibel level of everything you are hearing.
Tip 4: Monitor Your Volume Settings
A smartphone with earbuds is commonly the way people listen to music these days. This creates a dangerous scenario for your hearing. Your ears can be significantly harmed if you set your earbuds to high over a long period of time.
That’s why safeguarding your hearing means keeping a sharp eye on your volume control. You should never increase the volume to drown out sounds somewhere else. in order to make certain that volume doesn’t get too high, we recommend using volume settings or app settings.
Earbud use can become a negative feedback loop if your hearing starts to wane; in order to make up for your declining hearing, you may find yourself constantly increasing the volume of your earbuds, doing more harm to your ears in the process.
Tip 5: Get Your Hearing Checked
You might think of a hearing test as something you schedule when your hearing has already started to decline. The issue is that it’s not always easy to identify a problem in your ears without a baseline to compare results to.
Scheduling a hearing screening or exam is a good way to come up with data that can be used for both treatment and diagnostic purposes, making certain that all of your future hearing (and hearing protection) decisions have some added context and information.
Keep an Eye on Your Hearing
It would be perfect if you could constantly safeguard your ears without any issues. But challenges are always going to be there. So protect your hearing when you can, as often as you can. You should also get your hearing tested regularly. Hopefully, these guidelines will help you get a good start.