Eating right and safeguarding your hearing have some similarities. It’s difficult to know where to begin even though it sounds like a good idea. This is particularly true if you don’t consider your daily environment to be particularly noisy and there aren’t any noticeable risks to your ears. But your ears and senses can be stressed by everyday living, so your auditory acuity can be preserved if you practice these tips.
If you want to keep enjoying the sounds around you, you should 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 basic way to safeguard your ears. This means taking basic actions to lessen the amount of loud and damaging noises you’re exposed to.
For most people, this will mean utilizing hearing protection when it’s needed. Hearing protection generally comes in two basic forms:
- Ear Muffs, which are put over the ears.
- Ear Plugs, which are placed in the ear canal.
Neither form of hearing protection is inherently better than the other. There are benefits to each style. What’s significant is that you find some hearing protection that you feel comfortable with.
Tip 2: When Sound Gets Harmful, be Aware of It
But how can you tell when to wear hearing protection? We’re used to associating harmful noise with painful noise. But in reality, noise can begin to damage your ears at a much lower level than you might anticipate. After just a couple hours, for instance, the sounds of traffic are enough to damage your ears. An important step in protecting your hearing, then, is knowing when sound becomes dangerous.
Typically sounds become harmful at the following thresholds:
- 85 decibels (dB): This volume of sound is hazardous after around two hours of exposure. Your hairdryer or a busy city street are both situations where you will find this volume of sound.
- Over 100 dB: In this situation, you can damage your hearing very quickly. Anything over this limit can injure your hearing in minutes or seconds. As an example, rock concerts and jet engines will damage your ears in 30 seconds.
- 95-100 dB: This is the typical level of your earbuds or the level of farm equipment. This volume of noise becomes damaging after 15-20 minutes.
Tip 3: Use Your Phone as a Sound Meter
Now that we have a basic understanding of what levels of sound may be dangerous, we can take some steps to ensure we minimize our exposure. The trick is that, once you’re out and about in the real world, it can be difficult 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 check the decibel level of everything you are hearing.
Tip 4: Keep an Eye on Your Volume Buttons
Most people today listen to music via their phone or smart device, and they normally use earbuds while they do it. Your hearing is put at risk with this combination. Your hearing can be significantly harmed if you keep your earbuds too loud over a long period of time.
That’s why protecting your hearing means keeping a sharp eye on your volume management. In order to drown out noises elsewhere, you should not raise the volume. And we suggest using apps or settings to make sure that your volume never unintentionally become hazardously high.
If your hearing begins to decline, earbuds can become something of a negative feedback loop; in order to compensate for your declining hearing, you could find yourself constantly increasing the volume of your earbuds, and in the process doing more harm to your ears.
Tip 5: Get Your Hearing Checked
You may think that having a hearing exam is something you do only when your hearing begins to wane. The difficulty is that it’s not always easy to detect a problem in your hearing without a standard to compare results to.
Generating data that can be used for both diagnostic purposes and for treatment can be best achieved by scheduling a hearing test and screening. This will give you some extra context for future hearing choices and ear protection.
Pay Attention to Your Hearing
It would be ideal if you could continuously protect your hearing without any problems. But challenges are always going to be there. So whenever you can and as often as possible, safeguard your ears. Also, get regular hearing exams. Use these suggestions to improve your chances.