Eating right and protecting your hearing have some parallels. It sounds smart, but not many of us have a good concept of where to begin. This is especially true if you don’t think your daily environment is very noisy and there aren’t any apparent risks to your ears. But daily life can stress your ears and your senses, so your auditory acuity can be maintained if you practice these tips.
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
Using ear protection is the most sensible and simple way to safeguard your hearing. This means that diminishing loud and harmful sound is a basic step you should take.
This means that when it’s required most people will want to use ear protection. Hearing protection commonly 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 advantages. What’s important is that you find some hearing protection that you feel comfortable wearing.
Tip 2: When Sound Becomes Harmful, be Aware of It
But
The following threshold is when sound becomes harmful:
- 95-100 dB: This is about the noise level you’d get from farm equipment or the normal volume of your earbuds. This level of noise becomes damaging after 15-20 minutes.
- 85 decibels (dB): This level of sound is dangerous after about 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: Your hearing can be very quickly injured by this. Anything above this limit can injure your hearing in minutes or seconds. Rock concerts and jet engines, for example, can damage your hearing in around thirty seconds.
Tip 3: Turn Your Phone Into a Sound Meter
Now that we have a general understanding of what levels of noise could be harmful, we can take some precautions to make sure we minimize our exposure. The trick is that, once you’re out in the real world, it can be hard to gauge what’s 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 understanding of what dangerous 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 usually the way people listen to music these days. This creates a dangerous situation for your hearing. Your hearing can be significantly damaged if you keep your earbuds too loud over a long period of time.
So keeping an eye on the volume control means safeguarding your hearing. You should never increase the volume to drown out sounds somewhere else. And we suggest using apps or configurations to make sure that your volume doesn’t unintentionally become hazardously high.
Earbud use can become something of a negative feedback loop if your hearing begins to decline; you could find yourself constantly raising the volume of your earbuds so that you can make up for your faltering hearing, and in the process doing more harm to your ears.
Tip 5: Get Your Hearing Checked
You might think that having a hearing test is something you do only when your hearing begins to decline. The problem is that it’s not always easy to identify 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 best be accomplished by scheduling a hearing exam and screening. This will give you a little extra perspective for future hearing decisions and ear protection.
Pay Attention to Your Hearing
It would be ideal if you could constantly safeguard your ears without any problems. But there will always be difficulties. So safeguard your ears whenever you can, as often as possible. Also, get regular hearing exams. Use these suggestions to improve your chances.