Safeguarding 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 especially true if you don’t consider your daily environment to be especially 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.
The more you can do to delay the impairment of your hearing, the longer you’ll be capable of enjoying the sounds around you.
Tip 1: Wearable Ear Protection
Using ear protection is the most sensible and simple way to safeguard your ears. This means that diminishing loud and harmful sound is a basic step you should take.
This means that when it’s needed most people will want to use ear protection. Two basic forms of protection are available:
- Ear Plugs, which are placed in the ear canal.
- Ear Muffs, which are placed over the ears.
Neither form of hearing protection is inherently better than the other. There are advantages to each style. What’s important is that you pick some hearing protection that you feel comfortable with.
Tip 2: When Sound Gets Dangerous, be Aware of It
But
Typically sounds become dangerous at the following levels:
- Over 100 dB: Your ears can be very quickly injured by this. Damage is done in around thirty seconds with sounds over this limit. For example, jet engines and rock concerts will injure your hearing in 30 seconds.
- 85 decibels (dB): After around two hours this volume of sound is damaging.This is the level of sound you’d expect from a busy city street or your hairdryer.
- 95-100 dB: This is about the sound level you’d get from farm equipment or the normal volume of your earbuds. After about 15-20 minutes this level of sound becomes dangerous.
Tip 3: Use Your Phone as a Sound Meter
We can take steps to minimize our exposure, now that we have a concept of what volumes will be hazardous. But in day to day life, it can be difficult trying to measure what is too 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.
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: Keep an Eye on Your Volume Buttons
A smartphone with earbuds is usually the way people listen to music these days. Your hearing is put in danger with this combination. Your ears 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 focused eye on your volume management. In order to drown out sounds somewhere else, you should never increase the volume. in order to make certain that volume doesn’t get too loud, we recommend using volume configurations or app settings.
If your hearing begins to decline, earbuds can become something of a negative feedback loop; you could find yourself consistently increasing the volume of your earbuds in order to compensate for your declining hearing, doing more damage to your ears in the process.
Tip 5: Get Your Hearing Examined
You may think of a hearing test as something you schedule when your hearing has already started to diminish. The problem is that it’s not always easy to identify a problem in your hearing without a baseline to compare results to.
Creating data that can be used for both diagnostic purposes and for treatment can be best accomplished by scheduling a hearing test and screening. This will give you some extra perspective for future hearing choices and ear protection.
Pay Attention to Your Hearing
In an ideal world, protecting your hearing would be something you could do constantly without any problem. But there will always be obstacles. So safeguard your hearing when you can, as often as you can. Also, get regular hearing examinations. Hopefully, these guidelines will help you get a good start.