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Woman protects her hearing with ear muffs while doing yardwork.

Eating right and protecting your hearing have some similarities. It’s hard to know where to start even though it sounds like a smart idea. This is especially true if you don’t think your daily environment is particularly noisy and there aren’t any obvious risks to your ears. But day-to-day life can stress your ears and your senses, so your auditory acuity can be maintained 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 degeneration of your hearing.

Tip 1: Wearable Ear Protection

Using hearing protection is the most practical and simple way to safeguard your ears. This means taking basic steps to reduce the amount of loud and damaging noises you’re exposed to.

This means that when it’s required most people will want to use hearing protection. Hearing protection generally comes in two basic forms:

  • Ear Muffs, which are put over the ears.
  • Ear Plugs, which are put in the ear canal.

Neither form of hearing protection is inherently better than the other. There are positive aspects to each style. What’s essential is that you get some hearing protection that you feel comfortable with.

Tip 2: Be Aware When Sound Gets Dangerous

But when to wear hearing protection is the question. We’re used to connecting dangerous noise with painful noise. But honestly, noises can begin to damage your hearing at a much lower volume than you might anticipate. After only a couple hours, for instance, the sounds of traffic are enough to injure your ears. A vital step in protecting your hearing, then, is recognizing when sound becomes dangerous.

Usually sounds become dangerous at the following levels:

  • 95-100 dB: This is about the sound level you’d get from farm equipment or the typical volume of your earbuds. This level of sound becomes harmful after 15-20 minutes.
  • Over 100 dB: Your hearing can be very rapidly injured by this. Anything above this limit can damage your hearing in minutes or seconds. Rock concerts and jet engines, for instance, can damage your hearing in around thirty seconds.
  • 85 decibels (dB): This volume of sound is harmful after roughly two hours of exposure. Your hairdryer or a busy city street are both scenarios where you will find this level of sound.

Tip 3: Use Your Phone as a Sound Meter

We can take precautions to minimize our exposure, now that we have an idea of what levels will be hazardous. But in day to day life, it can be difficult trying to determine what is too loud and what isn’t.

Your smartphone can now be used as 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 idea of what hazardous levels of noise actually sound like, use your sound meter to confirm the decibel level of everything you are hearing.

Tip 4: Monitor Your Volume Settings

The majority of people today listen to music using their phone or smart device, and they normally use earbuds while they do it. Your hearing is put in danger with this setup. Over years of use, earbuds set to a substantially high volume can cause significant injury to your hearing.

So keeping an eye on the volume control means safeguarding your ears. You should not increase the volume to drown out sounds somewhere else. in order to make sure that volume doesn’t get too high, we recommend using volume configurations or app settings.

Earbud use can become a negative feedback loop if your hearing starts to decline; you could find yourself consistently raising the volume of your earbuds so that you can make up for your declining hearing, and in the process doing more harm to your ears.

Tip 5: Have Your Hearing Examined

You may think of a hearing exam as something you schedule when your hearing has already begun to diminish. The issue is that it’s not always easy to identify a problem in your ears without a baseline to compare results to.

Acquiring data that can be used for both diagnostic applications and for treatment can best be achieved by scheduling a hearing examination and screening. This will give you some extra perspective for future hearing decisions and ear protection.

Keep an Eye on Your Hearing

In an ideal world, protecting your hearing would be something you could do constantly without any difficulty. But there will always be difficulties. So anytime you can and as often as possible, protect your hearing. You should also get your ears examined routinely. Hopefully, these tips will give you a good start.
