Protect Your Hearing With These Tips

Eating right and safeguarding your hearing have some similarities. It's hard to know where to start even though it sounds like a smart idea. This is particularly true if you don't consider your daily environment to be particularly noisy and there aren't any noticeable dangers to your ears. But daily life can stress your ears and your senses, so your auditory acuity can be preserved if you practice these tips.

The more you can do to slow the deterioration of your hearing, the longer you'll be capable of enjoying the sounds around you.

Tip 1: Wearable Hearing Protection

Using ear protection is the most practical and basic way to safeguard your ears. This means taking basic actions to lessen the amount of loud and harmful noises you're exposed to.

This means that when it's warranted most people will want to use ear protection. Two general forms of protection are available:

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

Neither form of hearing protection is inherently better than the other. There are benefits to each type. What's important is that you get some hearing protection that you feel comfortable wearing.

Tip 2: Be Aware When Sound Becomes Harmful

But when to wear hearing protection is the question. Noise that is painful is normally regarded as harmful. But much lower levels of sound can harm your ears than you might realize. After just a couple hours, for instance, the sounds of traffic are enough to damage your hearing. A vital step in safeguarding your hearing, then, is recognizing when sound becomes dangerous.

Generally sounds become harmful at the following levels:

• Over 100 dB: In this situation, you can injure your hearing very quickly. Anything above this limit can injure your hearing in minutes or seconds. Jet engines and rock concerts, for instance, can injure your ears in around thirty seconds.
• 85 decibels (dB): This level of sound is dangerous after roughly two hours of exposure. This is the level of sound you'd expect from a busy city street or your hairdryer.
• 95-100 dB: This is about the noise level you'd get from farm equipment or the typical volume of your earbuds. This level of noise becomes damaging after 15-20 minutes.

Tip 3: Turn Your Phone Into a Sound Meter

Now that we have a general concept of what volume of sound may be dangerous, we can take some precautions to make sure we limit our exposure. The trick is that, once you're out in the real world, it can be difficult to measure what's 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 understanding of what harmful levels of noise actually sound like, use your sound meter to confirm the decibel level of everything you are hearing.

Tip 4: Keep an Eye on Your Volume Settings

The majority of people these days listen to music via their phone or smart device, and they normally use earbuds while they do it. This sets up a dangerous situation for your hearing. Your ears can be considerably harmed if you keep your earbuds too loud over a long period of time.

So keeping an eye on the volume control means safeguarding your ears. You should never raise the volume to drown out noises elsewhere. And we recommend using apps or configurations to ensure that your volume doesn't accidentally become hazardously high.

Earbud use can become a negative feedback loop if your hearing starts to wane; in order to make up for your faltering hearing, you could find yourself continuously rising the volume of your earbuds, and in the process doing more damage to your hearing.

Tip 5: Have Your Hearing Examined

You may think of a hearing test as something you schedule when your hearing has already begun to decline. Without a standard to compare results to, it's not always easy to identify a problem in your hearing.

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

Pay Attention to Your Hearing

It would be ideal if you could continuously protect your ears without any problems. But challenges are will always be there. So whenever you can and as often as possible, protect your hearing. Also, get routine hearing examinations. Put these suggestions into practice to improve your chances.