Eating right and safeguarding your hearing have some parallels. It’s difficult to know where to begin even though it sounds like a good idea. If there aren’t any apparent noise risks and you don’t consider your daily environment to be particularly noisy, this is especially true. But your ears and senses can be stressed by everyday living, so doing these hearing protection techniques can help maintain your auditory acuity.

The more you can do to slow down the impairment of your hearing, the longer you’ll be able to enjoy the sounds around you.

Tip 1: Wearable Hearing Protection

The most basic and practical way that you can safeguard your ears is to protect your ears. This means taking basic actions to minimize the amount of loud and harmful noises you’re subjected to.

For many people, this will mean wearing ear protection when it’s called for. Two basic forms of protection are available:

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

Neither form of hearing protection is inherently better than the other. Each style has its positive aspects. What’s significant is that you pick some hearing protection that you feel comfortable with.

Tip 2: Be Aware When Sound Gets Dangerous

But how can you be sure when to wear hearing protection? We’re used to associating harmful noise with painful noise. But honestly, sounds can start to damage your ears at a much lower volume than you might expect. The sounds of traffic, for instance, are loud enough to start damaging your hearing after just a couple of hours. Recognizing when sound becomes harmful, then, is a vital step in safeguarding your hearing.

The following threshold is when sound becomes hazardous:

• 85 decibels (dB): After about two hours this volume of sound is harmful.This is the level of sound you’d expect from a busy city street or your hairdryer.
• Over 100 dB: Your hearing can be very rapidly injured by this. Anything over this threshold can injure your hearing in minutes or seconds. For example, rock concerts and jet engines will injure your hearing in 30 seconds.
• 95-100 dB: This is about the noise level you’d expect from farm equipment or the typical volume of your earbuds. After around 15-20 minutes this volume of noise becomes harmful.

Tip 3: Use Your Phone as a Sound Meter

Now that we have a general understanding of what volume of noise could be harmful, we can take some precautions to ensure we minimize our exposure. But in real life, it can be tricky trying to determine 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.

Having a live sound meter with you will help you evaluate everything you’re hearing in decibels, so you’ll have a much better understanding of what dangerous levels really sound like in your daily life.

Tip 4: Monitor Your Volume Buttons

A smartphone with earbuds is usually the way people listen to music these days. This creates a dangerous scenario for your hearing. Your hearing can be considerably harmed if you set your earbuds to high over a long period of time.

Somonitoring the volume control means protecting your ears. In order to drown out sounds elsewhere, you should not increase the sound level. in order to make sure that volume doesn’t get too high, we suggest using volume configurations or app settings.

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

Tip 5: Get Your Hearing Checked

You may think that having a hearing test is something you do only when your hearing begins to diminish. Without a baseline to compare results to, it’s not always easy to detect a problem in your hearing.

Scheduling a hearing screening or exam is a good way to obtain data that can be used for both treatment and diagnostic purposes, making certain that all of your future hearing (and hearing protection) decisions have a little bit of added context and information.

Pay Attention to Your Hearing

It would be ideal if you could constantly safeguard your hearing without any issues. But there are always going to be obstacles. So protect your hearing whenever you can, as often as you can. You should also get your hearing examined regularly. Hopefully, these tips will help you get a good start.