Eating right and safeguarding your hearing have some similarities. It’s difficult to know where to start even though it sounds like a good idea. If there aren’t any obvious noise risks and you don’t consider your daily environment to be especially noisy, this is especially true. But daily life can put stress on your ears and your senses, so practicing these hearing protection tips can help preserve your auditory acuity.

The more you can do to delay the degeneration of your hearing, the longer you’ll be capable of enjoying the sounds around you.

Tip 1: Wearable Hearing Protection

Using hearing protection is the most practical and basic way to safeguard your ears. This means that diminishing loud and damaging sound is a basic step you should take.

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

• 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 type has its advantages. Your choice of hearing protection should, most notably, feel comfortable.

Tip 2: Be Aware When Sound Gets Dangerous

But how can you be sure when to use hearing protection? We’re used to associating dangerous noise with painful noise. But in reality, noises can begin to damage your ears at a much lower level than you might anticipate. The sounds of traffic, for instance, are loud enough to start injuring your hearing after just a couple of hours. An important step in safeguarding your hearing, then, is knowing when sound becomes dangerous.

The following threshold is when sound becomes harmful:

• 85 decibels (dB): After around 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 ears can be very rapidly injured by this. Injury is done in around thirty seconds with noises over this threshold. Jet engines and rock concerts, for instance, can damage your ears in about thirty seconds.
• 95-100 dB: This is about the noise level you’d get from farm equipment or the typical volume of your earbuds. After around 15-20 minutes this level of noise becomes dangerous.

Tip 3: Your Phone Can Be a Sound Meter

Now that we have a basic idea of what levels of noise might be hazardous, we can take some precautions to ensure we minimize our exposure. The trick is that, once you’re out and about in the real world, it can be challenging to determine what’s too loud and what isn’t.

That’s where your smartphone can become a handy little tool. Sound meter apps exist for every type of smartphone.

Having a dynamic sound meter with you will help you evaluate everything you’re hearing in decibels, so you’ll have a much better understanding of what harmful levels actually sound like in your everyday life.

Tip 4: Keep an Eye on Your Volume Settings

A smartphone with earbuds is commonly the way people listen to music nowadays. Your hearing is put in danger with this combination. Your hearing can be considerably damaged if you set your earbuds to high over a long period of time.

That’s why safeguarding your ears means keeping a focused eye on your volume management. In order to drown out sounds somewhere else, you should not raise the sound level. And we recommend using apps or configurations to ensure that your volume never unintentionally become hazardously high.

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

Tip 5: Have Your Hearing Tested

You might think that getting a hearing test is something you do only when your hearing starts to wane. The difficulty is that it’s not always easy to identify a problem in your ears without a baseline to compare results to.

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

Pay Attention to Your Hearing

In an ideal world, protecting your ears would be something you could do continuously without any difficulty. But challenges are always going to be there. So protect your ears whenever you can, as often as possible. Also, get regular hearing examinations. Hopefully, these guidelines will help you get a good start.