Everybody should look after their ears and hearing because injury to the auditory system may be irreversible. It is crucial to keep and safeguard your remaining hearing if you suffer from hearing loss, because interacting freely with others is essential.
Because hearing loss is usually progressive, most individuals are unaware of it until friends or family point it out. Hearing loss typically goes unreported because our brains are excellent at closing in the gaps using a blend of lipreading and understanding the context of the dialogue.
Even in regular activities and settings, hearing is fragile and prone to injury. In this post, we’ll go over certain risk areas that aren’t always visible when it comes to hearing protection, as well as some helpful hints for minimising harm.
Reasons You Should Wear Ear Protection
Ear protection is a critical component of hearing protection throughout several activities. Any sound louder than 85 dB can cause hearing impairment, particularly if repeated. It is essential to be conscious of the activities that damage your hearing and to use ear protection when participating in them.
We can’t emphasise how ear blockers can prove helpful in such situations. With that in mind, below are some more reasons why you should protect your hearing at all costs.
Your sense of hearing is delicate
The most important reason to use ear protection is that your hearing is highly vulnerable. Even brief contact with deafening noises might cause long-term hearing loss. Hearing loss is inevitable as you get older but causing damage to your hearing when you’re young might exacerbate this normal process.
It helps to prevent disorders like tinnitus
Tinnitus is a typical hearing problem in which you experience a continual buzzing or ringing in your ears. Consider hearing your fire alarm go off in the distance for weeks or months at a time — this is what tinnitus feels like. Tinnitus is frequently caused by exposure to deafen noises, such as drilling, blasts, or thunderous music.
You can reduce your chances of getting tinnitus by wearing ear protection when subjected to these sounds. Hearing a loud sound can harm your inner ear, resulting in the ringing or buzzing noise that tinnitus produces.
It is impossible to restore your hearing after it has been impaired
Once your hearing has been compromised, there are some options for managing it, such as hearing aids, but once it is damaged, it is irreversible. Tragically, your eardrum and other sensitive inner ear parts cannot be repaired to the point where your hearing loss can be restored.
You can’t get your hearing back after you’ve injured it; that is why it’s so vital to take care of your ears and use earmuffs when necessary. If you don’t use ear protection while subjected to loud noises, you’ll only regret it afterward.
This emphasises the importance of using proper ear protection in noisy situations. Fortunately, there are a variety of ear protection alternatives available to help you avoid hearing loss.
Ways to Protect Your Ears and Hearing Health
Put on hearing protection
Wear hearing protection such as earplugs or protective earbuds when in a noisy setting. Earplugs are most likely available at your local pharmacy or music supply shop, but you can also inquire with your audiologist for more details. Your audiologist could suggest personalized earplugs for people frequently subjected to noise. Before entering any noisy location, consider “ear protection.”
- Any loud entertainment, including rock concerts, is prohibited.
- Sites of construction
- Claustrophobic workplaces
- Airports, railroad terminals, and bus stops
- Mowing the lawn or blowing the leaves
- Automobile racing
- Shooting or hunting
Make your personalised earphone moulds
Personalised earphone moulds are an excellent choice if you frequently play music on earbuds with a piece of portable music or video device. Customized ear moulds that fit the specific shape of your ear canal and hook up to the earphone’s wires are pretty affordable. Because the bespoke ear molds exclude outside noise, you will notice a significant improvement in sound quality.
Others are developed for artists and those who are subjected to noise. Your audiologist can assist you in determining which style is most appropriate for you.
Keep an eye on your gadgets’ volume.
Maintain a reasonable sound level while viewing television or using smartphones. It should be loud enough to hear without straining but not so loud that you can still listen to it when you leave the room. The following are some simple guidelines to help you listen to music on your phone or tablet.
- Adjust your headphone volume levels in a peaceful setting, not in a noisy background.
- If you can’t hear what others are saying, turn down the volume.
- Avoid utilizing a listening device in situations where being distracted from your environment could be dangerous, such as driving or operating machinery.
- Keep track of how long you listen to loud music. Over time, your ears adjust to greater volume levels, which means you can harm your hearing even if the loudness does not bother you.
- The faster noise affects your hearing, the higher the loudness. Quit listening and check your hearing if you have ringing in your ears or speech that sounds distorted.
How to Protect Your Hearing at Work
When can occupational noise cause hearing impairment? And besides, we dwell in a society wherein loud noises are commonplace, such as those created by heavy traffic or the music generously shared through the open windows of the car parked beside you.
And then there’s the one who mistakenly believes headphones are speakers and plays music loud enough for everybody in the room to hear. Yes, there is a lot of noise. Yes, excessive loudness can cause hearing loss.
There’s no doubt that the instruments we use in our jobs generate a lot of noise, but that doesn’t mean workers are at risk of losing their hearing. We limit the likelihood of our personnel developing industrial hearing loss by putting in place suitable professional hearing protection procedures to remove, minimize, and shield against potentially harmful noise exposures.
What role do our work tools and settings play in this?
- Air compressors at 3 feet away record 92 dB, which would induce hearing damage in less than 2 hours.
- Powered drills have a decibel level of 98, which is harmful after 30 minutes.
- Most factories can reach 100 decibels, which is equal to 15 minutes of contact.
- From 3 feet, powered saws can achieve 110 dB, causing permanent hearing damage in less than 2 minutes.
Hearing loss is quite possible if employees are subjected to these sound levels without protection. Noise surveillance utilizing specialized equipment is the only way of knowing the actual levels of noise to which employees are subjected, albeit this is only necessary when exposures are high.
Hearing Protection Measures at Work
As an employer, it is your job to make sure your employees work in a safe and sound environment. While you can remove the tools that cause this disturbance, it’s, however, unachievable as some injuries can’t be what they are today without these tools.
So, what’s the ultimate solution? You can also endeavour to limit employee noise exposure. There are tools and machinery on the market that are engineered to work at lower dB, lowering the risk of hearing loss.