How to care for your ears and prevent hearing loss
How to care for your ears and prevent hearing loss. You must be diligent in protecting your ears because the damage is pervasive and irreversible. Here we are going to explore the key features of hearing and how we can protect ourselves from our auditorily toxic environment.
3 Steps to Better Hearing Health provided by ASHA
lower the volume (never go past 5/10)
limit the time spent listening
wear earphones that go around the ear or fit deeper into the ear to better isolate wanted sound and reduce the need to increase the volume
Sound exposure isn’t just about causing hearing loss, it is known to impact cognitive performance in adults as well as negatively impact a child’s development.
Numerous studies have found that “depending on characteristics of sounds and tasks— noise of low to moderate intensity may in fact evoke substantial impairments in performance.”
Not all sounds are created equally and there is a difference between Chopin and a jackhammer however, blasting Chopin is just as damaging as a jackhammer.
Hearing loss is known to cause isolation which leads to depression which has significant health effects including cognitive deficits and memory loss. It has devastating effects on one’s quality of life.
Hearing is the process of turning vibrations from the environment into recognizable information.
There are 3 parts to the ear. The Inner, Middle, and Outer. The inner ear contains the cochlea which has little hairs in it that vibrate in relation to the sounds transmitted against the tympanic membrane (ear drum).
Those signals created by the hairs are transmuted into electro-chemical signals that the brain integrates into sounds via the 8th cranial nerve. The hairs differ in size and volume as they spiral throughout the shell-shaped cochlea. The smaller hairs pick up higher frequency sounds and are the first to get damaged.
Higher FQ sounds in speech are s,h,f. You can see in this speech banana the range of sounds that are impacted by hearing loss. Not hearing certain sounds has a pervasive effect on your comprehension. Herein lies the most misunderstood problem with hearing loss.
When the hairs get damaged, it isn’t just the ability to hear the sound that is affected, it is the ability to understand. It is not a matter of increasing the sound, as hearing aids do, it is a matter of damaging comprehension.
Take care of your ears by avoiding continued exposure to high decibel sounds. This can be deceiving because your ears adapt to loud sounds by shifting your auditory threshold.
This is what happens after a concert. Before the band came on you could hear your friend next to you speaking at a relatively normal volume. But after the show, you are both shouting into each other’s ears because the threshold has shifted and is significantly higher now due to the ringing in your ears from blasting speakers during the show.
The ringing in your ears makes it difficult to hear sounds that were easily heard before the exposure. By forcing your ears to constantly adjust to loud sounds, you shift your auditory threshold and put duress on the hairs in your cochlea.
Tinnitus is chronic ringing in the ears which affects 15-20% of people and it is a sign of damage to the hairs in the cochlea which will eventually result in hearing loss.
Earplugs help to reduce the impact but if you are in a sustained environment of consistent high decibel exposure, you want noise-canceling headphones. There is a common misconception that you fight outside noise by increasing the volume of your earplugs, but this compounds the problem. You are replacing one loud sound with another.
Blasting Chopin over the jackhammer isn’t going to help your ears. Noise-canceling headphones that go over the ears significantly reduce the background noise so you maintain a healthy threshold without having a volume battle with your environment.
You can manage this by never putting your headphones over 50%. 5/10 is the ideal sound level because it does not tax your cochlea while allowing you to have a level threshold.
If wherever you are is competing with the volume at 50% then you should limit your time there as much as possible. If you are in the environment for a prolonged period, consider getting noise-canceling headphones. It the best you can do for your ears.
TV volume is another huge culprit in the war on our ears. We often set the volume too high so our ears are constantly adjusting to the blasting volume. For most TV’s you can attune your ears to comfortable enjoy it at no more than ¼ - 1/8 of the volume. My TV goes up to 45, but I taught the kids to never go past 10 and 8 is our usual level.
TV settings are also deceiving. The volume difference between speech, music and explosions is completely out of synch. You blast it to hear the characters talk only to have your ear drum rung out a second later when the massive explosion is 50x the volume. Closed captions counter this by allowing you to adjust the volume to a manageable level without worrying about hearing the dialogue because you are reading it. It also increases comprehension because you retain more information when reading.
You will also notice the deliberate increase in volume for commercials on streaming services. These are the sneaky ways that higher decibel sounds invade your home.
To recap:
-Mild to moderately loud sounds negatively impact cognition and performance in adults and disruptions development in children.
-Hearing loss affects understanding, not just perception of sounds
-lower the volume (never go past 5/10) and use closed captions
-limit the time spent in loud places
-wear earphones that go around the ear or fit deeper into the ear to better isolate wanted sound and reduce the need to increase the volume.
-spend the extra money on noise-canceling headphones