Do Headphones Affect Hearing?

Recent news from the World Health Organization (WHO) is concerning. According to estimates, 1.1 billion young people are at risk for hearing loss, which might have a significant impact on their quality of life. According to the WHO, this noise-induced hearing loss is brought on by either:sustained eight-hour exposure to 85 decibels of fairly loud noise. 15 minutes of exposure to an extremely loud sound is considered short-term exposure.

According to the WHO, 50% of people use excessively loud headphones when listening to music. A lot of young people are playing their music loudly. Using headphones while listening to loud music might harm the inner ear and result in hearing loss.

How Do Headphones Cause Hearing Loss?

Even though your ear is a very intricate mechanism, in the simplest words, sound is produced as a brain response to the vibrating of small hairs in a chamber in your inner ear. The movement in the air caused by friction between various surfaces causes these hairs to vibrate in various ways, which results in various sounds.

Loud music amplifies these vibrations' power. The hairs cannot handle the stress and stop functioning correctly if the vibrations are too strong for an extended period of time. The hair cannot be repaired if there has been too much damage. They are no longer useful since they can no longer vibrate in response to sound. We then suffer from hearing loss brought on by noise. Your hearing has been permanently damaged.

Can I Reverse Hearing Damage?

Unfortunately, there is no way to undo damage to the inner ear. Once the inner ear hairs are damaged to the point that they can no longer regrow, they are permanently gone. At this time, it is not possible to repair the ear canal's injured cells. Hearing loss caused by headphones cannot be cured, but it can be treated, and your hearing can be improved.

How to Tell if You Have Hearing Loss from Headphones

You can have hearing loss symptoms, or you might see warning indications in people nearby. Tinnitus, a persistent ringing in one or both ears, frequently asking someone to repeat what they just said, and mishearing things are all typical symptoms of hearing loss.If you’re experiencing these symptoms — or have more obvious signs of hearing loss, such as clear difficulty hearing or partial deafness — then the best way to confirm your suspicions is through a hearing test.

How to Prevent Hearing Loss When Listening to Music Through Headphones

It is simple to take action to avoid endangering your hearing by using headphones. All you have to do to prevent irreversible hearing loss is use the knowledge we have at our disposal to guide your decisions and safeguard your ears.

Turn the Volume Down

Really, it's that simple. You can listen to noise at 80 dB without risking hearing impairment for more than 25 hours. With high-quality headphones, you can still clearly hear your music at a volume of 60%, and you can groove to every rhythm. The simplest approach to preventing any hearing loss issues using headphones is to keep the volume under control.

Set Controls on Phones

To avoid mistakenly going over a safe volume limit, most phones feature options that let you set a maximum level. If you can't find it, seek it online or navigate to the settings menu to hunt for it. This is a fantastic approach for parents to control, in particular, how their child listens to music.

Don't Turn the Volume Up in Loud Environments

Consider a scenario in which you are traveling and the noise level increases, or you are in a noisy airplane and the sound is being disrupted by the engine whir. It is tempting to increase the volume. Louder music aids in both blocking out background noise and improving hearing. Music can truly suffer from background noise.However, the background noise is not making your music any quieter, so turning up the volume would just increase the decibel levels your ears are exposed to and perhaps cause hearing loss. Try to wear noise-cancelling headphones to block out surrounding noise rather than turning up the volume.

Use Over-The-Ear Headphones

As the music is applied to the eardrum less directly with over-the-ear headphones than with inner-ear earbuds, they are kinder on the ears. Don't get carried away; loud music played through over-the-ear headphones can nonetheless easily cause damage to your hearing. However, they often offer a smoother and more uniform dispersion of sound, making them safer.