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Tips for Protecting Your Hearing

Hearing protection is incredibly important in our increasingly noisy world. If something is over 70 decibels in volume, it can harm your hearing over a period of time or repeated exposures. Download the free NIOSH SLM phone app if you want to estimate the loudness of your everyday lives, and watch the following video of Dr. Egan as she talks about other tips and tricks for hearing protection.

Hi, this is Dr. Egan from Now Hear This and today I wanted to talk to you about something very close to my ears and my heart, and that is hearing protection. As some of you may know, I recently bought a house and moved to Holly Springs, North Carolina. Well, Holly Springs is a very noisy place to live. There is construction going on all the different interstates. There are housing complexes being put up left and right. There is a new UNC Rex hospital being out of the corner, so there are sirens going in and out and noise conservation and hearing protection is just so important. This topic is very close to my heart and my home, because living in Holly Springs has reminded me of just how noisy life can be.

It’s actually really interesting, there are some interesting articles showing that living in a place with a lot of noise can be harmful to your ear, but also elevated your blood pressure and your stress levels. So, if you are somewhere that has loud sound, we want to make sure we get away from it as much as possible. If it loud enough that you have to shout to be heard, that is an easy way to measure that something can be dangerously loud. So, if my neighbor in Holly Springs is mowing his lawn and I have to yell to my husband to be heard, it is time for me to get some distance between me and the lawn mower. At the same time, if you are the person mowing the lawn yourself, make sure you’re wearing hearing protection, either muffs or plugs and pay attention to the NRR or Noise Reduction Rating, because we want to preserve your hearing for as long as possible.

Outside of the home, if you’re somewhere like a concert, make sure that you bring plugs with you. We do custom music filters here if that is ever of interest to you. Of course, things like construction, if you’re driving outside, roll the windows up. All these things can make a huge difference, because every loud sound you hear over the course of a lifetime can accumulate and cause noise induced hearing loss to out hearing system. If you’re a hearing aid user, we want to preserve the hearing you have left. If you don’t need hearing aids yet, we want to prevent intervention for as long as possible. Take it from me, I live in a very noisy world right now! Protect your ears as much as possible. There is also some research showing that antioxidants taken before noisy event, so If you were going to a concert or a loud place, that they can help protect the inner ear from that noise damage as well. So, do what you can to protect your ears and keep them healthy as long as possible. Of course, I hope you learned something from this video and have a wonderful day.