5 Ways To Avoid Hearing Loss
Protect your hearing by avoiding loud environments, not sticking things in your ears, looking after your overall health, getting regular tests, and using hearing aids if needed.
Hear Ye, Hear Ye
Hearing loss is often associated with getting older—but it can strike at any age. In the US, for example…
- Around 13% of adults have hearing difficulties
- Nearly 27% of those over 65 have hearing difficulties
Complete or near-complete hearing loss is less common. From the same source…
- A little under 2% of adults in general had a total or near-total inability to hear
- A little over 4% of those over 65 had a total or near-total inability to hear
Source: CDC | Hearing Difficulties Among Adults: United States, 2019
So, what to do if we want to keep our hearing as it is?
Avoid loud environments
An obvious one, but it bears stating for the sake of being methodical. Loud environments damage our ears, but how loud is too loud?
You can check how loud an environment is by using a free smartphone app, such as:
Decibel Pro: dB Sound Level Meter (iOS / Android)
An 82 dB environment is considered safe for 16 hours. That’s the equivalent of, for example moderate traffic.
Every 3 dB added to that halves the safe exposure time, for example:
- An 85 dB environment is considered safe for 8 hours. That’s the equivalent of heavier traffic, or a vacuum cleaner.
- A 94 dB environment is considered safe for 1 hour. That might be a chainsaw, a motorcycle, or a large sporting event.
Many nightclubs or concert venues often have environments of 110 dB and more. So the safe exposure time would be under two minutes.
Source: NIOSH | Noise and Hearing Loss
With differences like that per 3 dB increase, then you may want to wear hearing protection if you’re going to be in a noisy environment.
Discreet options include things like these -20 dB silicone ear plugs that live in a little case on one’s keyring.
Stop sticking things in your ears
It’s said “nothing smaller than your elbow should go in your ear canal”. We’ve written about this before:
What’s Good (And What’s Not) Against Earwax
Look after the rest of your health
Our ears are not islands unaffected by the rest of our health, and indeed, they’re larger and more complex organs than we think about most of the time, since we only tend to think about the (least important!) external part.
Common causes of hearing loss that aren’t the percussive injuries we discussed above include:
- Diabetes
- High blood pressure
- Smoking
- Infections
- Medications
Lest that last one sound a little vague, it’s because there are hundreds of medications that have hearing loss as a potential side-effect. Here’s a list so you can check if you’re taking any of them:
List of Ototoxic Medications That May Cause Tinnitus or Hearing Loss
Get your hearing tested regularly.
There are online tests, but we recommend an in-person test at a local clinic, as it won’t be subject to the limitations and quirks of the device(s) you’re using. Pretty much anywhere that sells hearing aids will probably offer you a free test, so take advantage of it!
And, more generally, if you suddenly notice you lost some or all of your hearing in one or more ears, then get thee to a doctor, and quickly.
Treat it as an emergency, because there are many things that can be treated if and only if they are caught early, before the damage becomes permanent.
Use it or lose it
This one’s important. As we get older, it’s easy to become more reclusive, but the whole “neurons that fire together, wire together” neuroplasticity thing goes for our hearing too.
Our brain is, effectively, our innermost hearing organ, insofar as it processes the information it receives about sounds that were heard.
There are neurological hearing problems that can show up without external physical hearing damage (auditory processing disorders being high on the list), but usually these things are comorbid with each other.
So if we want to maintain our ability to process the sounds our ears detect, then we need to practice that ability.
Important implication:
That means that if you might benefit from a hearing aid, you should get it now, not later.
It’s counterintuitive, we know, but because of the neurological consequences, hearing aids help people retain their hearing, whereas soldiering on without can hasten hearing loss.
On the topic of hearing difficulty comorbidities…
Tinnitus (ringing in the ears) is, paradoxically, associated with both hearing loss, and with hyperacusis (hearing supersensitivity, which sounds like a superpower, but can be quite a problem too).
Learn more about managing that, here:
Tinnitus: Quieting The Unwanted Orchestra In Your Ears
Take care!
Share This Post
Learn To Grow
Sign up for weekly gardening tips, product reviews and discounts.
-
Stop Cancer 20 Years Ago
Dr. Jenn Simmons shares vital tips on preventing cancer and inflammation, advocating for lifestyle changes and proactive health management at any age.
Get Abreast And Keep Abreast
This is Dr. Jenn Simmons. Her specialization is integrative oncology, as she—then a breast cancer surgeon—got breast cancer, decided the system wasn’t nearly as good from the patients’ side of things as from the doctors’ side, and took to educate herself, and now others, on how things can be better.
What does she want us to know?
Start now
If you have breast cancer, the best time to start adjusting your lifestyle might be 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now. We realize our readers with breast cancer (or a history thereof) probably have indeed started already—all strength to you.
What this means for those of us without breast cancer (or a history therof) is: start now
Even if you don’t have a genetic risk factor, even if there’s no history of it in your family, there’s just no reason not to start now.
Start what, you ask? Taking away its roots. And how?
Inflammation as the root of cancer
To oversimplify: cancer occurs because an accidentally immortal cell replicates and replicates and replicates and takes any nearby resources to keep on going. While science doesn’t know all the details of how this happens, it is a factor of genetic mutation (itself a normal process, without which evolution would be impossible), something which in turn is accelerated by damage to the DNA. The damage to the DNA? That occurs (often as not) as a result of cellular oxidation. Cellular oxidation is far from the only genotoxic thing out there, and a lot of non-food “this thing causes cancer” warnings are usually about other kinds of genotoxicity. But cellular oxidation is a big one, and it’s one that we can fight vigorously with our lifestyle.
Because cellular oxidation and inflammation go hand-in-hand, reducing one tends to reduce the other. That’s why so often you’ll see in our Research Review Monday features, a line that goes something like:
“and now for those things that usually come together: antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, and anti-aging”
So, fight inflammation now, and have a reduced risk of a lot of other woes later.
See: How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation
Don’t settle for “normal”
People are told, correctly but not always helpfully, such things as:
- It’s normal to have less energy at your age
- It’s normal to have a weaker immune system at your age
- It’s normal to be at a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease, etc
…and many more. And these things are true! But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for them.
We can be all the way over on the healthy end of the distribution curve. We can do that!
(so can everyone else, given sufficient opportunity and resources, because health is not a zero-sum game)
If we’re going to get a cancer diagnosis, then our 60s are the decade where we’re most likely to get it. Earlier than that and the risk is extant but lower; later than that and technically the risk increases, but we probably got it already in our 60s.
So, if we be younger than 60, then now’s a good time to prepare to hit the ground running when we get there. And if we missed that chance, then again, the second-best time is now:
See: Focusing On Health In Our Sixties
Fast to live
Of course, anything can happen to anyone at any age (alas), but this is about the benefits of living a fasting lifestyle—that is to say, not just fasting for a 4-week health kick or something, but making it one’s “new normal” and just continuing it for life.
This doesn’t mean “never eat”, of course, but it does mean “practice intermittent fasting, if you can”—something that Dr. Simmons strongly advocates.
See: Intermittent Fasting: We Sort The Science From The Hype
While this calls back to the previous “fight inflammation”, it deserves its own mention here as a very specific way of fighting it.
It’s never too late
All of the advices that go before a cancer diagnosis, continue to stand afterwards too. There is no point of “well, I already have cancer, so what’s the harm in…?”
The harm in it after a diagnosis will be the same as the harm before. When it comes to lifestyle, preventing a cancer and preventing it from spreading are very much the same thing, which is also the same as shrinking it. Basically, if it’s anticancer, it’s anticancer, no matter whether it’s before, during, or after.
Dr. Simmons has seen too many patients get a diagnosis, and place their lives squarely in the hands of doctors, when doctors can only do so much.
Instead, Dr. Simmons recommends taking charge of your health as best you are able, today and onwards, no matter what. And that means two things:
- Knowing stuff
- Doing stuff
So it becomes our responsibility (and our lifeline) to educate ourselves, and take action accordingly.
Want to know more?
We recently reviewed her book, and heartily recommend it:
The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer – by Dr. Jenn Simmons
Enjoy!