Six ways to help reduce the risk of harming hearing

Listening to loud music is a cause of tinnitus among young people. Lisa Salmon asks an expert what we can do about it

More than nine million Brits are thought to suffer from some degree of hearing loss, and while it is more common in older people, plenty of younger people have hearing problems too.

The charity Action on Hearing Loss (actiononhearingloss.org.uk) believes as many as four million young Brits are at risk of hearing damage, including tinnitus, from loud music.

Hearing protection expert Stephen Wheatley, a trustee of the UK Hearing Conservation Association and CEO of Hearangel/limitear, which develops technologies to protect hearing while using headphones, explains that humans have about 15,000 auditory hair cells in each ear at birth, and regular, repeated exposure to large sound doses can cause irreparable damage to them.

“You don’t get any more of the hair cells and when they’re gone, they’re gone – and so is your hearing,” he says.

Here are Wheatley’s simple tips to lower your sound exposure and protect your hearing at any age...

Generally avoid noise

Sometimes, a little peace and quiet is exactly what you need. As exposure to sound is calculated as an average over a 24-hour period, those quiet times will help bring the average down and your ears will benefit from a period of no or low-exposure to sound.

If you’re spending an evening in a noisy nightclub or at a concert take a break occasionally, either by going to a quieter area or perhaps by wearing earplugs for a support band but removing them for the main act.

Know your sound dose

How long are you listening for, how loud is it, and what’s the ‘energy’ content of what you’re listening to? These factors combine to give you your sound dose. As a guide, electronic dance music is high energy – lots of beats, few gaps to recover – while speech, with lots of quiet pauses between words, is relatively low energy. The World Health Watch the volume, above; hearing expert Stephen Wheatley, inset

Organisation (WHO) and the Noise at Work regulations recommend 80.22db over a 24-hour period. This is your Daily Sound Allowance (DSA).

Let your device guide you

If you’re listening on your phone or tablet, you’ll probably have noticed the high volume warning – don’t automatically override this, instead think about why it’s there.

Vary what you listen to

You may love a blast of Metallica to wake you up on your morning commute, but your ears won’t thank you if you continue to listen to such high-energy music all day. Consider your personal sound dose and, as well as spending plenty of time resting your ears without headphones, consider listening to something less challenging.

Don’t listen in noisy environments

When you’re sitting on the train, tube or bus, it’s tempting to plug in your headphones and switch off from the world. However, you’ll probably find yourself nudging up the volume to block out the extraneous noise so you can hear clearly – we tend to listen at 6-10db above the level of the background noise. So, if you’re on an underground train that can reach levels as high as 90-100db, and attempting to get the volume above that, you’re on dangerous ground, hearing-wise.

Use noise-cancelling headphones

Use noise-cancelling headphones and in noisy environments you will find you listen at a lower volume. Earpiece-type noise-cancelling headphones will reduce ambient noise by a factor of 10, over-ear ones by 20, so they make a big difference. n