There are countless things in life that we tend to take for granted. We seem to think that our blessings will always stay, especially when they are related to our health. After all, you can’t really lose your hearing easily, can you? As a matter of fact, there are a number of harmful daily habits that can be detrimental to our hearing.
Over the years, or earlier in extreme cases, you’ll wake up one day to realize you’re losing your ability to hear. However, before it’s too late to do anything about it, there are a few tweaks you can make in your daily life to ensure your ear health remains strong and efficient.
Here are some detrimental daily habits you should avoid to prevent damaging your hearing:
1High Volume on Headphones or Earphones
Most of us are guilty of doing this: listening to music on a full volume using our headphones or earphones. There is no problem in listening to music on a moderate volume, preferably not higher than 60% of the volume, but going higher than that is highly damaging to our ears.
Noise is measured in decibels, and it’s estimated that any noise, higher than 85 decibels can damage our hearing. Headphones played on full volume emit noise in the range of 100 to 110 decibels, higher than the noise emitted by a motorcycle taking off, which is 90 decibels.
2Living in Noisy Environments
It may not be every day that you go to an eardrum-shattering concert, but what about the noise you encounter on a daily basis?
What if your home appliances are a little bit too loud for the health of your ears or your job requires working with noisy machinery? In these situations, you have one of two options. The first option is to find quiet alternatives; even something as oxymoronic as finding a quiet hair dryer, according to silenthomehub.com, can be easily found if you know where to look.
Not only will you keep your hearing safe, but you’ll also maintain the much-needed peace of mind. Your second option would be to install mufflers on noisy equipment, or just use an earplug in worst-case scenarios.
3Smoking
Here’s another reason to tempt you into quitting smoking: smoking can, in fact, damage your hearing. If this feels like a far fetched, made-up excuse to trick you into quitting, it’s not.
Smoking has a detrimental effect on the neurotransmitters that enable you to hear, damages your DNA, and makes your ears more sensitive to noise. This means that even lower levels of noise will have a detrimental effect on your hearing.
4Bad Diet Habits
Just as smoking damages your healthy cells, following a bad diet can also impose the same detrimental effects on your hearing. A bad diet can be defined as eating unhealthy foods or failing to eat the right kind of food.
In the case of your hearing, eat-healthy food would include potassium, zinc, magnesium, folic acid, and omega 3 fatty acids.
5Ignoring Infections
It’s sad how many of us would neglect the health of our ears, even if we feel there’s something wrong with them. An ear infection, just like any infection we get, won’t just go on its own. On the contrary, it will probably get worse over time.
In general, infections that occur in the face and neck region should never be ignored; these include dental infections as well. They all affect our hearing health in one way or another.
6Poor Physical Health
Exercise is essential for so many reasons, but what’s surprising is that poor physical health can also damage our hearing.
When the body is in poor health, our heart and lungs struggle, circulation slows down, and oxygen can’t reach our cells properly. This results in a number of diseases that can impact our hearing and can even directly damage our ears.
7Failing to Maintain Ear Health
Generally speaking, anything that affects the health of our ears will damage our hearing. The best way to prevent this is to keep our ears clean from wax and healthy using proper methods. You can start by visiting an ENT physician to evaluate your current hearing health and know what precautions you need to take.
We’re able to hear thanks to the tiny hairs in our ears which vibrate whenever they’re stimulated by sound. It’s important to understand that these hairs are some of the few parts of our body that can never be regenerated once they’re destroyed.
You get one chance at keeping them safe and healthy; otherwise, you risk losing your hearing for good. The best way to keep your hearing intact is by taking up good eat-health habits and minimizing the bad ones.
