Risks You Should Know When Wearing Headsets

By Carrie Tsai,  Last Updated: June 20, 2019

It seems to be fashionable to wear earbuds or headphones and it is easy to see young people wearing them in the bus or subway. However, they may not know that there are risks lurking in their earphones.

Three incorrect ways of wearing earbuds

Are headphones bad for you? The answer is yes if you wear them in wrong way. Though wearing earbuds or headphones really bring you convenience and a sense of fashion, you should also pay attention to the ways of using earphones that may do harm to your health.

Firstly, it is obvious that wearing earbuds or headphones for a long period is not advisable, in particular for those who likes using wearable earphones which are not light. And your hearing is likely to be impaired in that way.

Secondly, it is also wrong to listen in a loud voice. When the surroundings become noisy and annoying, such as in the buses or subways, most of us tend to turn up the volume in order to cover the noise around us. However, it may lead to hearing loss even becoming deaf.

Thirdly, the majority of people seldom clean their earbuds or headphones in a regular basis, which provides bacteria an opportunity to breed. Needless to say, that is also what we should prevent.

How does wearing earbuds incorrectly impair hearing?

For a start, it is inevitable that your earphone cable can be drew suddenly, in that case, your ear cavity will be enlarged, pressure dropped, thus adding the sound pressure to eardrums, one of the most vulnerable part of our body. Such action may trigger the irreversible damage to your hearing.

What’s more, listening music in a loud volume will lead to a direct impact of sound pressure to the slim eardrum, which will stimulate hearing nerve ending and cause the nerve impulses of your hearing nerve, eventually contribute to auditory fatigue. It may also cause damage to your entire body like tinnitus and hearing loss. Some of users even exhibit the symptoms such as dizziness, short attention span and memory loss.

Thirdly, your skin will directly contact with ear pads when wearing earbuds, which are mostly made of leather or cloth, that means sweat and grease can probably penetrate into your ear pads. Apart from causing some material damage of your ear pads, more importantly, germs are likely to breed. If you don’t clean them in a regular basis, the germs on your earbuds will infect your ears, thus leading to skin diseases.

So how can you tell if whether the hearing has been impaired？Well, when you have the following symptoms, be careful that you may have hearing loss:

• Always ask for others to repeat

• Find it hard to catch others words

• Withdrawal from conversations

• Avoidance of some social settings

• Always turn up the volume higher than others do when watching TV or listening to music

The correct ways of wearing earbuds

Follow the next methods and you can enjoy your own world while keeping the damage to your hearing to a minimum.

Firstly, choose suitable earbuds or headphones, it is worthwhile to invest on a pair of high-quality headphones for the sake of your health. Noise cancellation headphones are advisable.

Next, keep control of the volume, any sound louder than 85 decibels will cause irreversible damage to your ear. Another preferable way is trying to keep the volume of player under the 60% of the largest one.

Finally, the longer you expose your ears in a loud voice, the greater damage it will cause to your hearing. So try to control the time of using earbuds, better to keep the usage time within 60 minutes a day.

Headphones are a double-edged sword, on the one hand, most people embrace the convenience they bring, on the other hand, few of us know the potential harm they will do to our hearing even health. The next time when wearing earbuds, bear in mind that only when utilize them in correct ways like controlling time and volume can you enjoy you life to the largest extent.