With the current level of advancements in technology, more and more people are gaining access to devices of the 21st century. Amongest the plethora of these technological devices, Apple’s iPods and iPhones are at the top of the list. 

Proving to be extremely convienent in both size and function, iPods and iPhones are often regarded as a blessing with which many of us cannot live without. Unfortunately, these little devices comes with just as many cons as the pros that they bring us, and I’m not just talking about the reports of insomnia from staying up to play Plants Vs. Zombies all night. The real issue with these little devils is much more subtle and unnoticeable, and has to do with those little buds that you screw into your ear every morning before going out.

As you take the morning train to go to school each morning, you may be inclined to notice that almost eight out of the 10 passengers on your train have headphones plugged into their ears; and in fact, you probably have one plugged in yourself. After arriving at school, you may choose to keep your headphones on through the day until your teacher orders you to put them away, but fear not, for the minute the last bell of the day sounds, those ear buds will immediately return to the safety of your ears, and proceed to stay on until you arrive at home in which you may choose to continue listening on with them as you work through your homework for the remaining few hours until supper. At the end of the day, your total headphone usage for the day will usually range from two to eight hours.

Completely oblivious to the damages being done to their hearing, people are freely abusing the convienience of headphones. Hearing damage from headphones is mainly dependent on two factors: the length at which one uses them, and the volume in which they are being used at. Director of diagnostic audiology at Children’s Hospital Boston; Brian Fligor, explained in a Times article that should a person listen with the headphones that comes with iPods for two hours a day, five days a week. at a volume of around 90% of the maximum volume that the iPod can hold, the person will, in a few years, develop a significant loss in hearing on the order of 40 decibels (meaning they can’t hear anything below 40 decibels.) Contradictory to common belief, the hearing loss mentioned above is not affected by whether or not the person listened to two hours straight, or that they simply listened for two hours in the entire duration of the day. To put this into context, imagine the loud ambient noise on the train, and the volume of your headphones that is required for you to drown out the background noise. Depending on how far you live from your destination, the round trip on the train alone may provide the two hours of headphone usage for the day, and with addition to the extremely high volume required to overcome the background noises, permanent hearing damage is happening to you every day.

Another important factor to keep in mind is that everyone has different ears with varying degrees of toughness. The amount of hearing loss from the same exposure to headphones may differ between two different people by a degree of 30 decibels. In other words, the example posed by Brian Fligor above is merely an average, hence a person with tender ears may vary well suffer on an order of 60 decibels from a two hour per day exposure to extremely loud headphones. The issue is that no one can actually tell whether they have strong or tender ears unless they are specifically tested, therefore it is important to treat everyone as if they have tender ears.

Below are a few key steps for reducing hearing loss resulting from headphone uses:

• Use noise isolating headphones. They can be either ones that block background noises by completely sealing up the ear canel, or the more active ones that sends out frequencies to cancel out background noises. Using these often results in lower volume usage.
• Choose over-ear headphones over in-ear headphones as often as possible. Over-ear phones are much less “personal” as they do not reach directly into your ears, and are often used at lower volumes due to their ability to completely cover the ear, therefore automatically reducing background noises.
• Reduce your overall headphone time by avoiding using them whenever an alternative is available. For example, when doing homework at home, use you computer’s speakers to listen to music instead of using your headphones.