Why wear earplugs?

You may be thinking why should I bother wearing earplugs - well here's the thing. Excessive noise has been shown to increase blood pressure, heart rates, stress levels, and lead to noise induced hearing loss, which are known to have a negative effect on our health as a whole.

Have you ever noticed that you feel calmer in the countryside rather than in the city where you are surrounded by traffic noise, construction noise and music from shops and bars? So reducing your exposure to loud noise by wearing earplugs, will certainly have a beneficial effect on your health in the short term.

But what about the long-term effects of excessive noise exposure?

As we get older, our ability to hear tends to decrease. I'm sure you can think of an elderly relative or friend that suffers from hearing loss and uses an hearing aid. Hearing loss is a natural process of aging and affects a lot of people.

The problem that we are facing is that our world is generally getting noisier - traffic and construction noise, ipod use and music from bars and nightclubs all contribute to our ever noisier world.

The loudness and length of time we are exposed to these noise sources, tends to accelerate the rate at which we are losing our hearing. As one newspaper aptly stated - We are witnessing a generation of young people with old ears!

How does the ear work?

Our ears are made up of three sections: the outer ear, the middle ear and the inner ear.

The pinna, the part you can see on the side of your head, and ear canal, make up the outer ear. At the other end the eardrum stretches across the ear canal and separates the outer and middle ear.

The middle ear is an air filled cavity, which also contains a chain of three tiny bones. These bones stretch across the cavity from the eardrum to another membrane, which separates the middle and inner ear.

The inner ear or the cochlea, is a spiral tube which contains fluid and thousands of tiny hair cells.

Sound travels along the ear canal and causes the eardrum to vibrate. The vibrations pass from the eardrum, along the tiny bones of the middle ear.

One of the bones pushes like a piston against the membrane in the oval window, sending the amplified sound vibrations into the fluid of the cochlea in the inner ear.

When sound waves enter the fluid of the cochlea, they move the tiny hairs, causing the hair cells to send electrical signals to the auditory or hearing nerve.

Different frequencies of sound are picked up by different hair cells. The nerve passes impulses up to your brain, which recognises them as different sounds - for example music, people talking or industrial noise.

It is damage to the hairs of the cochlea that leads to noise induced hearing loss.

How does noise damage our hearing?

Noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) can be caused by a one-off exposure to an intense sound, such as an explosion, or through continuous exposure to damaging noise levels over a long period of time.

The pressure on the hair cells of the cochlea becomes too much for them to recover from, even after resting in a quiet environment.

Imagine that the hair cells of your ear are like blades of grass blowing in the wind. Between puffs of wind the grass will soon spring back to an upright position, but if the wind blows for too hard or too long the grass will become permanently bent and may break.

In a similar way, once the hair cells are damaged, they can never repair themselves and you will never regain your hearing once you have lost it.

What are the consequences of not protecting our hearing?

Having a hearing loss really impacts on the quality of your personal, social and working life. For example watching TV, being part of group conversations and talking on the phone can be difficult, and can lead to frustration and feelings of depression.

So what can you do to protect your hearing?

It makes sense to reduce your exposure to loud noise, but that isn't always practical if you want to go out and listen to loud music or if you work in noisy environments. Using hearing protection, such as earplugs are a great idea and there are many different types available, such as foam, filtered and custom made earplugs. Click here to read an article about the different kinds of earplugs available.