There is a sound in my head right now. It has been there for decades. It started on a firing line, or in an engine room, or in the cab of a truck, I honestly cannot tell you which, and it has never once stopped. I am going to tell you where it came from, because the places that took my hearing are not exotic. You have been in most of them. Some of you are in one right now.

Let me start with the most recent one, because it happened on an ordinary afternoon and took less than a second.

One second on a Tuesday

I was out walking with Bluetooth headphones on, volume at a level a careful man with 40 years of hearing loss would choose. My wrist brushed my jacket. The digital crown on my Apple Watch turned. That is the whole story. In less than a second the volume in both ears went to 100 percent, and what hit me was not music. It was a blow.

I tore the headphones off. The ringing began immediately, on top of the ringing I already live with, and it stayed for days. A man who spent years learning exactly what loud sound costs got caught by a button the size of a pea. If it can happen to me, it can happen to you, and that is the only reason this article exists.

What a loud sound actually does

Deep in your inner ear are thousands of hair cells. They turn vibration into the signals your brain hears. Loud sound bends them too far. Bend them a little too far for a little too long and they recover, which is why the world sounds like it is wrapped in cotton after a concert and clear the next morning. Bend them past their limit and they die. They do not grow back. Ever. Every loud moment you survive is a withdrawal from an account that is never refilled.

Two numbers decide the size of the withdrawal: how loud, and how long. Occupational research puts the line at roughly 85 decibels averaged over an eight-hour day. Above that, every 3 decibels cuts your safe time in half. At 100 decibels, a loud concert or a chainsaw, you have about 15 minutes. And then there is impulse noise. A rifle fired a few feet from your head is above 150 decibels. At that level there is no safe duration. There is only whether something was in your ears when it went off.

I know that last number the way you know the address of the house you grew up in. I stood next to it for years.

The firing line

I spent several years as an instructor on the rifle range, teaching Marines how to shoot. Picture the job. You are beside the firing line, hour after hour, day after day, while a row of rifles goes off an arm’s length from your head. You have to hear the range commands. You have to hear the Marine next to you. You have to hear a problem before it becomes an accident. So the hearing protection came out, and it came out often, because the job could not be done with it in.

Even when it was in, it was not much. The gear we were issued was inadequate for the work and inadequate for the era. Hearing protection technology was poor everywhere back then, and the military bought from the bottom of that shelf, when it bought at all. Today you can buy electronic muffs that let you hear a whispered command and clamp shut the instant a shot fires, for less than the price of a pair of boots. On my range, that was science fiction. We had foam, and we had the choice between hearing the command and keeping the foam in.

I chose the command, over and over, because that was the job. I would choose it again. But I want you to understand what the choice cost, because you are making a version of it every time you take your muffs off to talk to a coworker.

You have to hear the range commands. So the protection came out, and it came out often, because the job could not be done with it in.

The truck and the ship

The other years I drove trucks. Loud ones, all day, with an engine that filled the cab. It never felt dangerous. It just felt like driving. That is precisely the kind of exposure the 85-decibel rule was written for, a sound that is not painful and not frightening and is quietly above the line for eight hours straight.

Then I spent six months at sea. A ship is a machine that never stops making noise. Engines, ventilation, pumps, steel on steel, twenty-four hours a day, and nowhere on board to get away from it. After a week you stop hearing it. Your ears do not stop taking the dose. I still hear that ship. I mean that literally. Some of the sounds in my head today are the sounds of that ship, and they will still be there when I go to sleep tonight.

If you work on a factory floor, a road crew, a framing crew, an airport ramp, a print shop, a sawmill, you are on my ship. Federal rules require a hearing conservation program when workers average 85 decibels or more, and construction has weaker rules than factories, but a rule is not an earplug. A nail gun, a circular saw and a generator running together is a loud day. A loud career is a quiet retirement. Tinnitus and hearing loss are the most common service-connected disabilities the Department of Veterans Affairs pays for, and every trade that sounds like a ship is building the same bill.

The Walkman years

Here is the part where I have to admit that not all of it was the Marine Corps.

If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, you know exactly what we did. I had the Walkman with the thin foam headphones, and I turned it up until the tape hiss disappeared, then rewound and did it again. I had the car with the subwoofer that rattled the license plate, and I drove it around with the windows down so everyone could hear. I stood next to the speaker stacks at concerts because that was where the energy was. I turned the bedroom stereo up until somebody pounded on the wall.

None of us knew. There was no volume warning, no weekly exposure report, no adult saying the words hair cells. I do not blame anyone. I mention it because a lot of people in their forties and fifties are now discovering hearing loss they thought was just age, and part of it was a cassette tape in 1989. By the time I stepped onto my first rifle range, my account was already overdrawn.

The one in your pocket right now

The Walkman is gone. The habit is not. Earbuds today are louder, sealed tighter, and worn for hours a day instead of an album at a time. The World Health Organization has estimated that more than a billion young people are at risk of hearing loss from unsafe listening, mostly through personal audio devices. My generation did it for a few years with cheap foam. The current one is doing it all day with very good equipment, which is worse.

And the devices have dials. A watch crown, a knob on a cable, a phone in a pocket. What happened to me on that walk can happen with any of them, with no warning and no time to react. The sound that hit me was far past anything I would ever choose, and I did not choose it. A jacket sleeve did.

The everyday ones

Most of the noise in a normal life is not on a firing line or a ship. It is in the garage and the kitchen and the weekend, and I catch myself walking into it with nothing in my ears far more often than a man with my history should.

• A gas lawn mower or leaf blower runs around 90 to 100 decibels. An hour of yard work is a real dose. I wear muffs to mow now. The neighbors have stopped looking.
• A motorcycle at highway speed, with wind noise, sits close to 100 decibels inside a helmet.
• Movie theaters and stadiums regularly peak above 100. So do spin classes, on purpose.
• Fireworks, a single round at a range, a nail gun beside your head. Impulse noise. No safe duration, no second chances.
• Sirens, MRI machines, the dentist’s drill, a blender. Short bursts that add up over a year.
• Children’s toys held to the ear. Some are far louder than the box suggests, and the ear they are held to is very small.

The damage does not care whether the noise was your job, your hobby, or a jacket sleeve. It only counts the decibels.

What the ringing means

After the range, after the ship, after the watch, the sound was the same: a high tone that would not go away. Ringing after noise is not nothing. It means something in your ear just took damage. Some of it recovers. Some does not, and researchers now believe that even exposure that seems to recover can quietly damage the connections between hair cells and the hearing nerve, a condition sometimes called hidden hearing loss because it does not show on a standard test.

Mine never fully recovered. The tone from the range and the hum from the ship are still playing as I write this sentence. Tinnitus is the sound of damage that already happened, on a loop, for the rest of your life. If you have a tone like that after a loud day, you have just been handed the same warning I ignored for years. Take it more seriously than I did.

What I do now, and what I wish I had done at 19

• Carry earplugs. Not in a drawer at home. In the pocket, the car, the range bag. Cheap foam works. High-fidelity musician’s plugs let you hear a concert clearly at a safe level, and they cost less than the ticket. I stood by the speaker stack with nothing. Do not be me.
• Around gunfire, double up and go electronic. Plugs and muffs together, and make the muffs the electronic kind that let you hear commands and clamp shut on the shot. This is the exact problem that made me pull my foam out on the range, and it has been solved for years. Every instructor and every shooter should own a pair.
• Set a hard volume limit. On an iPhone: Settings, Sounds & Haptics, Headphone Safety, turn on Reduce Loud Sounds and pick a level. Apple Watch has the same setting under Sounds & Haptics. The limit holds no matter what the crown does. Android has an equivalent under Sound settings. This one setting would have saved me days of ringing. It is on now.
• Use the arm’s-length rule. If you have to shout to be understood by someone an arm’s length away, the room is over 85 decibels. That was every truck cab I ever drove and every deck of that ship. Protect, or leave.
• Take ringing seriously. If it lasts more than a day, or your hearing drops suddenly in one or both ears, see a doctor promptly. Sudden hearing loss is a medical emergency, and treatment works best in the first days. Our medical disclaimer is plain about what this site is not.
• Get a baseline hearing test. An audiogram now means next year you will know whether something changed, instead of guessing. Whatever you buy afterwards, and I will have opinions about that, the test comes first.

I cannot get back what the firing line, the trucks, the ship and the Walkman took, and I cannot switch off the sound they left behind. What I can do is stop the account from draining further, and make sure the kid with the earbuds hears the words nobody said to me.

Hearing damage can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime. That is not a slogan. It is the one thing about this subject I am completely certain of, because I have the soundtrack to prove it.

Evaluated by Scott West. Data scientist. 40 years of hearing loss. Method: How We Evaluate. If a cheap gadget is being sold to you as the fix, read this first.

Sources

Every claim above rests on a public record or a named organisation. Read them yourself.

• NIOSH: noise and hearing loss, recommended exposure limit
• OSHA: occupational noise exposure
• NIDCD: noise-induced hearing loss
• World Health Organization fact sheet: deafness and hearing loss
• Department of Veterans Affairs Annual Benefits Report (most prevalent service-connected disabilities)
• Apple Support: reduce loud headphone sounds on iPhone