You know what? When you get up every morning, your day begins to be accompanied by noise.
The alarm bell urges you to wake up; Kitchen utensils jingled in the kitchen; After you pack up and go to work, you can also get a luxury package of noise up to 90 dB by subway… But fortunately, compared with the bus, at least there is not so much horn noise.
In fact, we can’t avoid noise in our daily life. How can we correctly understand noise?
Noise at work
If you work in a factory or industrial organization, the noise level you are usually exposed to can range from 80 to 90 decibels.
If you work in an office building, the usual noise level is maintained between 40 and 50 decibels.
So what impact does the noisy environment have on employees?
According to the definition of GBZ 2.2-2007 occupational exposure limit for noise: working five days a week and eight hours a day, the limit of steady-state noise is 85 dB (a), and the limit of equivalent sound level of unsteady noise is 85 dB (a).
Other studies have shown that the incidence rate of noise induced deafness is 5% and 8%, respectively, for 15 and 30 years after exposure to noise for 85 dB.
The incidence rate of noise induced hearing loss increased to 14% and 18%, after exposure to noise for 90 and 30 years for 15 years and 30 years respectively.
Therefore, in high-intensity noise, you must wear protective earmuffs, earplugs, etc., otherwise it will easily lead to noise induced deafness, which will affect hearing and language understanding, and the hearing will decline as you continue to be exposed to high-intensity noise.
In fact, in our daily life, we can also be exposed to all kinds of noise.
For example, the low-frequency noise brought by home appliances: the volume emitted by the vacuum cleaner can be as high as 70 to 80 dB, and the volume of the washing machine can be between 50 and 70 dB.
There is also a remarkable phenomenon: young people like to listen to music and watch videos through headphones. The noise of headphones often causes great damage to hearing.
In a noisy environment (such as on the subway), young people unconsciously turn up the volume of their headphones in order to hear the songs, podcasts or audio books in their headphones.
In this way, by connecting headphones, all kinds of electronic devices can produce more than 100 dB sound, which increases the burden on the ears.
In addition, the sound of square dance, the sound of neighborhood decoration and the snoring in your ears during sleep will also affect your hearing to varying degrees.
How to effectively protect hearing
In fact, many people have long been used to the noise in daily life, and even don’t care. However, from a long-term perspective, the harm of noise, especially the harm of family noise, should not be underestimated.
At present, there is no standard and unified answer to the safe noise level. Because the focus and reasons are different.
But what we can do from a personal point of view is to understand the sound level of the surrounding environment and consciously make adjustments when the noise becomes dangerous.
You can download an app that records the noise level and wear noise reduction earplugs in noisy environments to protect your hearing.
Life is busy. We can’t live in a silent world, but we can improve our understanding of noise and maintain a healthy auditory environment, so as to prevent noise induced deafness.
I hope you and your family can stay away from noise.