5 Ways To Avoid Hearing Loss
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Hear Ye, Hear Ye
Hearing loss is often associated with getting older—but it can strike at any age. In the US, for example…
- Around 13% of adults have hearing difficulties
- Nearly 27% of those over 65 have hearing difficulties
Complete or near-complete hearing loss is less common. From the same source…
- A little under 2% of adults in general had a total or near-total inability to hear
- A little over 4% of those over 65 had a total or near-total inability to hear
Source: CDC | Hearing Difficulties Among Adults: United States, 2019
So, what to do if we want to keep our hearing as it is?
Avoid loud environments
An obvious one, but it bears stating for the sake of being methodical. Loud environments damage our ears, but how loud is too loud?
You can check how loud an environment is by using a free smartphone app, such as:
Decibel Pro: dB Sound Level Meter (iOS / Android)
An 82 dB environment is considered safe for 16 hours. That’s the equivalent of, for example moderate traffic.
Every 3 dB added to that halves the safe exposure time, for example:
- An 85 dB environment is considered safe for 8 hours. That’s the equivalent of heavier traffic, or a vacuum cleaner.
- A 94 dB environment is considered safe for 1 hour. That might be a chainsaw, a motorcycle, or a large sporting event.
Many nightclubs or concert venues often have environments of 110 dB and more. So the safe exposure time would be under two minutes.
Source: NIOSH | Noise and Hearing Loss
With differences like that per 3 dB increase, then you may want to wear hearing protection if you’re going to be in a noisy environment.
Discreet options include things like these -20 dB silicone ear plugs that live in a little case on one’s keyring.
Stop sticking things in your ears
It’s said “nothing smaller than your elbow should go in your ear canal”. We’ve written about this before:
What’s Good (And What’s Not) Against Earwax
Look after the rest of your health
Our ears are not islands unaffected by the rest of our health, and indeed, they’re larger and more complex organs than we think about most of the time, since we only tend to think about the (least important!) external part.
Common causes of hearing loss that aren’t the percussive injuries we discussed above include:
- Diabetes
- High blood pressure
- Smoking
- Infections
- Medications
Lest that last one sound a little vague, it’s because there are hundreds of medications that have hearing loss as a potential side-effect. Here’s a list so you can check if you’re taking any of them:
List of Ototoxic Medications That May Cause Tinnitus or Hearing Loss
Get your hearing tested regularly.
There are online tests, but we recommend an in-person test at a local clinic, as it won’t be subject to the limitations and quirks of the device(s) you’re using. Pretty much anywhere that sells hearing aids will probably offer you a free test, so take advantage of it!
And, more generally, if you suddenly notice you lost some or all of your hearing in one or more ears, then get thee to a doctor, and quickly.
Treat it as an emergency, because there are many things that can be treated if and only if they are caught early, before the damage becomes permanent.
Use it or lose it
This one’s important. As we get older, it’s easy to become more reclusive, but the whole “neurons that fire together, wire together” neuroplasticity thing goes for our hearing too.
Our brain is, effectively, our innermost hearing organ, insofar as it processes the information it receives about sounds that were heard.
There are neurological hearing problems that can show up without external physical hearing damage (auditory processing disorders being high on the list), but usually these things are comorbid with each other.
So if we want to maintain our ability to process the sounds our ears detect, then we need to practice that ability.
Important implication:
That means that if you might benefit from a hearing aid, you should get it now, not later.
It’s counterintuitive, we know, but because of the neurological consequences, hearing aids help people retain their hearing, whereas soldiering on without can hasten hearing loss.
On the topic of hearing difficulty comorbidities…
Tinnitus (ringing in the ears) is, paradoxically, associated with both hearing loss, and with hyperacusis (hearing supersensitivity, which sounds like a superpower, but can be quite a problem too).
Learn more about managing that, here:
Tinnitus: Quieting The Unwanted Orchestra In Your Ears
Take care!
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Fitness Walking and Bodyweight Exercises – by Frank S. Ring
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A lot of exercise manuals assume that the reader has a “basic” body (nothing Olympian, but nothing damaged either). As we get older, increasingly few of us fall into the “but nothing damaged either” category!
Here’s where Ring brings to bear his decades of experience as a coach and educator, and also his personal recovery from a serious back injury.
The book covers direct, actionable exercise advice (with all manner of detail), and also offers mental health tips he’s learned along the way.
Ring, like us, is a big fan of keeping things simple, so he focusses on “the core four” of bodyweight exercises:
- Pushups
- Squats
- Lunges
- Planks
These four exercises get a whole chapter devoted to them, though! Because there are ways to make each exercise easier or harder, or have different benefits. For example, adjustments include:
- Body angle
- Points of contact
- Speed
- Pausing
- Range of motion
This, in effect, makes a few square meters of floor (and perhaps a chair or bench) your fully-equipped gym.
As for walking? Ring enjoys and extols the health benefits, and/but also uses his walks a lot for assorted mental exercises, and recommends we try them too.
A fine book for anyone who wants to gain and/or maintain good health, but doesn’t pressingly want to join a gym or start pumping iron!
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Chickpeas vs Black-Eyed Peas – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing chickpeas to black-eyed peas, we picked the chickpeas.
Why?
In terms of macros, chickpeas have more protein, carbs, and fiber, the ratio of the latter two also giving them the lower glycemic index. An easy win for chickpeas.
In the category of vitamins, chickpeas have more of vitamins B2, B6, C, E, K, and choline, while black-eyed peas have more of vitamins B1, B5, and B9. Another victory for chickpeas.
When it comes to minerals, things are even more pronounced: chickpeas have more calcium, copper, iron, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while black-eyed peas have (barely) more magnesium. An overwhelming win for chickpeas.
Adding up the sections makes for a very evident overall win for chickpeas; as ever, do enjoy either or both though; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
Enjoy!
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Finish What You Start – by Peter Hollins
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For some people, getting started is the problem. For others of us, getting started is the easy part! We just need a little help not dropping things we started.
There are summaries at the starts and ends of sections, and many “quick tips” to get you back on track.
As a taster: one of these is “temptation bundling“, combining unpleasant things with pleasant. A kind of “spoonful of sugar” approach.
Hollins also discusses hyperbolic discounting (the way we tend to value rewards according to how near they are, and procrastinate accordingly). He offers a tool to overcome this, too, the “10–10–10 rule“.
Also dealt with is “the preparation trap“, and how to know when you have enough information to press on.
For a lot of us, the places we’re most likely to drop a project is 20% in (initial enthusiasm wore off) or 80% in (“it’s nearly done; no need to worry about it”). Those are the times when the advices in this book can be particularly handy!
All in all, a great book for seeing a lot of things to completion.
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Shoulders Range – by Elia Bartolini
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Shoulder flexibility and mobility can be a big deal, especially when it starts to decline—more so than other kinds of flexibility. Most seniors can get through the day without doing the splits against a wall, for example, but shoulder tightness can be more of a problem if you can’t easily get into or out of your clothes.
If you think it couldn’t happen to you: the great Jane Fonda has a now-famous photoset of her looking glamorous in a dress at a red carpet event, and then looking frazzled making breakfast in the same dress in her kitchen the next morning, because, as she wrote, “I couldn’t get my dress unzipped so I slept in it”.
Now, “to avoid ending up like Jane Fonda” is not a series of words that usually precedes advice, but in this case: this book delves into the science of one of the most quirky joints of the human body, and how to leverage this to maximize shoulder mobility, while maintaining adequate strength (because flexibility without strength is just asking for a dislocation) without doing anything that would actually bulk up our shoulders, because it’s just about progressing through passive, active, and tensed stretching, static, dynamic, and loaded stretching, as well as PNF stretching and antagonist stretching.
If that seems like a lot of stretching, don’t worry; the author presents a series of workouts that will take us through these stretches in a very small amount of time each day.
The style is instructional like a textbook, with clear diagrams where appropriate, and lots of callout boxes, bullet points, emboldening for key points, etc. It all makes for every easy learning.
Bottom line: if you’d like to improve and maintain your shoulder mobility, this is an excellent book for that.
Click here to check out Shoulders Range, and perfect your shoulders and upper body flexibility!
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Why Telomeres Shorten, & What Can Be Done About It
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Telomeres are protective caps at the ends of our DNA, similar to the plastic tips on shoelaces (there’s a repeated “junk DNA” string, TTAGGG in humans, kept safe in a sheathe, which made of shelterin, a protein complex).
They prevent our genetic material from becoming damaged or tangled. However, each time a cell divides, telomeres get a little shorter because the copying process isn’t perfect (DNA polymerase can’t replicate everything inside the sheathe, because it is too well-protected).
So, how do we deal with this?
Lacing up for long life
An enzyme called telomerase (discovered as recently as 2009 by Nobel Prize-winning scientists Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn et al.) can rebuild telomeres. It has two main parts: one part1 that makes new DNA and another part2 that acts as a guide. Most cells don’t produce enough telomerase, so telomeres still tend to shrink over time.
1 TERT (Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase), which synthesizes telomeric DNA
2 TERC (Telomerase RNA Component), which serves as a templateWhen telomeres become too short, cells stop dividing. Some cells may enter a damaged state (e.g. senescent “zombie” cells) or die. In some cases, cells bypass this limit by reactivating telomerase, which can lead to cancer.
Studies on mice show that when telomerase is missing, they age more quickly and struggle to repair tissues. When telomerase is restored, aging effects are reversed. Human research also links short telomeres to age-related diseases like immune system decline and organ damage.
Researchers have already found some ways to slow aging by:
- Activating telomerase (e.g. with small molecules like TA-65).
- Gene therapy to transiently express telomerase.
- Stabilizing TERC RNA component to prevent degradation.
However, increasing telomerase too much could raise the risk of cancer. So, it’s a bit of a juggling act yet.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Fisetin: The Anti-Aging Assassin ← kills senescent cells, meaning newer cells are copied rather than older ones, resulting in copied cells with less DNA damage
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Statin and Antidepressant Side Effects
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Questions and Answers at 10almonds
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
This newsletter has been growing a lot lately, and so have the questions/requests, and we love that! In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
Side effects of statins, are they worth it? Depression, are antidepressants worth it?
About statins, that depends a lot on you, your circumstances, and—as it happens—your gender. We covered this in a main feature recently, but a short answer is: for most people, they may not be the best first choice, and could even make things worse. For some people, however, they really are just what’s needed.
- Factors that make them more likely better for you: being a man, or having atherosclerosis
- Factors that make them more likely worse for you: being a woman in general
Check out the main feature we did: Statins: His & Hers?
As for antidepressants? That depends a lot on you, your physiology, your depression, your circumstances, and more. We’ll definitely do a main feature on that sometime soon, as there’s a lot that most people don’t know!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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