I wear my AirPods for roughly six hours a day. Meetings, podcasts, music while working, phone calls. Sometimes I forget they’re in and just… leave them. My ears have started ringing faintly at night, which is the kind of thing that makes you Google “tinnitus” at 2 AM and then not sleep at all.

I’m not alone in this. A WHO report estimated that over a billion young people worldwide are at risk of hearing loss from unsafe listening practices. That was before wireless earbuds made it effortless to have audio pumping into your ear canals from sunrise to bedtime.

The convenience is the problem. Wired earbuds were annoying enough that you’d take them out. Wireless ones are so comfortable and easy that they’ve become permanent fixtures.

The Volume Creep Problem

Here’s something most people don’t realize: you naturally increase volume over time during a listening session. Your ears adapt to the current level, it starts feeling quiet, you bump it up a notch. Do this for a few hours and you’re listening at significantly louder levels than where you started.

This is called temporary threshold shift. Your hearing sensitivity decreases during exposure, so you compensate by turning things up. When you finally remove your earbuds and the world sounds muffled for a few minutes, that’s your ears recovering from the volume they’ve been enduring.

The problem is that repeated threshold shifts can become permanent. The tiny hair cells in your inner ear that convert sound to nerve signals don’t regenerate. Once they’re damaged, they’re gone. And unlike a lot of health issues, hearing damage is cumulative and irreversible.

In-Ear vs Over-Ear: It Matters

Not all headphones are equally risky. In-ear buds that sit inside your ear canal deliver sound directly to your eardrum with minimal loss. This means they’re more efficient at lower volumes, but people rarely use them at lower volumes.

Over-ear headphones, especially open-back designs, allow some sound to escape. This actually provides a natural volume limitation because you can hear environmental sounds alongside your audio. You’re less likely to crank them up because the audio doesn’t need to compete with silence.

Noise-cancelling technology cuts both ways. Active noise cancellation means you don’t need to turn up volume to overcome background noise—that’s genuinely better for hearing health. But it also enables longer wearing sessions because external distractions disappear, which means more total hours of ear canal exposure.

What the Numbers Say

The Centers for Disease Control recommends the 60/60 rule: no more than 60% volume for no more than 60 minutes at a time. Most people I know blow past both limits before lunch.

Hearing damage typically starts at sustained exposure above 85 decibels. Most earbuds at maximum volume produce 100-110 decibels. Even at 70% volume, many models produce sounds in the 85-95 decibel range, which is safe for limited periods but damaging over extended use.

The math isn’t complicated. More hours per day times louder average volumes equals accelerated hearing damage. And we’re wearing earbuds more hours at higher volumes than any previous generation wore headphones.

The Kids Problem

This concerns me more than my own habits. Kids are getting wireless earbuds younger and younger. A 10-year-old with AirPods doing homework for three hours is getting sustained in-ear audio exposure during the developmental period when their hearing is most vulnerable.

Apple added volume limiting features for kids, and some parents use them. Most don’t. And even the limits are set higher than audiologists would recommend for extended daily use.

We won’t see the full impact of this for 10-20 years, when today’s earbud-wearing kids become adults with unexpectedly degraded hearing. By then the damage will be done.

What I’ve Changed

I’m not giving up my earbuds. That’s unrealistic advice that nobody follows. But I’ve made some adjustments:

Volume cap at 50%. I set a hard limit on my phone and force myself to stay there. It felt too quiet for a day, then my ears adjusted and it sounds fine now.

Over-ear headphones at home. When I’m working at my desk, I switched to open-back over-ear headphones. The sound quality is better and the design is inherently less damaging.

Earbud-free hours. I’ve made a conscious effort to have at least four waking hours with nothing in my ears. This means no podcasts during cooking, no background music while cleaning, just ambient sound.

Annual hearing test. My GP looked at me funny when I requested a baseline hearing test at 34. But having a baseline means I’ll notice degradation early rather than discovering it when it’s already significant.

The Manufacturer Incentives

Here’s the cynical part: earbud manufacturers benefit from you wearing their products as much as possible. The more integrated they are into your daily life, the more dependent you become, the more likely you are to upgrade to the next model.

Apple, Samsung, Sony—none of them are particularly motivated to tell you to use their products less. They’ll add hearing health features because it looks responsible, but the fundamental business model is maximising usage time.

Some manufacturers have added exposure tracking that warns you when cumulative volume gets dangerously high. That’s genuinely useful if you pay attention to it. Most people dismiss the notification the same way they dismiss screen time warnings.

What Would Actually Help

Mandatory default volume limits set to safe levels, where exceeding them requires deliberate action. Not a one-time “are you sure?” prompt, but ongoing friction that reminds you you’re in the danger zone.

Better education about cumulative hearing damage, starting in schools alongside the drug and alcohol awareness programs. Kids should understand that hearing damage from earbuds is as real and permanent as any other health risk they’re taught about.

Standardised decibel output ratings on earbud packaging, like nutrition labels on food. “At 70% volume, this product produces 92 dB” would help consumers make informed decisions.

None of this will happen voluntarily from manufacturers. It’ll require regulation, and nobody’s in a hurry to regulate earbuds.

The Bottom Line

I’m not being alarmist here. Earbuds at reasonable volumes for reasonable durations are fine. The problem is that “reasonable” has expanded to mean all day, every day, at whatever volume feels comfortable in the moment.

If your ears ring after removing earbuds, that’s damage happening in real time. If you can’t hear someone talking to you from across the room without removing your buds, you’re listening too loud. If you wear earbuds for more than four hours daily, you should be thinking about your hearing health.

The technology is great. I genuinely love my earbuds. But I’d also like to hear my grandchildren without hearing aids, and the way things are going, that’s not guaranteed.

Turn it down. Take them out sometimes. Your future self will thank you.