Your Habits Are Hurting Your Hearing

We all have habits that we’d like to break, whether it’s an overindulgence in chocolate or fingernail biting. While some of our habits don’t really affect our lives, others can have serious impacts on our health. In fact, many of the most common negative habits can have a major impact on your hearing health. Here are a few:

Smoking

The research is pretty clear: smoking has a huge negative effect on our health. Smoking has been linked to everything from lung cancer to stroke and poor dental health, but did you know that it can also hurt your hearing?

While most of smoking’s negative health effects come from the innumerable chemicals and carcinogens in tobacco, nicotine is the main culprit in smoking’s effects on our ears. Nicotine actually restricts blood flow to our ears, which can cause long-term and irreversible damage to the delicate cells that we rely upon for our hearing abilities. Basically, the more you smoke, the more damage you do to your ears.

Additionally, smoking hurts the hearing health of your loved ones. In addition to harming your own hearing health, studies show that people exposed to second-hand smoke (especially adolescents) are almost twice as likely to develop low-frequency hearing loss than their peers in non-smoking households.

Vaping

Although the jury is still out on the overall negative health effects of vaping and e-cigarettes on the human body, any vaping fluid or e-juice that contains nicotine will have the same negative hearing health effects as smoking. If that wasn’t bad enough, e-juices contain hundreds of chemicals with as-of-yet unknown health impacts, one of which, propylene glycol, has been clearly linked to cases of sudden hearing loss.

Binge Drinking

While moderate and responsible alcohol consumption can be part of a healthy lifestyle, binge drinking and consistent excessive drinking can do more than irreversibly damage your liver. Many of the leading health experts believe that drinking alcohol can affect your brain’s ability to interpret and understand sound.

When this happens, it’s believed that sounds at lower frequencies might create a toxic environment within the inner ear that can damage the all-important and sensitive hair cells of the cochlea. As a response, the central auditory cortex of the brain might actually shrink in binge drinkers, which means that the nerves responsible for our hearing abilities can be negatively impacted over time.

Poor Dental Hygiene

Forgetting to floss can do more than give you a cavity or two. In fact, while it might seem a bit weird to think that not brushing your teeth can hurt your hearing, when you allow your teeth and gums to become unhealthy, you allow bacteria to build up in your mouth.

Eventually, these bacteria can make it into your bloodstream, causing inflammation and a narrowing of the arteries, both of which result in poor circulation. Since adequate blood circulation is critical for healthy hearing, forgetting to floss and brush your teeth twice a day could be hurting your ears.

Letting Hearing Loss Go Untreated

All too often, people with signs and symptoms of hearing loss let it go untreated. Whether this is due to a lack of access to hearing healthcare, a dearth of financial resources, or an unwillingness to acknowledge one’s hearing difficulties, untreated hearing loss is a major concern.

When hearing loss is left untreated, one increases their risk for dementia, dangerous falls, and other negative health effects. Thus, if you or someone you know if experiencing hearing loss, the best place to start is to schedule an appointment with your hearing healthcare professional today!