Millions of people who think they are protecting their hearing might be doing just the opposite.
Overuse of noise-canceling headphones could raise the risk of being diagnosed with auditory processing disorder, or APD, hearing experts say.
This condition makes it more difficult to decipher spoken words and other sounds. Patients may struggle to identify where sounds are coming from. They also might feel overwhelmed in noisy situations where sounds are all around them.
Others who use noise-canceling headphones report symptoms such as nausea, headaches and ear pain.
In a recent report, the BBC reached out to five audiology departments in the U.K.’s National Health Service, and all of them confirmed that they are seeing an increase in the number of younger people who report hearing issues.
In many cases, hearing tests are normal for these patients. However, their ability to process sounds is compromised.
Increasingly, experts are pointing to noise-canceling headphones as a possible cause of auditory processing disorder. Experts say hearing a wide variety of sounds is essential to teaching the brain which sounds it should focus on.
Although noise-canceling headphones can protect the ears from potential damage caused by loud sounds, experts have begun to worry that using them may cause the brain to forget how to filter noise properly, increasing the risk of auditory processing disorder.
Patients with auditory processing disorder may benefit from treatments that try to train the brain to separate speech from background noise. Some patients make a full recovery, but others do not.
David McAlpine, academic director of Macquarie University Hearing, told Gizmodo:
“If you have a listening loss, it’s like changing your brain’s encryption. Even if you can change what you’re hearing, you may not get back to the brain state that you had before. It’s not reversible.”
McAlpine adds that the human body is not meant to experience total silence, which can cause people to feel disoriented and to report what feels like pressure in their head and ears.
Dr. Angela Alexander, audiologist and owner of APD Support in the U.K., told the BBC:
“Right now I can hear there is a fan above my head, but my brain is telling me that is not something I need to worry about. It’s the way we identify threats in our environment, so it makes sense to me that there would be an increase in anxiety if a person’s brain no longer has those inputs helping tell them what is a concern and what is not.”
She suggests limiting the amount of time you use noise-canceling headphones, wearing headphones that don’t completely block the ears and using the transparency mode — which amplifies background noise — to improve this.
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