Health impacts of excessive noise - what noise does to hearing

Noise doesn’t make you ‘deaf’, at least not immediately. What it does is make you start to lose clarity, especially around key speech frequencies - people who have noise damage in their hearing usually know someone is talking and can hear what is happening on the other side of a room, but struggle to hear what someone is saying even right next to them when there is other noise around.

The best way I can describe it is that if you are in something like a restaurant or a pub, you are hearing many noise sources at once and with normal hearing your ears and brain can separate them out, bringing the speech you want to hear to the front. With hearing which is damaged by noise all those different sources start to kind of lump together into one complex lump of sound, with background noises burying speech. When there are loads of people talking at once you end up grinning inanely in the corner guessing at what people are saying, using context to try and fill in the blanks which you simply didn’t hear.

Things aren’t necessarily quieter, at the start anyway, it is as loud as it always was but with far less clarity and sharpness.

This is permanent, there is no fix and that’s why employers need to do noise assessments and actively manage noise risks.

The biggest impacts of hearing which is damaged by too much noise tend to come outside work. For example, TV companies love adding dramatic background music to dramas and that is fine for people with ‘normal’ hearing as they can hear both the music and speech. For someone with noise induced hearing loss however it is more like one solid sound, with the speech being buried among the sound effects and music. Turning the volume up doesn’t help, that just makes a mushy noise a louder mushy noise.

For some context, based on a sample of over 5000 hearing tests, pretty much exactly 2/3 of people have some level of noise damage. A bit of it is kind of normal - you may have quiet life now but 20 years ago went to nightclubs and concerts regularly and that exposure will have caused a little bit of damage. Most people never notice it, but then if you add more noise exposure at work onto it then it can start to become an issue.

Unhelpfully, the person suffering from the loss is not usually the first to notice it, it is usually friends and family who start having to repeat themselves.

Add to that a second impact which is tinnitus. There are many causes of tinnitus from getting older to a bang on the head, some medications to other types of illness, stress or a lack of sleep, but noise can also cause it. Tinnitus should not be overlooked as it can have a huge impact on quality of life - you are trying to sleep but there is an incessant whistling or hissing in your ears which can seem very loud.

Noise is good as well as bad

Noise is everywhere and nobody would ever say have no noise at all as noise can make some things more enjoyable, but what you want to do really is save yourself for the noises you do want to hear and not for the punch press banging away for eight hours a day.

Noise assessments look to identify those workplace causes and see what should be done about it, lessening hearing loss and leaving people more able to enjoy wider life for many years longer.