I now have hearing loss and it is amazing that the things that you may think are safe throughout your life are actually not when it comes to protecting your hearing. I went to loud concerts, I used headsets with music turned up way too high, and I think that at work there was way too much noise and louder than needed. Here are some tips I found from enthealth.org:
Turn it down—Set your volume limit on your device so you’re listening at no louder than 70 percent of the possible volume.
Turn it off—Hearing damage occurs at loud volumes for long periods of times. You can use the 60/60 rule: listen at 60 percent volume for 60 minutes, then take a break for 30 minutes or more to allow your ears to rest and recover.
Choose over-the-ear headphones over earbuds—Earbuds can be up to nine dB louder than over-the-ear headphones. That would reduce your safe listening time from two hours to 15 minutes if you were listening at 91 dB!
Choose noise-canceling headphones—This is particularly important if you like listening to your device(s) in noisy environments, like busy city streets. Without realizing it, you will dial up the volume in your earbuds to overcome the noise around you.
It’s all about that bass—If you’re a big fan of the deep vibration and “head-banging” effect of music, use the equalizer on your device to turn up the bass. Even by turning down the volume, you’ll still get the feeling that pleases you.
We now know that even a limited amount of noise exposure can cause permanent damage to delicate ribbons between the hair cells in our ears. The damage only becomes obvious a decade or two later when we start having trouble hearing conversations with noise in the background.