YOUR iPhone has a built-in feature that tells you if you’re listening to music too loud.
The handy tool is buried in Apple’s Health app and is designed to help you preserve your hearing long-term.
Playing tunes at excessive volumes through earbuds can harm the cells in your inner ear that recognise sounds and carry them to your brain.
According to research, 85 decibels is the maximum volume at which you can listen to sound for two hours without damaging your hearing.
That’s the equivalent noise to that of a food blender, a noisy restaurant or a cinema.
Any louder than that, and you risk causing permanent damage that accelerates hearing loss as you get older.
Fortunately, the Health app will tell you if you’ve got the volume turned up too high when listening to stuff through your headphones.
To try it out for yourself, open the Health app and tap the Browse tab in the lower right corner of your screen.
Select Hearing and tap Headphones audio levels to view a summary of your recent listening habits.
You can toggle at the top of the screen whether you want to see hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly data.
If you scroll down, the tool will tell you whether or not your average headphones audio levels were above the 85-decibel limit over the last seven days.
If they were, you might want to think about reducing the amount of noise you’re exposing yourself to.
One way to reduce the noise at which you listen to music or podcasts is to invest in some noise-cancelling headphones.
They use a series of microphones to track and block out background noise so you can listen to music at lower volumes.
Apple’s AirPods Pro and the Sony WF-1000XM4 are among the most popular earbuds with Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) technology.
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