Many of us where headphones for most of our waking hours. Whether you use Beats, Air Pods, or alternative headphones that do not double as status symbols, there’s a very real question about what long term headphone use means for hearing loss. As one hearing study, among many, suggests that it’s really not much of a question at all: chronic headphone use is associated with hearing loss.

Of course, individual results tend to vary. No two people use headphones exactly the same way, and headphone behavior has a great deal to do with how much hearing loss will manifest in a person’s life. Here are some of the most important factors when determining how much or little your headphone use will make a difference in your hearing down the road.

Time Matters - If you wear headphones all day, you have a greater likelihood of damaging your hearing than someone who wears headphones only occasionally. In the study linked above, it’s shown that teenagers who used headphones for listening sessions of 3 hours or more (at least when long sessions like these were common practice) were more likely to have tinnitus (ringing in the ears) than those who listened through headphones for shorter durations.

Frequency Matters - Not only does the length of a session matter, the frequency of these sessions is also a factor. 2 hours of headbanging to Crowbar with earphones once a month probably won’t make a big difference, but doing this every single day almost certainly will. Even for those who do not listen to loud music, frequency of headphone listening sessions should be an important consideration. Give your ears breaks.

Volume Matters - Obviously, volume is the single biggest contributor to hearing loss than any other, with likelihood of hearing damage increasing with duration and decibel. Those who listen at more than 85 dB LAeq, FF show the biggest change in hearing threshold. If you don’t happen to have a decibel reader app on your phone, or carry a unit in your pocket, just be very conscious of the volume at which you are listening to your music with headphones.

There are other interesting factors at play in hearing loss. Women tend to report subjective hearing loss more frequently and pessimistically than men, but men actually suffer worse hearing loss overall. This could be due to factors other than headphone use, but men also report greater time spent with personal listening devices, and also report listening to music at higher volumes.

What most studies fail to take into account is the style of audio consumed with headphones. Is the person who listens to podcasts all day at the office going to suffer the same hearing loss as the person blasting Meshuggah on headphones in their cubicle? Science may not have made a firm statement on this, but common sense says “no.” The spoken word found in podcasts usually does not have the same frequency range as popular music, nor are these frequencies compressed to provide maximum subjective “loudness” in a mix. Finally, podcast listeners tend not to need high volumes to get the most out of Ira Glass, though music fans do tend to like loud listening sessions.

Be careful with your ears. Once hearing is lost, there’s no easy fix to bring it back. Tinnitus is a chronic condition once you’ve got it. It may be possible that by the time we’re old, some solution for hearing loss has come along, like laser eye surgery with poor vision. But as this solution has not yet materialized, take care of the ears you have. They might have to last you for the rest of your life.