← Blog · March 8, 2026 · 6 min read
Work From Home and Your Hearing: Risks You Might Be Ignoring
The widespread shift to remote work has had many well-documented effects on health and wellbeing — changes in physical activity, social interaction, work-life boundaries, and mental health. One effect that has received far less attention is the dramatic increase in daily headphone usage and its implications for hearing.
A pre-2020 office worker might have worn headphones for two to three hours a day: a commute, some music or a podcast during lunch, and occasional calls. A remote worker doing the same type of job can easily wear headphones for six to nine hours daily: back-to-back video calls, focused work with background music, online training sessions, and an evening workout playlist. That's a tripling or more of daily exposure — and in many cases, at volumes that carry cumulative risk.
Why Video Calls Are a Particular Risk
Video conferencing audio introduces multiple factors that tend to push volume up:
- Low-quality audio compression — many conferencing platforms aggressively compress audio to reduce bandwidth. Compressed call audio can sound muddy or unclear even at moderate volumes, prompting users to turn up the dial.
- Unpredictable volume spikes — when different participants speak, their microphone sensitivity and distance from their mic varies. A soft-spoken colleague followed by someone speaking directly into a headset mic creates sudden jumps in perceived volume.
- Notification sounds — meeting platforms often play notification tones (entry chimes, message alerts) at a higher level than the call audio itself, causing repeated brief spikes throughout the day.
- In-ear headsets push audio closer to the eardrum — the compact earbuds favoured for remote work deliver sound much closer to the tympanic membrane than traditional speakers or over-ear headphones, amplifying the risk at any given percentage volume.
The Accumulation Problem
Hearing damage from noise is cumulative. The ear does not simply reset overnight. If your daily exposure is just slightly above the safe threshold — not dramatically over it — the damage accumulates slowly but persistently over years.
A remote worker who listens at a modest-but-risky 87 dB for six hours every weekday will, over a year, accumulate far more cochlear stress than a concertgoer who attends a loud show once a month. The concert-goer's exposure is acute and infrequent; the remote worker's is chronic and daily.
What You Can Do
Schedule No-Headphone Time
Treat headphone-free time as a deliberate part of your workday, not just the gaps between calls. Use a speaker for calls when you're alone and the environment is suitable. Reserve headphones for focused work or calls where audio privacy genuinely matters.
Standardise Your Call Volume
Pick a volume level for calls and set it once. Many people habitually raise the volume during a call when a speaker is unclear, then forget to lower it for the next call that starts at a higher base level. Set your call volume explicitly and leave it there.
Turn Off or Mute Conference Notification Sounds
Most conferencing platforms allow you to disable in-call notification tones in their settings. These repeated audio spikes are unnecessary and add to cumulative exposure. Disable them.
Use Quality Over-Ear Headphones for Long Sessions
For calls lasting longer than 30 minutes, over-ear headphones with good passive or active noise isolation are safer than earbuds. They allow you to achieve adequate call quality at lower volume without the in-ear proximity risk.
Monitor Your Desktop Volume Automatically
Most audio monitoring tools focus on mobile devices. For the computer — where remote workers spend most of their audio time — SoundBrake provides the same kind of automatic monitoring. It runs silently in your system tray, tracks your cumulative volume exposure throughout the workday, and alerts you before the total reaches a risky threshold.
For remote workers who may sit through five to seven hours of calls and focus sessions in a single day, this kind of passive monitoring provides a safety net that willpower alone cannot reliably sustain.
The Compound Risk Over Years
Consider someone who has worked remotely for five years with slightly elevated daily headphone exposure. Individually, no single day was dramatically dangerous. But the compounding effect of thousands of hours of mild overexposure can produce measurable high-frequency hearing loss by their mid-thirties or early forties — a decade earlier than the age-related hearing decline they might otherwise expect.
Unlike most occupational health risks, this one is entirely self-managed. Your employer is not responsible for the volume at which you set your headphones during a home office call. You are — and the earlier you build protective habits, the more hearing you preserve for the decades ahead.
Next reading: Why Open Source Matters for Hearing Protection Software →