It's common advice to take a break from screens, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes, etc. Defocus your eyes, get a different type of light. Good, reasonable advice.
I don't know if it's just me, but I need to give my ears a break too. Especially with in-ear or noise cancelling, I feel faint pressure in my ears after a while. Music sounds flat, and I end up flicking through songs trying to find something which will fix the energy. I can't stand to listen to things I could normally spend hours zoning out to.
Switch to a speaker if you can, get some external noise if you can't. A bit of hallway chatter, the sink running full blast, a nice gust in the trees.
If you can't do that, at least switch it up. Toggle noise cancelling, switch from in-ear to over-ear, bassy music to high-pitched instrumentals.
The other kind of break is nice too. Using headphones to take a break, not needing a break from them.
I wear my headphones turned off all the time. The world is noisy and busy and weird and sometimes I just need some space to breathe. No noise cancelling or music, just a bit of plastic and foam to filter the sounds of the world.
It's quite functional. I can hear traffic and hold a conversation fine. Can pop one ear in or out as needed too.
Looks anti-social, wandering around public with headphones on all the time. Everyone will assume you're listening to something. I'm happy to pay that cost for a bit of auditory breathing room.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Sound is interesting to me because it's simultaneously so much worse than vision and so much harder to filter out. You can ignore sounds to some extent, but it's so much easier to get tunnel vision than to focus on only a single sound. You can block a specific light source with your hand or turn away so you can't see it, but not a specific sound.
No wonder noise-cancelling is so popular.
- Rew