How do you protect your hearing while using headphones?

As you can probably tell from my own posts in the Techniques forum, I am far from being an "expert." But what I will say is, yeah, in my opinion, sticking a limiter on your master bus will help with this issue.
 
However, what might be more important is the level at which you are constantly listening to. Short sharp peaks, although painful, "may" do less damage than a constant, but still bearable high listening level.
 
cheers
 
andy

AFAIK, our auditory system to some extent adapts to a continuing noise, having an automatic self protecting behaviour. You can notice this By the way you often feel the need to increase the volume little by little while you work. The volume that sounded loud enough in the beginning of the session, sounds too low after an hours work. You need to conciously avoid increasing the volume, and have breaks that "reset" your ears.
In the same, when you´re watching TV and you need to lower the volume little By little to not disturb the sleeping ones, you may find surprisingly low volume sufficient.
 
 Randomly repetitive gun shot like sudden sounds are to my knowledge the most dangerous ones.
In practice, though, continuous overload does the most damage.
 

gbowling
I feed the headphones from a wireless monitor amp, which provides a "brick wall" limiter. 

Gary, I'm curious to hear about your experience with wireless monitoring. (Sorry for hijacking your thread, Bjorn.)
 
I sometimes work with a drummer who uses electronic drums, and he always monitors himself via headphones, even on stage. His headphones are plugged straight into his amplifier, though. The technique must work, because he's an incredibly tight player and a real joy to perform with. The only problem is he's not able to gauge his volume with respect to the rest of the band.
 
I recently acquired a new keyboard amplifier that has a headphone output, and I'm finding that very enjoyable for my personal one-man jams. 
 
This has got me thinking about doing all stage monitoring via headphones. I don't think it would look as weird to an audience as it might have 20 years ago.
 
The challenge is putting together a headphone amplifier / mixer into which drums, guitars and keys could all be routed, with everyone having their own monitor mix. And it would have to be cordless for the headphones since it's not practical to run long headphone cables all over the stage.
 
So I've been researching possible solutions. My experience with cordless microphones and guitars has not always been positive: batteries going dead mid-set, interference from light dimmers. I'm trying to determine if the whole idea is even practical.
 

Bitflipper, not only is it practical but it's pretty much main stream now. Except most on-stage guys don't use headphones they use in-ear monitors. Which is a fancy word for in-ear headphones!!
 
The difference is that the really good ones are custom molded to your ears. So if you see guys on stage with what looks like custom molded ear plugs, those are actually monitors. 
 
Sennheiser, Shure, AKG, all those guys make the wireless monitor amps/systems. Just go to any music store or web site (musicianfri*, Guitar cent*, sweetwa*) all those guys and search for in ear monitors. 
 
Basically 3 components to these things. A monitor amp piece that you feed your monitor mix to, which is the wireless transmitter. A belt clip receiver that each musician wears. Plug your in-ear monitors or headphones into the belt receiver. 
 
Yep, they have all the same issues as other wireless gear. So you're fighting the same issues as wireless mics, wireless guitar/bass or whatever rigs. They all use the same wireless freqs. 
 
But if you tweak with them you can get them to work well.  Like with cell phones and other battery gadgets, the battery technology has gotten better so that's not as bad as it used to be. Still requires a bit of discipline to charge them correctly but workable. 
 
gabo