A little thing I do is when my ears start to feel tired, or perhaps more accurately when I think to myself “I need to turn this up” I turn it down instead and focus on what change that makes. What stands out now, what can I change etc. Or stop the music and tidy the project up, label things, mess with track colours, remove unused devices or samples etc. I’m a real noob though so YMMV etc.
Of course a cup of tea/coffee and a handful of biscuits feels good as well.
This works surprisingly well at dealing with what initially made you want to turn it up. Occasionally completely derailing your train of thought is a great technique. Also, Oblique Strategies.
But I fear I’m starting to lean off-topic. 
some great advice in this thread. thanks, all…
one thing I like to do to refresh my ears is hang out with earplugs in for an hour or two.
sometimes I’ll even sleep with them in. feels like I have super hearing when I take em out
FWIW/YMMV
I often find that the more natural a mix/speaker/headphone sounds the less fatiguing it is.
When i use monitors (my room acoustics is not very good) i get ear fatigue after 10 minutes already at normal listening volume. But i can work for hours with my more natural/linear sounding open back headphones.
Opening the window and listening to the sounds of nature or the street once in a while also helps to keep an unbiased perception.
I have always slept with ear plugs in, I cant sleep without them in fact. I have always credited them with some amount of hearing recovery properties, but I have no basis in scientific or medical fact for that claim. But I’m 37, old raver, use headphones a lot while at work, commuting etc. and my hearing is decent/tinnitus free. But again that’s a very anecdotal story and YMMV.
What’s not up to debate :
When to use headphone :
At low volume, a good balanced headphone can be comfortable for a long while. And by low volume I mean that my audient sono is set to 0.7 and occasionally 1.5 when I want to party. I wear a AT-m70x which is known to be a bit tiring, and never had a problem
What’s more subjective :
I’d say headphones are quite a trap with stereo, the sound travelling in your room does things a headphone can’t prevent…
I worked for years with cheap monitors/headphones but I think that was an error because it prevented me to work a lot of sound aspects I couldn’t just ear on bad speakers…
I think headphones are good for fixing issues in stereo and frequencies (too much bass, to harsh highs, things like that) What I also noticed (and that was a “wow” for me), is that they are really bad at dynamic range. For example, I can listen to a track which has a too loud kick on headphones and it won’t bother me. Then I turn on the monitors and I hear the obvious “booom booom”…
This is a huge thing.
I’ve even gone so far as to make an impulse response of my listening space and put it on the master channel when stuck with headphones. It ain’t perfect (since the headphone response is obviously not totally flat, and the impulse is shaped a bit by the microphone used to capture it), but it does help to fool the ear and the mind a bit.
Similar with all the highs, especially when it comes to hihats, hats or percussion. On headphones it’s normal, almost too soft, but when you switch to speakers it’s prominent. Maybe it’s just my equipment, but having too prominent hihats on speakers is always the case. On the other hand someone told me on his monitors the highs in my tracks are a little bit too soft compared to the bass. I don’t know the exact reason, so I just continue mixing via studio headphones, Hi-Fi speakers and if necessary more types of speakers. But at the end finetuning is always needed to be done via headphones, no doubt about that.
what did you use for the exciter?
seems like this could be useful for analysis of the space for treatment
It’s been a while, but I think I just used a pink white noise burst. It’d probably be best to use a sine sweep, though, if you wanted it closer to perfect.
makes sense, thanks
I’ve gone back and forth between what I prefer. I now use cheap Sony MDR ZX110s as daily drivers but then test on other equipment - in particular, bass frequencies and phasing checks really need speaker setups. The reason for using the MDRs is actually related to a little-considered ergonomic fact: they’re lighter than “studio” headphones, so there is literally less to crush my head and neck with, which is a contributor to fatigue that is just as important as the timbre. And then I keep the volume as low as I can tolerate. The process is a game of making it sound good when I can barely hear it, and then only cranking it for fun.
It’s more important for my mix decisions to have a reference mix set up and to quickly and frequently go back and forth between the reference and my mix on the same listening setup, than it is to have that setup be perfect. For long sessions, I agree with the idea of using Pomodoro timers or similar. The other members of my household will switch on fans, air filters, etc. over the course of the day and the sudden blasts of white noise that they add and remove are also a good serendipitous cue for me to adjust my own volume. Getting that little jolt moves things along much faster than another 30 minutes of hearing the same loop.
Related to this is the strategy of focusing a session just on replicating an existing track, if only a few bars of it. Then your reference mix exists in two places: in the original track, and in a session file that you can bring up and look at.
Using “open” headphones help a lot to reduce ear fatigue
I have “open” headphones and “closed” headphones
“open” headphones->long sessions
“closed” headphones->finalization
Try the AKG 702
You will think differently
Transductors are the same…all is the same
the only difference is that this is assembled by chinese
the sound is exactly the same
My noise canceling headphones mostly removes lower frequencies and it feels calming to put them on in noisy environments, so i find it a bit strange if the high frequencies are responsible for ear fatigue?
To me it sounds like the higher mid range, around 1-3KHz is the most ‘annoying’ frequencies when they become too loud, i don’t know…
Now is my new strategy:
• be most careful about the volume, set the volume lower (checking the volume after a break could help to be more objective)
• make a break nearly every hour
• no too long sessions (after 2,5 hours, going for making something else)
Maintaining the volume lower is really the most issue.
I asked about that to my doctor, she said me the best is to stay around 70 db maximum, no matter about what genre of music, classical or EDM, headphones or speakers, under 70 db (mostly 60 db) for long play is better.
I would be super happy to have a tool wich can check (and limit) the volume in real db delivered in real-time, but this not exist I think.