Lenovo thinkpad t440p speakers work but headphones don't

I'm pretty tired of googling for hours collectively every time it breaks. This isn't the first time and I'd love it to be the last.

Occasionally at seemingly random times my headphones like to just stop working. I've been having to open alsamixer and manually turn the volume up after a reboot but this time it just stopped.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T440p running ubuntu 15.10 with linux kernel 4.2.0-040200rc2-generic.

Some stuff I've seen other people mention:

:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC3232 Analog [ALC3232 Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HDA Intel HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HDA Intel HDMI], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HDA Intel HDMI], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

edit: I pulled the battery and let it sit for some time, came back and it worked.

If someone could explain why that worked, that'd be awesome. I'd love to know why that solved this.

Also: I can't seem to be able to change the volume from the main volume fader. I have to do it through alsamixer.