You want to be polite when you’re talking with friends. You want your clients, co-workers, and boss to see that you’re totally involved when you’re at work. You frequently find yourself needing family to repeat themselves because it was less difficult to tune out parts of the conversation that you couldn’t hear very well.
On zoom calls you move in closer. You watch for facial cues, listen for inflection, and pay close attention to body language. You read lips. And if that doesn’t work, you nod as if you heard everything.
Don’t fool yourself. You’re struggling to keep up because you missed most of what was said. You may not know it, but years of cumulative hearing loss can have you feeling isolated and discouraged, making projects at work and life at home unnecessarily overwhelming.
Some research shows that situational factors like environmental acoustics, background noise, contending signals, and situational awareness have a strong influence on the way a person hears. These factors are always in play, but they can be far worse for individuals who have hearing loss.
Watch out for these behaviors
Here are some behaviors to help you determine whether you are, in fact, fooling yourself into thinking hearing loss isn’t impacting your social and professional interactions, or whether it’s just the acoustics in the environment:
- Requesting that repeat themselves over and over again
- Finding it harder to hear phone conversations
- Asking others what was said after pretending you heard what they were saying
- Thinking people aren’t speaking clearly when all you can hear is mumbling
- Not able to hear others talking from behind you
- Leaning in during conversations and unconsciously cupping your ear with your hand
Hearing loss most likely didn’t occur overnight even though it could feel that way. Most people wait an average of 7 years before acknowledging the issue and seeking help.
This means that if your hearing loss is problematic now, it has probably been going unaddressed and neglected for some time. Hearing loss is no joke so stop fooling yourself and schedule an appointment now.