In conversation with friends, you like to be polite. At work, you want to appear involved, even enthralled with what your boss/colleagues/clients are saying. With family, you may find it easier to simply tune out the conversation and ask the person next to you to repeat what you missed, just a little louder, please.
You need to move in a little closer when you’re on zoom calls. You look for facial cues, listen for inflection, and tune in to body language. You read lips. And if that doesn’t work, you nod in understanding as if you heard everything.
Don’t fool yourself. You’re struggling to catch up because you missed most of what was said. You might not recognize it, but years of progressive hearing loss can have you feeling isolated and discouraged, making projects at work and life at home unnecessarily overwhelming.
The ability for a person to hear is impacted by situational variables like background noise, contending signals, room acoustics, and how acquainted they are with their surroundings, according to research. But for people who have hearing loss, these factors are made even more difficult.
Some hearing loss behaviors to watch out for
Here are a few habits to help you figure out whether you are, in truth, fooling yourself into thinking hearing loss isn’t impacting your social and professional interactions, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in the environment:
- Missing important parts of phone conversations
- Unable to hear people talking behind you
- Asking others what you missed after pretending you heard what they were saying
- Repeatedly having to ask people to repeat what they said
- Cupping your hands over your ear or leaning in close to the person who is speaking without realizing it
- Thinking others aren’t speaking clearly when all you seem to hear is mumbling
Hearing loss probably didn’t take place overnight even though it might feel as if it did. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing loss is something that takes most individuals at least 7 years.
This means that if your hearing loss is problematic now, it has probably been going unaddressed and untreated for some time. Hearing loss is no joke so stop fooling yourself and make an appointment now.