In conversation with friends, you like to be courteous. You want your customers, colleagues, and supervisor to see that you’re completely engaged when you’re at work. With family, you might find it less difficult to just tune out the conversation and ask the person next to you to fill in what you missed, just a bit louder, please.
You have to move in a little closer when you’re on conference calls. You pay attention to body language and facial cues and listen for verbal inflections. You attempt to read people’s lips. And if that doesn’t work, you nod in understanding as if you heard every word.
Don’t fool yourself. You’re struggling to keep up because you missed most of the conversation. You may not know it, but years of cumulative hearing loss can have you feeling cut off and discouraged, making projects at work and life at home unnecessarily overwhelming.
Some research shows that situational factors such as environmental acoustics, background noise, competing signals, and situational awareness have a strong influence on how we hear. These factors are relevant, but they can be a lot more extreme for individuals who have hearing loss.
Look out for these behaviors
Here are a few habits to help you determine whether you are, in truth, convincing yourself that your hearing loss isn’t impacting your social and professional relationships, or whether it’s just the acoustics in the environment:
- Requesting that repeat themselves over and over again
- Finding it more difficult to hear phone conversations
- Cupping your ear with your hand or leaning in close to the person who is speaking without realizing it
- Pretending to understand, only to later ask others what you missed
- Not able to hear people talking from behind you
- Thinking people aren’t talking clearly when all you can hear is mumbling
Hearing loss most likely didn’t occur overnight even though it could feel that way. The majority of people wait an average of 7 years before acknowledging the problem and seeking help.
That means that if your hearing loss is an issue now, it has most likely been going unaddressed and neglected for some time. Begin by scheduling an appointment right away, and stop kidding yourself, hearing loss is no joke.
