In conversation with friends, you want to be polite. You want your customers, colleagues, and supervisor to recognize that you’re completely engaged when you’re at work. With family, you might find it easier to just tune out the conversation and ask the person near you to repeat what you missed, just a bit louder, please.
You need to lean in a little closer when you’re on zoom calls. You watch for facial cues, listen for inflection, and pay close attention to body language. You try to read people’s lips. And if that doesn’t work, you nod as if you heard every word.
Maybe you’re in denial. You missed a lot of what was said, and you’re struggling to catch up. You might not know it, but years of cumulative hearing loss can have you feeling cut off and discouraged, making tasks at work and life at home unnecessarily overwhelming.
The ability for a person to hear is impacted by situational variables like background noise, competing signals, room acoustics, and how comfortable they are with their surroundings, according to studies. These factors are always in play, but they can be far more extreme for individuals who suffer from hearing loss.
Watch out for these behaviors
Here are a few behaviors to help you figure out whether you are, in fact, fooling yourself into thinking hearing impairment isn’t impacting your social and professional relationships, or whether it’s just the acoustics in the environment:
- Cupping your ear with your hand or leaning in close to the person who is speaking without noticing it
- Asking others what you missed after pretending to hear what they were saying
- Feeling like people are mumbling and not speaking clearly
- Having a hard time hearing what people behind you are saying
- Repeatedly needing to ask people to repeat what they said
- Finding it harder to hear phone conversations
While it may feel like this crept up on you suddenly, chances are your hearing impairment didn’t happen overnight. The majority of people wait 7 years on average before accepting the issue and seeking help.
This means that if your hearing loss is a problem now, it has most likely been going unaddressed and untreated for some time. Begin by making an appointment right away, and stop fooling yourself, hearing loss is no joke.
