In conversation with friends, you like to be courteous. At work, you want to look engaged, even enthralled with what your supervisor/colleagues/customers are talking about. With family, you may find it less difficult to just tune out the conversation and ask the person next to you to repeat what you missed, just a bit louder, please.
You have to lean in a little closer when you’re on conference calls. You look for facial cues, listen for inflection, and tune in to body language. You attempt to read people’s lips. And if all else fails – you fake it.
Don’t fool yourself. You missed a lot of the conversation, and you’re struggling to catch up. Life at home and tasks at work have become unnecessarily difficult and you are feeling frustrated and isolated due to years of cumulative hearing loss.
The ability for someone to hear is impacted by situational variables including background noise, contending signals, room acoustics, and how comfortable they are with their setting, according to studies. But for individuals who suffer from hearing loss, these factors are made even more challenging.
Watch out for these behaviors
Here are a few habits to help you determine whether you are, in fact, fooling yourself into thinking hearing impairment is not affecting your professional and social interactions, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in the environment:
- Leaning in during conversations and instinctively cupping your ear with your hand
- Finding it harder to hear phone conversations
- Thinking others aren’t speaking clearly when all you seem to hear is mumbling
- Unable to hear others talking from behind you
- Requesting that repeat themselves again and again… and again
- Pretending to comprehend, only to follow up with others to get what you missed
While it might feel like this snuck up on you suddenly, more than likely your hearing loss didn’t occur overnight. Most people wait an average of 7 years before accepting the problem and finding help.
That means that if your hearing loss is a problem 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 right away.
