You want to be courteous when you are talking with friends. You want your customers, co-workers, and manager to recognize that you’re fully involved when you’re at work. With family, you might find it less difficult to simply tune out the conversation and ask the person next to you to repeat what you missed, just a bit louder, please.
On zoom calls you move in closer. You watch for facial hints, 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 missed lots of the conversation, and you’re struggling to keep up. Life at home and projects at work have become unjustifiably difficult and you are feeling aggravated and isolated due to years of progressive hearing loss.
The ability for a person to hear is impacted by situational variables including background sound, competing signals, room acoustics, and how familiar they are with their environment, according to research. These factors are always in play, but they can be much more severe for people who have hearing loss.
Some hearing loss behaviors to look out for
Here are some behaviors to help you identify whether you are, in fact, fooling yourself into thinking hearing loss is not affecting your social and professional interactions, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in the environment:
- Unable to hear people talking from behind you
- Asking others what you missed after pretending you heard what they were saying
- Feeling like people are mumbling and not talking clearly
- Missing what people are saying when on phone conversations
- Leaning in during conversations and unintentionally cupping your ear with your hand
- Repeatedly having to ask people to repeat what they said
Hearing loss most likely didn’t take place overnight even though it could feel that way. Most people wait an average of 7 years before acknowledging the issue and finding help.
This means that if your hearing loss is a problem now, it has probably been going unaddressed and neglected for some time. Begin by making an appointment now, and stop kidding yourself, hearing loss is no joke.