You want to be polite when you are talking to friends. At work, you want to look engaged, even enthralled with what your supervisor/peers/clients are saying. You frequently find yourself asking family to repeat themselves because it was less difficult to tune out parts of the conversation that you weren’t able to hear very well.
On conference calls you move in closer. You look for facial cues, listen for inflection, and tune in to body language. You read lips. And if everything else fails – you fake it.
Don’t fool yourself. You’re straining to catch up because you missed most of the conversation. You may not realize it, but years of progressive hearing loss can have you feeling isolated and frustrated, making tasks at work and life at home unnecessarily difficult.
The ability for a person to hear is influenced by situational variables including background noise, competing signals, room acoustics, and how comfortable they are with their surroundings, according to research. These factors are always in play, but they can be far more extreme for people who have hearing loss.
Watch out for these behaviors
Here are a few habits to help you identify whether you are, in fact, convincing yourself that your hearing impairment is not impacting your professional and social interactions, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in the environment:
- Unable to hear others talking behind you
- Cupping your ear with your hand or leaning in close to the person who is speaking without noticing it
- Requesting that repeat themselves over and over again
- Asking others what you missed after pretending you heard what they were saying
- Thinking others aren’t talking clearly when all you seem to hear is mumbling
- Missing important parts of phone conversations
Hearing loss most likely didn’t happen overnight even though it could feel that way. Most 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 probably been going unaddressed and untreated for some time. Start by scheduling an appointment right away, and stop fooling yourself, hearing loss is no joke.