You want to be courteous when you’re talking to friends. At work, you want to appear engaged, even enthralled with what your manager/colleagues/customers are saying. With family, you might find it less difficult 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 look for facial hints, listen for inflection, and pay close attention to body language. You read lips. And if all else fails – you fake it.
Don’t fool yourself. You’re struggling to catch up because you missed most of the conversation. You may not know it, but years of progressive hearing loss can have you feeling isolated and discouraged, making tasks at work and life at home needlessly difficult.
The ability for a person to hear is impacted by situational factors including background sound, contending signals, room acoustics, and how comfortable they are with their surroundings, according to research. But for individuals who suffer from hearing loss, these factors are made even more challenging.
Look out for these behaviors
Here are a few habits to help you figure out whether you are, in fact, fooling yourself into thinking hearing loss is not impacting your social and professional relationships, or whether it’s just the acoustics in the environment:
- Pretending to comprehend, only to later ask others what you missed
- Missing what people are saying when on phone conversations
- Not able to hear others talking from behind you
- Requesting that repeat themselves over and over again
- Thinking people aren’t talking clearly when all you seem to hear is mumbling
- Leaning in When people are talking and instinctively cupping your hand over your ear
While it might feel like this snuck up on you suddenly, chances are your hearing loss didn’t happen overnight. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing loss is something that takes most individuals 7 years or more.
So if you’re detecting symptoms of hearing loss, you can bet that it’s been occurring for some time unnoticed. Start by scheduling an appointment now, and stop fooling yourself, hearing loss is no joke.