You want to be polite when you’re talking to friends. You want your clients, co-workers, and boss to recognize that you’re totally involved when you’re at work. You often find yourself needing family to repeat themselves because it was less difficult to tune out parts of the discussion that you weren’t able to hear very well.
You have to move in a little closer when you’re on conference calls. You look closely at body language and facial cues and listen for verbal inflections. You read lips. And if none of that works, you nod as if you heard every word.
Maybe your in denial. You missed lots of the conversation, and you’re struggling to keep up. You may not realize it, but years of cumulative hearing loss can have you feeling cut off and frustrated, making projects at work and life at home unnecessarily difficult.
The ability for a person to hear is impacted by situational variables including background noise, competing signals, room acoustics, and how acquainted they are with their setting, according to studies. These factors are always in play, but it can be far more severe for people who have hearing loss.
Here are a few habits to help you determine whether you are, in truth, convincing yourself that your hearing loss is not impacting your professional and social interactions, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in their environment:
- Feeling like people are mumbling and not talking clearly
- Asking others what you missed after pretending you heard what someone was saying
- Not able to hear others talking from behind you
- Requesting that people repeat themselves over and over again
- Finding it more difficult to hear over the phone
- Cupping your ear with your hand or leaning in close to the person talking without noticing it
Hearing loss probably didn’t happen overnight even though it may feel as if it did. Acknowledging and seeking out help for hearing impairment is something that takes most people at least 7 years.
So if you’re detecting symptoms of hearing loss, you can be sure that it’s been occurring for some time undetected. So begin by making an appointment right away, and stop kidding yourself, hearing loss is no joke.
