You want to be polite when you are talking to friends. You want your clients, co-workers, and manager to see that you’re fully involved when you’re at work. With family, you might find it easier to just tune out the conversation and ask the person next to you to repeat what you missed, just a bit louder, please.
On conference calls you lean in closer. You look for facial cues, listen for inflection, pay close attention to body language. You try to read people’s lips. And if none of that works, you nod in understanding as if you heard everything.
Maybe your in denial. You missed a lot of what was said, and you’re struggling to keep up. Life at home and projects at work have become unnecessarily difficult and you are feeling aggravated and cut off due to years of cumulative hearing loss.
The ability for a person to hear is influenced by situational variables such as background noise, competing signals, room acoustics, and how acquainted they are with their environment, according to studies. These factors are relevant, but it can be far more severe for individuals who are suffering from hearing loss.
Here are some behaviors to help you figure out whether you are, in fact, fooling yourself into thinking hearing loss isn’t impacting your professional and social interactions, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in their environment:
- Having a difficult time hearing what people behind you are saying
- Finding it harder to hear phone conversations
- Feeling as if people are mumbling and not speaking clearly
- Repeatedly needing to ask people to repeat what they said
- Cupping your ear with your hand or leaning in close to the person who is speaking without noticing it
- Pretending to understand, only to follow up with others to get what you missed
Hearing loss most likely didn’t occur overnight even though it may feel that way. Acknowledging and seeking out help for hearing impairment is something that takes most people 7 years or more.
This means if your hearing loss is an issue now, it has probably been going un-addressed and untreated for some time. So start by scheduling an appointment right away, and stop kidding yourself, hearing loss is no joke.
