You want to be polite when you are talking with friends. At work, you want to look engaged, even enthralled with what your supervisor/peers/customers are talking about. With family, you may find it less difficult to simply tune out the conversation and ask the person next to you to fill in what you missed, just a bit louder, please.
On zoom calls you move in closer. You look closely at body language and facial clues and listen for verbal inflections. You read lips. And if everything else fails – you fake it.
Maybe your in denial. Your struggling to keep up because you missed most of what was said. You might not realize it, but years of cumulative hearing loss can have you feeling cut off and frustrated, making tasks at work and life at home unnecessarily difficult.
According to some studies, situational factors such as environmental acoustics, background noise, competing signals, and environmental awareness have a strong influence on how we hear. These factors are always in play, but it can be much worse for individuals who suffer from hearing loss.
Here are a few habits to help you figure out whether you are, in truth, convincing yourself that your hearing impairment is not affecting your social and professional interactions, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in their environment:
- Not able to hear others talking from behind you
- Pretending to comprehend, only to later ask others what you missed
- Missing important parts of phone conversations
- Leaning in When people are talking and unintentionally cupping your ear with your hand
- Feeling as if people are mumbling and not speaking clearly
- Requesting that people repeat themselves again and again… and again
Hearing loss probably didn’t occur overnight even though it could feel that way. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing impairment is something that takes most people 7 years or more.
So if you’re noticing symptoms of hearing loss, you can be sure that it’s been occurring for some time unnoticed. Hearing loss is no joke so stop kidding yourself and schedule an appointment now.