You want to be courteous when you are talking to friends. At work, you want to look engaged, even enthralled with what your manager/peers/customers are saying. You regularly find yourself needing family to repeat themselves because it was easier to tune out parts of the conversation that you weren’t able to hear very well.
You need to lean 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 try to read people’s lips. And if none of that works, you nod as if you heard everything.
Don’t fool yourself. Your straining to keep up because you missed most of what was said. 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 factors including background sound, contending signals, room acoustics, and how familiar they are with their surroundings, according to studies. These factors are always in play, but it can be far more severe for people who suffer from hearing loss.
There are some revealing habits that will raise your awareness of whether you’re in denial about how your hearing impairment is affecting your social and professional life:
- Constantly having to ask people to repeat themselves
- Unable to hear people talking behind you
- Missing what people are saying when on phone conversations
- Feeling as if people are mumbling and not speaking clearly
- Pretending to comprehend, only to follow up with others to get what you missed
- Cupping your ear with your hand or leaning in close to the person who is speaking without noticing it
Hearing loss most likely didn’t happen overnight even though it may feel as if it did. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing impairment is something that takes most individuals 7 years or more.
This means if your hearing loss is a problem now, it has probably been going un-addressed and untreated for some time. Hearing loss is no joke so stop fooling yourself and schedule an appointment right away.