In conversation with friends, you want to be courteous. You want your clients, colleagues, and manager to recognize that you’re fully involved when you’re at work. You frequently 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 need to lean in a little closer when you’re on conference calls. 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.
Don’t fool yourself. You’re straining to catch up because you missed most of what was said. Life at home and projects at work have become unjustifiably overwhelming and you are feeling frustrated and isolated due to years of progressive hearing loss.
The ability for a person to hear is impacted by situational variables like background sound, competing signals, room acoustics, and how acquainted they are with their surroundings, according to studies. But for individuals who have hearing loss, these factors are made even more challenging.
Some hearing loss behaviors to watch out for
Here are some habits to help you figure out whether you are, in fact, convincing yourself that your hearing impairment is not impacting your professional and social interactions, or whether it’s just the acoustics in the environment:
- Missing what people are saying when on phone conversations
- Thinking people aren’t talking clearly when all you can hear is mumbling
- Pretending to understand, only to follow up with others to get about what was said
- Constantly having to ask people to repeat what they said
- Leaning in when people are talking and unintentionally cupping your ear with your hand
- Not able to hear others talking from behind you
While it may feel like this crept up on you suddenly, chances are your hearing loss didn’t happen overnight. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing impairment is something that takes most individuals 7 years or more.
That means that if your hearing loss is a problem now, it has probably been going unaddressed and neglected for some time. Hearing loss is no joke so stop kidding yourself and make an appointment now.