In conversation with friends, you like to be polite. You want your clients, colleagues, and supervisor to recognize that you’re fully involved when you’re at work. With family, you might find it less difficult to just tune out the conversation and ask the person near you to repeat what you missed, just a little louder, please.
You have 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 read lips. And if none of that works, you nod as if you heard every word.
Maybe you’re in denial. You’re struggling to keep up because you missed most of the conversation. Life at home and projects at work have become unnecessarily overwhelming and you are feeling aggravated and isolated due to years of progressive hearing loss.
The ability for someone to hear is impacted by situational factors including background sound, contending signals, room acoustics, and how comfortable they are with their environment, according to studies. But for people who have hearing loss, these factors are made even more challenging.
Look out for these behaviors
Here are some habits to help you determine whether you are, in truth, fooling yourself into thinking hearing loss isn’t affecting your professional and social relationships, or whether it’s just the acoustics in the environment:
- Finding it more difficult to hear over the phone
- Asking others what was said after pretending to hear what they were saying
- Not able to hear others talking from behind you
- Feeling like people are mumbling and not speaking clearly
- Requesting that repeat themselves again and again… and again
- Cupping your ear with your hand or leaning in close to the person talking without realizing it
While it may feel like this crept up on you suddenly, chances are your hearing loss didn’t occur overnight. Most people wait an average of 7 years before acknowledging the problem and seeking help.
So if you’re noticing symptoms of hearing loss, you can bet that it’s been going on for some time undetected. Hearing loss is no joke so stop fooling yourself and make an appointment right away.
