In conversation with friends, you like to be courteous. At work, you want to look engaged, even enthralled with what your manager/colleagues/clients are talking about. With family, you may find it easier to just tune out the conversation and ask the person next to you to fill in what you missed, just a little louder, please.
You need to lean in a little closer when you’re on conference calls. You pay attention to body language and facial cues and listen for verbal inflections. You read lips. And if everything else fails – you fake it.
Don’t fool yourself. You missed a lot of the conversation, and you’re straining to keep up. Life at home and projects at work have become unjustifiably difficult and you are feeling frustrated and cut off due to years of cumulative hearing loss.
According to some studies, situational factors like environmental acoustics, background noise, competing signals, and environmental awareness have a major influence on the way we hear. But for individuals who suffer from 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 fact, convincing yourself that your hearing impairment is not affecting your professional and social interactions, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in the environment:
- Leaning in during conversations and instinctively cupping your ear with your hand
- Finding it harder to hear phone conversations
- Pretending to comprehend, only to follow up with others to get what you missed
- Constantly needing to ask people to repeat what they said
- Not able to hear others talking from behind you
- Thinking others aren’t talking clearly when all you can hear is mumbling
Hearing loss most likely didn’t take place overnight even though it could feel as if it did. Most people wait 7 years on average before acknowledging the issue and finding help.
So if you’re detecting 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.
