You want to be polite when you’re talking to friends. You want your customers, co-workers, and supervisor to recognize that you’re fully involved when you’re at work. You regularly find yourself asking family to repeat themselves because it was easier to tune out parts of the conversation that you couldn’t hear very well.
You have to lean in a little closer when you’re on conference calls. You look for facial hints, listen for inflection, pay close attention to body language. You read lips. And if that doesn’t work, you nod in understanding as if you heard every word.
Don’t fool yourself. You missed a lot of the conversation, and you’re struggling to keep up. Life at home and projects at work have become unnecessarily overwhelming 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 acquainted they are with their environment, according to studies. But for people who have hearing loss these factors are made even more challenging.
Here are a few habits to help you figure out whether you are, in truth, fooling yourself into thinking hearing loss is not affecting your social and professional interactions, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in their environment:
- Pretending to comprehend, only to later ask others about what was said
- Having a hard time hearing what people behind you are saying
- Requesting that people repeat themselves over and over again
- 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
Hearing loss probably didn’t occur overnight even though it could feel as if it did. The majority of people wait an average of 7 years before acknowledging the problem and seeking help.
So if you’re detecting symptoms of hearing loss, you can bet that it’s been occurring for some time undetected. So start by scheduling an appointment right away, and stop fooling yourself, hearing loss is no joke.