You want to be polite when you’re talking to friends. You want your customers, co-workers, and boss to see that you’re fully involved when you’re at work. With family, you might find it easier to simply tune out the conversation and ask the person near you to repeat what you missed, just a little louder, please.
On zoom calls you move in closer. You pay attention to body language and facial clues and listen for verbal inflections. You try to read people’s lips. And if everything else fails – you fake it.
Don’t fool yourself. You’re straining 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 frustrated and isolated due to years of progressive hearing loss.
The ability for a person to hear is influenced by situational variables such as background noise, contending signals, room acoustics, and how acquainted they are with their surroundings, according to studies. These factors are always in play, but they can be a lot more severe for people who suffer from hearing loss.
Look out for these behaviors
Here are a few behaviors to help you determine whether you are, in fact, fooling yourself into thinking hearing loss isn’t impacting your professional and social relationships, or whether it’s just the acoustics in the environment:
- Missing important parts of phone conversations
- Unable to hear others talking from behind you
- Requesting that repeat themselves over and over again
- Thinking others aren’t talking clearly when all you can hear is mumbling
- Cupping your hands over your ear or leaning in close to the person talking without realizing it
- Pretending to understand, only to later ask others what you missed
Hearing loss probably didn’t occur overnight even though it may feel as if it did. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing loss is something that takes most individuals at least 7 years.
So if you’re detecting 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 schedule an appointment right away.