You want to be courteous when you are talking with friends. You want your customers, colleagues, and manager to see that you’re completely engaged when you’re at work. You often find yourself asking family to repeat themselves because it was easier to tune out parts of the discussion that you weren’t able to hear very well.
On conference calls you move in closer. You look for facial cues, listen for inflection, pay close attention to body language. You try to read people’s lips. And if everything else fails – you fake it.
Don’t fool yourself. You missed lots of the conversation, and you’re straining to catch up. You might not know it, but years of progressive hearing loss can have you feeling cut off and discouraged, making tasks at work and life at home unnecessarily overwhelming.
Some research shows that situational factors such as room acoustics, background noise, competing signals, and environmental awareness have a major influence on the way a person hears. These factors are relevant, but it can be far more severe for individuals who suffer from hearing loss.
Here are a few habits to help you figure out whether you are, in truth, fooling yourself into thinking hearing loss is not impacting your professional and social relationships, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in their environment:
- Not able to hear others talking behind you
- Asking others what you missed after pretending you heard what someone was saying
- Thinking others aren’t speaking clearly when all you seem to hear is mumbling
- Cupping your ear with your hand or leaning in close to the person who is speaking without noticing it
- Asking people to repeat themselves again and again… and again
- Finding it harder to hear over the phone
Hearing loss most likely didn’t occur overnight even though it may feel as if it did. Most people wait 7 years on average before accepting the problem and seeking 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 fooling yourself and schedule an appointment right away.