You want to be courteous when you’re talking with friends. You want your clients, co-workers, and manager to see that you’re completely engaged when you’re at work. With family, you might find it less difficult to just tune out the conversation and ask the person next to you to fill in what you missed, just a bit louder, please.
On zoom calls you move in closer. You look closely at body language and facial cues and listen for verbal inflections. You try to read people’s lips. And if everything else fails – you fake it.
Maybe your in denial. You missed a lot of the conversation, and you’re struggling to keep up. You may not recognize it, but years of progressive hearing loss can have you feeling isolated and discouraged, making tasks at work and life at home needlessly difficult.
The ability for a person to hear is influenced by situational factors including background noise, competing signals, room acoustics, and how familiar they are with their surroundings, according to studies. But for people who suffer from hearing loss these factors are made even more difficult.
Here are some behaviors to help you identify whether you are, in fact, convincing yourself that your hearing impairment isn’t affecting your professional and social relationships, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in their environment:
- Leaning in during conversations and unconsciously cupping your ear with your hand
- Having a difficult time hearing what others behind you are saying
- Thinking others aren’t talking clearly when all you can hear is mumbling
- Missing what people are saying when on phone conversations
- Pretending to comprehend, only to later ask others what you missed
- Asking people to repeat themselves over and over again
Hearing loss probably didn’t happen overnight even though it might feel as if it did. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing loss is something that takes most individuals at least 7 years.
That means if your hearing loss is a problem now, it has probably been going un-addressed and untreated for some time. Hearing loss is no joke so stop kidding yourself and schedule an appointment now.