In conversation with friends, you want to be courteous. You want your customers, colleagues, and supervisor 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 repeat what you missed, just a bit louder, please.
You need to move in a little closer when you’re on conference calls. You look closely at body language and facial clues and listen for verbal inflections. You read lips. And if everything else fails – you fake it.
Don’t fool yourself. You’re struggling to catch up because you missed most of what was said. You may not recognize it, but years of cumulative hearing loss can have you feeling cut off and frustrated, making tasks at work and life at home unnecessarily difficult.
The ability for someone to hear is influenced by situational variables such as background sound, contending signals, room acoustics, and how acquainted they are with their setting, according to studies. But for individuals who suffer from hearing loss, these factors are made even more challenging.
Watch out for these behaviors
Here are some behaviors 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 the environment:
- Not able to hear people talking from behind you
- Finding it harder to hear over the phone
- Asking people to repeat themselves again and again… and again
- Thinking people aren’t talking clearly when all you can hear is mumbling
- Asking others what was said after pretending to hear what they were saying
- Leaning in When people are talking and unintentionally cupping your hand over your ear
While it might feel like this crept up on you suddenly, chances are your hearing impairment didn’t occur overnight. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing impairment is something that takes most people 7 years or more.
So if you’re noticing symptoms of hearing loss, you can bet that it’s been occurring for some time undetected. Hearing loss is no joke so stop kidding yourself and schedule an appointment right away.