In conversation with friends, you like to be polite. You want your clients, colleagues, and boss to see that you’re completely engaged when you’re at work. You regularly find yourself asking family to repeat themselves because it was easier to tune out parts of the discussion that you couldn’t hear very well.
You need to move in a little closer when you’re on conference calls. You look for facial cues, listen for inflection, tune in to body language. You read lips. And if all else fails – you fake it.
Maybe your in denial. You missed a lot of the conversation, and you’re struggling to catch up. You may not know it, but years of cumulative hearing loss can have you feeling cut off and discouraged, making projects at work and life at home unnecessarily difficult.
The ability for a person to hear is impacted by situational variables including background noise, contending signals, room acoustics, and how comfortable they are with their setting, according to studies. These factors are always in play, but it can be a lot more extreme for people who are suffering from hearing loss.
Here are a few behaviors to help you identify whether you are, in fact, convincing yourself that your hearing impairment is not impacting your social and professional interactions, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in their environment:
- Not able to hear others talking behind you
- Pretending to comprehend, only to follow up with others to get what you missed
- Thinking others aren’t talking clearly when all you can hear is mumbling
- Leaning in during conversations and unconsciously cupping your ear with your hand
- Repeatedly having to ask people to repeat themselves
- Finding it harder to hear phone conversations
While it might feel like this crept up on you suddenly, more than likely your hearing loss didn’t happen overnight. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing impairment is something that takes most people at least 7 years.
So if you’re noticing symptoms of hearing loss, you can bet that it’s been going on for some time undetected. Hearing loss is no joke so stop kidding yourself and make an appointment now.
