You want to be courteous when you’re talking with friends. You want your clients, co-workers, and supervisor to see that you’re fully engaged when you’re at work. You frequently find yourself asking family to repeat themselves because it was less difficult to tune out parts of the conversation that you couldn’t hear very well.
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.
Don’t fool yourself. You’re struggling to catch up because you missed most of what was said. You may not know it, but years of cumulative hearing loss can have you feeling isolated and discouraged, making tasks at work and life at home needlessly overwhelming.
The ability for a person to hear is impacted by situational variables such as background noise, competing signals, room acoustics, and how familiar they are with their surroundings, according to research. But for people who have hearing loss, these factors are made even more difficult.
Some hearing loss behaviors to look out for
There are some revealing habits that will alert you to whether you’re in denial about how your hearing impairment is impacting your professional life:
- Repeatedly having to ask people to repeat themselves
- Not able to hear others talking behind you
- Leaning in When people are talking and unintentionally cupping your ear with your hand
- Pretending to understand, only to follow up with others to get what you missed
- Finding it more difficult to hear phone conversations
- Feeling like people are mumbling and not speaking clearly
While it may feel like this snuck up on you suddenly, more than likely your hearing loss didn’t happen overnight. The majority of people wait an average of 7 years before accepting the issue and seeking help.
This means that if your hearing loss is problematic now, it has most likely been going unaddressed and untreated for some time. Begin by scheduling an appointment now, and stop kidding yourself, hearing loss is no joke.
