In conversation with friends, you like to be polite. 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 easier to simply tune out the conversation and ask the person near you to fill in what you missed, just a bit louder, please.
On zoom calls you lean in closer. 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 might not recognize it, but years of cumulative hearing loss can have you feeling cut off and frustrated, making projects at work and life at home needlessly difficult.
The ability for someone to hear is impacted by situational factors such as background noise, competing signals, room acoustics, and how familiar they are with their surroundings, according to research. But for people who suffer from hearing loss, these factors are made even more difficult.
Watch out for these behaviors
Here are a few behaviors to help you determine whether you are, in truth, fooling yourself into thinking hearing impairment is not impacting your social and professional relationships, or whether it’s simply the acoustics in the environment:
- Finding it more difficult to hear phone conversations
- Pretending to understand, only to follow up with others to get what you missed
- Cupping your hands over your ear or leaning in close to the person who is speaking without realizing it
- Repeatedly having to ask people to repeat what they said
- Thinking people aren’t speaking clearly when all you seem to hear is mumbling
- Not able to hear others talking behind you
While it may feel like this snuck up on you suddenly, more than likely your hearing impairment didn’t happen overnight. Acknowledging and seeking out help for hearing loss is something that takes most individuals 7 years or more.
That means that if your hearing loss is problematic now, it has most likely been going unaddressed and untreated for some time. Begin by making an appointment right away, and stop fooling yourself, hearing loss is no joke.