Don’t take your eyes off the road. While this may be sound advice, how about your other senses? As an example, consider the amount of work your ears are doing while driving. You’re using your ears to engage with other individuals in your vehicle, call your attention to important information coming up on your dashboard, and help you monitor other vehicles.
So when you’re coping with hearing impairment, how you drive can vary. That’s not to say your driving will come to be excessively dangerous. With regards to safety, inexperience and distracted driving are far bigger liabilities. Nevertheless, some specific safeguards need to be taken by people with hearing loss to ensure they continue driving as safely as possible.
Hearing loss can impact your situational awareness but developing good driving habits can help you stay safe while driving.
How hearing loss might be impacting your driving
Generally, driving is a vision-centric activity (at least, if it’s not a vision-centric activity, something has gone wrong). Even total hearing loss most likely won’t keep you from driving, but it very likely could change how you drive. While driving you do utilize your hearing a lot, after all. Some prevalent examples include:
- Your sense of hearing can help you have a better sense of other vehicles around you. For instance, you will usually be able to hear a large truck coming toward you.
- If another driver needs to make you aware of their presence, they will often use their horn. If you fail to see the light turn to green, for example, or you begin to wander into the other lane, a horn can alert you before it becomes an issue.
- Your hearing will often alert you when your car has some kind of malfunction. For instance, if you run over an obstruction in the road or a rock hits your windshield.
- You can often hear emergency vehicles before you can see them.
- Audible alerts will sound when your car is attempting to alert you to something, like an unbuckled seat belt or an open door.
All of these audio cues can help build your total situational awareness. As your hearing loss advances, you may miss more and more of these cues. But there are steps you can take to ensure you stay as safe as possible while driving.
New safe driving habits to develop
If you’re experiencing hearing loss and you want to keep driving, that’s okay! Here are a few ways you can make sure to remain safe while driving:
- Put away your phone: Even if your hearing is strong, this one is still good advice. Phones are among the leading causes of distraction on the road these days. And that goes double when you try to use them with hearing loss. Keeping your phone stowed can, simply, keep you and other people safer–and save your life.
- Don’t ignore your dash lights: Normally, when you need to give attention to your instrument panel, your vehicle will beep or make some other sound. So you’ll want to be sure to glance down (when it’s safe) and confirm your turn signals aren’t still on, or you don’t have a check engine light on.
- Minimize in-car noises: Hearing loss is going to make it difficult for your ears to differentiate noises. It will be easy for your ears to become overwhelmed and for you to get distracted if you have passengers loudly speaking and music playing and wind blowing in your ears. So when you’re driving, it’s a smart idea to reduce the volume on your radio, keep discussions to a minimum, and roll up your windows.
- Check your mirrors more often: You may not be able to hear an ambulance pull up behind you–even with all those sirens going. So make sure you aren’t neglecting your mirrors. And keep the possible presence of emergency vehicles in mind.
How to keep your hearing aid driving ready
If you suffer from hearing loss, driving is one of those scenarios where having a hearing aid can really help. And there are a few ways you can be certain your hearing aid is a real asset when you’re driving:
- Have us program a driving setting for you: If you anticipate doing a lot of driving, you can ask us to give you a “car” setting on your hearing aid. The size of the interior of your vehicle and the fact that your passengers will be speaking to you from the side or rear will be the factors we will use to optimize this “car setting” for smoother safer driving.
- Use your hearing aid each time you drive: If you don’t wear it, it won’t help! So each time you drive, be sure you’re wearing your hearing aids. By doing this, your brain will have an easier time acclimating to the incoming signals.
- Get the most recent updates and keep your hearing aid clean and charged: You don’t want your hearing aid batteries to quit right when you’re driving to the store. That can distract you and may even lead to a dangerous situation. So be sure everything is working properly and the batteries are charged.
Hearing loss doesn’t mean driving is an issue, particularly with hearing aids which make it easier and safer. Your drive will be pleasant and your eyes will remain focused on the road if you establish safe driving habits.