In conversation with friends, you like to be polite. You want your clients, co-workers, and supervisor to see that you’re fully engaged when you’re at work. You regularly find yourself needing family to repeat themselves because it was less difficult to tune out parts of the conversation that you weren’t able to hear very well.
You need to move in a little closer when you’re on zoom calls. You look closely at body language and facial clues and listen for verbal inflections. You read lips. And if all else fails – you fake it.
Maybe your in denial. You missed lots of what was said, and you’re straining to catch up. Life at home and projects at work have become unjustifiably difficult and you are feeling frustrated and cut off due to years of progressive hearing loss.
Some research shows that situational factors like room acoustics, background noise, contending signals, and situational awareness have a major influence on the way a person hears. But for individuals who suffer from hearing loss these factors are made even more difficult.
Here are a few habits to help you figure out whether you are, in truth, convincing yourself that your hearing loss isn’t affecting your professional and social relationships, or whether it’s just the acoustics in their environment:
- Thinking others aren’t speaking clearly when all you can hear is mumbling
- Asking others what you missed after pretending to hear what someone was saying
- Not able to hear others talking from behind you
- Leaning in during conversations and unconsciously cupping your ear with your hand
- Constantly needing to ask people to repeat what they said
- Missing what people are saying when on phone conversations
Hearing loss most likely didn’t occur overnight even though it may feel as if it did. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing loss 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 occurring for some time undetected. Hearing loss is no joke so stop kidding yourself and schedule an appointment right away.