Hearing loss usually doesn’t come on suddenly but develops slowly over the course of several or many years. We usually don’t notice that we have hearing loss until it is fairly far along, and because we adjust to having it day by day, it’s usually someone else who tells us we have a hearing problem before we notice it, ourselves.
Regular Hearing Tests are the Best Way to Catch Hearing Loss
The best way to be sure that you catch hearing loss before it becomes a more serious problem is to get your hearing tested regularly. Letting hearing loss develop untreated for too long can result in major changes in the brain that make it harder to adjust to hearing aids once you start wearing them—not to mention the changes that may have occurred in your lifestyle.
The Better Hearing Institute, a non-profit organization, recommends getting a hearing test once every decade until age 50, and once every three years after that. Those in higher-risk professions or with a medical history indicating a higher risk of hearing loss should be tested even more frequently.
If you are wondering whether you have hearing loss and you haven’t been tested recently, here are a few signs that it might be time to treat hearing loss:
Fatigue
Hearing loss is exhausting, especially in busy situations with background noise. Our brains have to work overtime to try to parse what someone is saying amidst all the noise. We might need to string together context clues and make guesses at what we might be hearing. All that work comes at the cost of overworking our brains, which wears us out.
If you feel yourself being more tired than normal after social events, or you’re having trouble spending as much time in social situations as you used to, it could be that you have a hearing loss.
Watching Lips Instead of Eyes
When our hearing is normal, we tend to focus on a conversational partner’s eyes. Once hearing loss becomes an issue, we may start automatically reading lips in order to help us along. Try paying attention to whether you’re doing this, and if you find yourself looking more often at another person’s mouth than their eyes, it could be you have a hearing loss. If you can’t see their mouth, can you still hear what they’re saying?
You Have Trouble Following Conversations
If it’s hard to listen to someone tell a story, or you find yourself getting lost in the conversation, you might have hearing loss. We tend to lose high-frequency hearing first, and this is also the area of the frequency spectrum where background noise tends to be the most intrusive. So if you’re getting lost while following along, especially in crowded places or when noise is present, it could be that you’re experiencing mild hearing loss.
People Are Asking You to “Turn It Down”
It may be that you’re speaking too loudly for them, or that the TV is too loud, or the radio is too loud. Whatever it might be, if the volume is comfortable for you but not for someone else in the room, it’s probably a sign that you have some hearing loss.
Hearing Aids Can Help
If you do have hearing loss, getting a good set of hearing aids is the best step you can take to ensure that your lifestyle doesn’t have to change to accommodate hearing loss. People who get hearing aids tend to have better relationships, feel more confident, and be more independent and optimistic than those who leave their hearing loss untreated.
Untreated hearing loss can also bring about what hearing care professionals often refer to as a “cascade of negative outcomes” regarding social life and physical health. Unfortunately, untreated hearing loss leads all too often to frustration and miscommunication in close relationships, decreased physical activity, loneliness, depression, and social isolation. It increases the risk of accidental injury, especially due to falling down. It even puts us at a significantly increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia, with the increase in risk going up according to the severity of the hearing loss.