The New Year is upon us! Many of us may have resolutions to eat better, exercise more, quit smoking, or make other improvements to our health and well-being. This is great! The more we can do to keep ourselves feeling healthy and out of the doctor’s office, the better. Let us humbly suggest that we also add improving our hearing to our list of resolutions!
Whether you might have hearing loss or not, scheduling a hearing test is a great way to start your new year. Maybe you’ve been meaning to look into hearing aids or custom hearing protection. There’s no time like the present to make it a reality!
Regular Hearing Tests
The Better Hearing Institute, a non-profit organization, has said that everyone should get a hearing test at least once every decade until age 50, and once every three years thereafter. Those in higher-risk professions or with a medical history that may indicate a higher risk of hearing loss should be tested even more frequently.
Regular hearing tests are how you keep track of your hearing health over time. Hearing health care is a lifelong process. We need to establish a baseline hearing ability, which is the result of your first hearing test. As years go by, additional hearing tests allow you to see whether your hearing has remained the same or declined at all, and what may be the cause(s) of the decline. If it’s noise exposure, you can do a better job of protecting your hearing in noisy situations, and prevent further hearing loss going forward.
It may also be that you have hearing loss that progresses unusually fast. This can be a sign of an underlying cardiovascular condition. If discovered early enough, you can receive the necessary treatment for the condition to save your hearing—and perhaps your life.
Hearing Aids Are Essential
The World Health Organization recently published a list of the top 12 modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease, and hearing loss topped the list. While hearing loss itself may not always be preventable, it is possible to alleviate many of the concerns about hearing loss by wearing a good pair of hearing aids. The goal is really to deliver more information to the brain, and hearing aids are a great way to do that.
Many people understandably wish to put off the purchase of a set of hearing aids until their hearing becomes “really bad.” Naturally, if we can get by without making a major purchase, we should. Unfortunately, hearing loss tends to bring with it a host of problems—physical, mental, and social—even in its early stages.
Mild hearing loss causes fatigue in complicated listening scenarios. Imagine the last time you were out with a group of friends. Did you have trouble hearing them? If so, it probably took some serious effort to understand what was being said. That extra effort probably made you tired pretty early into the occasion! Nobody wants to have to strain to hear, and without hearing aids, we’re likely to start declining our friends’ invitations, which can lead to a pretty lonely lifestyle.
Those with mild hearing loss also report having more memory issues than those with normal hearing or who wear hearing aids. This is likely due to the proximity of the parts of the brain that interpret sound and store memories for the short term. Normally, the words we hear are automatically shunted into our short-term memory. When we have to struggle to hear, the path is more circuitous, and we lose a lot of information in the process.
In short, if your hearing test indicates mild hearing loss and your hearing care professional recommends hearing aids, you should get them!
Custom Hearing Protection
For those with normal hearing, custom hearing protection is one of the best ways to help keep the hearing you have. For musicians, they are indispensable. No other types of earplugs can represent the frequency spectrum so completely. The sound is like you’re not even wearing hearing aids—just quieter!
But not only musicians can benefit from custom-molded earplugs. Motorcyclists or other motorsports enthusiasts, gun enthusiasts, hunters, and anyone else who spends a significant amount of time around loud sound will appreciate the accurate sound, comfortable feel even over long periods of wear, and precision-tuned levels of attenuation for the activities that you partake in. It’s not only important to attenuate loud sounds but not too much. The right earplugs will help you hear what you need to hear while keeping the sensitive parts of your inner ear safe.
Schedule Your Hearing Test with Hearing Wellness Solutions
If you’re due for a hearing test, make an appointment now and start keeping track of your hearing health! From all of us at Hearing Wellness Solutions, happy new year!
