Many people believe that hearing loss is just a minor inconvenience, but it actually has a significant impact on our everyday lives.
The ability to hear takes on practical importance as people live their everyday life, whether at home, outside the house, or engaged in work or play. It enables ambient sounds to be heard and understood, the source and location of a sound to be identified, and, most importantly, to perceive and understand spoken words.
In the real world, an individual’s ability to understand what they need is affected by their hearing capacity and many other factors, such as background noise, social context, and whether they have experience of the situation they are in. These different factors are crucial regardless of whether you have hearing loss or not, but their effects are magnified when you have hearing loss.
Put simply: life gets more challenging with hearing loss. Here are a few situations in your everyday life that will become more difficult to navigate.
At home
Regular hearing lets you know when your microwave meal is ready, whether someone is knocking on your door or calling you. It lets you hear your fire alarm or when someone else is calling for your attention from another room. If you hear these sound cues, you will need to rely on visual cues more often when at home.
Untreated hearing loss can also affect communication with your loved ones at home. By treating hearing loss, you’ll be able to catch an inside joke or be an active listener when your spouse needs to vent.
Outside the home
- It’s more challenging to navigate a city. As we go through a busy city, we have to ask people to step aside or move out of the way ourselves. These are all the little things that make large movements of people share the same space. If you can’t hear well, dealing with strangers, especially when social distancing is imperative, becomes more confusing and stressful.
- It’s harder to hear potential hazards. It can be hard to pick up the noise of approaching traffic when you can’t hear properly. This increases the likelihood of accidents.
At work
Hearing loss can hurt your job and financial earnings if an employer doesn’t understand why you can’t follow a conversation, or you struggle with listening or following directions. A Better Hearing Institute national study showed that persons with untreated hearing loss lose as much as $30,000 in income annually, depending on their degree of hearing loss.
When socializing with others
- It’s harder to socialize. So much of the way that family and friends socialize includes noisy environments. If it’s too hard to understand others, staying home and missing out might become the default option. If you find socializing in some circumstances has become difficult, it may be time to seek support.
- People who wear masks are harder to understand. A mask itself is a physical shield that prevents sound, and it can cause speech to become muffled. People with hearing loss often rely more on visual signals than those without hearing loss. A mask takes away their ability to read lips and observe facial expressions, preventing them from understanding better what they hear.
- Conducting video calls is harder. It is hard to follow visual signs or gauge body language when faced with poor internet access, lousy lighting, and people wearing headphones and walking away from their computers. People might initiate conversations from other rooms, look away or turn around while talking or talk with their mouths full. This can all impair the listener’s ability to read lips.
Hearing treatment can help to make daily life easier.
Hearing loss is a gradual process in most cases. This makes it hard to recognize, as the person does not even know that they can no longer hear those sounds. But by finding the right assistance, you can stop this process.
Hearing aids help people to hear correctly. This means they can navigate their social, home, work, and outside environments more efficiently, reducing stress and anxiety in the process.
If you’re experiencing hearing loss, don’t hesitate to schedule a consultation with Hearing Wellness Solutions! We can find a solution to help you move through your days seamlessly.