In conversation with friends, you want to be polite. You want your clients, co-workers, and supervisor to recognize that you’re fully engaged when you’re at work. You regularly find yourself asking family to repeat themselves because it was less difficult to tune out parts of the discussion that you couldn’t hear very well.
You have to lean in a little closer when you’re on zoom calls. You watch for facial cues, listen for inflection, tune in to body language. You attempt to read people’s 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 keep up. You might not know it, but years of progressive hearing loss can have you feeling cut off and discouraged, making projects at work and life at home needlessly overwhelming.
The ability for someone to hear is influenced by situational factors like background sound, contending signals, room acoustics, and how comfortable they are with their setting, according to studies. But for individuals who have hearing loss these factors are made even more difficult.
There are certain revealing habits that will raise your awareness of whether you’re in denial about how your hearing loss is impacting your professional life:
- Cupping your ear with your hand or leaning in close to the person who is speaking without noticing it
- Feeling as if people are mumbling and not speaking clearly
- Missing important parts of phone conversations
- Not able to hear others talking behind you
- Pretending to understand, only to follow up with others to get what you missed
- Requesting that people repeat themselves again and again… and again
While it might feel like this snuck up on you in an all-of-a-sudden way, chances are your hearing loss didn’t occur overnight. The majority of people wait 7 years on average before acknowledging the issue and finding help.
So if you’re detecting symptoms of hearing loss, you can be sure that it’s been going on for some time undetected. Hearing loss is no joke so stop fooling yourself and make an appointment right away.
