In conversation with friends, you like to be polite. You want your customers, colleagues, and supervisor to see that you’re fully engaged when you’re at work. With family, you may find it less difficult to simply tune out the conversation and ask the person next to you to repeat what you missed, just a little louder, please.
You have 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 none of that works, you nod in understanding as if you heard every word.
Maybe your in denial. Your straining to keep up because you missed most of the conversation. You might not realize it, but years of progressive hearing loss can have you feeling isolated and discouraged, making tasks at work and life at home unnecessarily difficult.
The ability for someone to hear is influenced by situational variables like background noise, contending signals, room acoustics, and how familiar they are with their environment, according to studies. But for individuals who have hearing loss these factors are made even more challenging.
There are some revealing habits that will alert you to whether you’re in denial about how your hearing loss is affecting your professional life:
- Pretending to comprehend, only to later ask others about what was said
- Finding it more difficult to hear over the phone
- Leaning in during conversations and unintentionally cupping your ear with your hand
- Repeatedly having to ask people to repeat themselves
- Unable to hear others talking behind you
- Feeling as if people are mumbling and not speaking clearly
Hearing loss most likely didn’t take place overnight even though it may feel that way. Acknowledging and getting help for hearing loss is something that takes most people 7 years or more.
So if you’re detecting symptoms of hearing loss, you can bet that it’s been going on for some time undetected. Hearing loss is no joke so stop fooling yourself and schedule an appointment now.