Hearing loss can impact every aspect of your life. Here are five good reasons to treat it as soon as possible:
Your Personal Safety
Untreated hearing loss can make things unsafe for both you and others on the road. You may have trouble determining where ambient noises like approaching cars, bike bells, car horns and pedestrian warning shouts are coming from. You might not even hear them at all.
Hearing loss can also leave you prone to dangerous falls. Studies show that if your hearing starts to decline so too can your balance. The good news it that properly fitted hearing aids will help keep you upright.
Your Employment
In the workplace, healthy hearing is integral to effective communication, productivity and preventing conflict. Mishearing can have serious career consequences. You might find yourself unable to follow instructions; mishearing and missing deadlines; being unable to contribute in key group discussions, being judged as ‘disengaged’; and causing staff resentment i.e. “My boss never listens to me”.
Your Social Life
Diminished hearing ability can make it hard to understand higher pitched voices or to follow conversations in a group or in background noise. Straining to keep up with conversations, especially when you’re in a group of more than three people, can really tire you out. After struggling to hear and understand what’s being said all day, it can be a relief to just tune out, and it’s not uncommon for people with untreated hearing loss to avoid the social activities they once loved.
Blamey Saunders client Greg Ebsworth recently discussed the way his hearing aids transformed his social life. Have a read.
Your Relationships
Hearing loss can change the way you communicate and interact with the people closest to you. Naturally, this can leave you frustrated, irritable, depressed and isolated. Your hearing loss can also affect your loved ones in a similar way. As a pair, couples often start avoiding certain social situations, and the growing communication barrier can cause them to feel distanced from one another despite still spending time together.
Research shows that our spouse’s reaction to hearing loss goes a long way to how we view our hearing loss and what we do about it.
Your Cognition and Mental Health
Hearing loss is believed to link to dementia in several ways. Studies reveal that people with hearing loss are mentally drained from the strain of listening everyday, and this weakens their working memory. Brain scans published in 2014 showed diminished grey matter in areas related to language and memory (the same region associated with early Alzheimer’s) in people with hearing loss over six years.
What’s more, If hearing loss is not corrected with the appropriate solution, a more subtle effect occurs as your brain adapts to hearing loss – the mental processing of spoken language is degraded slowly over time. Luckily, much of the adaptation in the brain is reversible with the right hearing solution, but it does take longer the longer you put off treatment.
Do you suspect you have hearing loss?
So if you suspect you have hearing loss, please don’t allow yourself to spend the average seven years not treating it and ‘waiting for it to get worse’. Take our free online screening test now, or speak to a hearing professional about finding the solution that will improve every aspect of your life. Contact Better Hearing Australia for independent information and advice.