How Treating Hearing Loss Improves Your Relationships
Communication is essential to any relationship and shapes how we move through the world. Expressing and sharing thoughts and ideas provide us with an understanding of ourselves, other people, and the environments we navigate.
Hearing loss can negatively impact communication and cause relationships to suffer. This can affect how you feel daily and affect your overall health. Getting your hearing assessed and addressing any impairment you may be experiencing is essential, drastically improving your relationships.
A spotlight on hearing loss
Hearing loss often occurs gradually and reduces the ability to hear speech and sound. Many factors contribute to impaired hearing, including environmental exposure to noise, existing medical conditions, and family/genetic history. Symptoms of hearing loss are wide-ranging and can include:
- Difficulty following a conversation
- Need to increase the volume on devices (TV, phone, speaker, etc.)
- Asking other people to repeat words or sentences
- Cupping your ears to hear more clearly
- Preferring one ear over the other
- Ringing noise in your ear (known as tinnitus)
- Speaking loudly and asking others to speak loudly
- Not fully hearing distinct words
These symptoms can create stress and anxiety that may result in the desire to avoid public places that are noisy and social settings where you have to engage with multiple people. This can significantly impact your social life and emotional well-being as you find yourself exhausted from constantly trying to hear better.
The effect of hearing loss on your relationships
Another significant way hearing loss can impact your well-being is by causing your relationships to suffer. This can look several ways, including:
- Becoming less social: As mentioned previously, you may withdraw from social interaction. This can be because you experience severe fatigue as you are required to work overtime to hear, environments with loud external noise and conversations with multiple people can be overwhelming. All of this can result in seeing your friends and family less.
- Difficulty communicating: Hearing loss reduces your ability to hear and therefore understand. Having conversations, sharing information, jokes, and all of the elements necessary for relationships; are impacted. You may need other people to speak loudly, repeat themselves, and miss things they say. This can make people frustrated when trying to engage in a conversation.
Relationships can become strained and difficult to manage. There are helpful ways to address hearing loss that can improve all aspects of your life.
What can you do?
Being proactive about your hearing health can drastically improve the quality of your life! We recommend having your hearing tested, which assesses any impairment to your hearing and the degree and type of loss you could be experiencing. Because hearing loss often happens gradually, you may not be fully aware of any changes you are experiencing to your ability to hear. Early detection of impairment is beneficial in treating hearing loss.
The most common treatment for hearing loss is hearing aids, which effectively help people hear more clearly. This can improve your relationships by:
- Improving your hearing health: Strengthens your overall health, which ultimately makes you feel better daily. This can lead you to participate more in social activities, as you can navigate noisy environments and conversations more easily.
- Enabling more effective communication: Being able to hear means not missing words or sentences, which allows you to understand the conversation better. This can prevent miscommunication and allows you to be more present in a conversation.
- Giving you more energy: Trying to hear when your hearing is impaired requires a lot of energy. You may default to reading mouths during conversations, asking others to repeat themselves, trying to make words out, etc. is exhausting. Treating your hearing loss can prevent this fatigue and give you more energy to be out in the world!
Your hearing health is essential. With the advanced technology today and the accessibility of effective hearing aids, hearing loss can be effectively treated. Leading to improved relationships, health, and day-to-day life!