Thanksgiving is a time to take stock of your life and find the things you’re most thankful for. Everyone’s list is personal; yours may include your family and friends, your pets, your favorite mug, the town you live in or even your hearing aids.
In honor of our gratitude for hearing aids, let’s look at a few benefits these devices offer.
1. Restoring Connection
When hearing loss dulls speech, it can leave you feeling disconnected from your friends and family. Not only is it more difficult to have a conversation, but missed or misheard words can lead to misunderstandings or even fights.
Hearing aids collect and amplify speech to give you a firmer grasp on communication. When you have a little help understanding a person’s words, you can reconnect and have a better chance of avoiding those misunderstandings.
2. Increasing Energy
Understanding speech with untreated hearing loss can be exhausting—a feeling known as listening fatigue. By improving speech clarity, hearing aids can reduce the strain on your brain, leaving you with more energy to enjoy the things you love.
3. Reducing Stress in Busy Environments
Busy environments are especially challenging for people with hearing loss, whose ears are likely to fuse multiple like-sounding noises together into a single stream. By prioritizing speech above background noise, hearing aids can reduce some of the listening stress in these hectic environments. Some devices even have directional microphones that amplify the noise in front of you so you can have clearer face-to-face conversations.
Celebrate Hearing Aids This Year
For all the benefits hearing aids offer, they’ve certainly earned a place in our list of things we give thanks for. If you have hearing loss but haven’t gotten hearing aids yet, contact River ENT to schedule a consultation with one of our specialists.
Sources
Hornsby B. W. (2013). The effects of hearing aid use on listening effort and mental fatigue associated with sustained speech processing demands. Ear and hearing, 34(5), 523–534. https://doi.org/10.1097/AUD.0b013e31828003d8
Reiss, L. A. J., & Molis, M. R. (2021). An alternative explanation for difficulties with speech in background talkers: Abnormal fusion of vowels across fundamental frequency and ears. Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 22(4), 443–461. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10162-021-00790-7
