One of the most frustrating aspects of hearing loss is how it affects our ability to communicate with others. If you find yourself struggling to follow conversations at work or while out with friends at 34th Street Café, know that hearing aids can help!
Hearing Loss Makes It Harder to Understand Speech
Hearing loss often comes on gradually. One of the earliest signs of hearing loss is having increased difficulty understanding what people are saying. You may feel as though people are constantly mumbling or find yourself asking others to repeat themselves more frequently.
Part of the reason why hearing loss makes speech recognition difficult is that speech sounds are made up of different frequencies. This makes them more complex and, in turn, harder to hear.
Hearing Loss Can Affect Relationships
These difficulties in understanding speech can negatively affect your relationship. Your spouse or children may start to express frustration that you’re not listening to them or complain that you forgot something they already told you. This can cause resentment on both sides and make it harder to have meaningful communication with those that you love.
Communication is Essential to Everyday Life
Communication isn’t just important in our closest relationships. It’s essential to everyday life as well. Think about how much we communicate with others throughout the day. Whether chatting with a coworker, placing an order at your local coffee shop or making small talk with the cashier while getting groceries, we spend a great deal of time interacting with others. Hearing loss makes all of these activities harder, which limits your ability to navigate and move through the world with confidence.
How Hearing Aids Help
Hearing aids can help amplify speech and make it sound clearer and richer in any environment, including busier or louder places. They can work to tune out background noise and adjust to better pick up the frequency of human voices.
Not only does this make socializing easier, but it actually makes you happier as well. Research has shown that people with hearing loss report both better speech recognition in noisy environments and a better overall quality of life after being fitted with hearing aids.
Take the first step towards better hearing health today and call the experts at River ENT to schedule an appointment.
