Most assume that hearing loss symptoms are easy to identify. However, they are harder to detect than you might think, especially in the early stages of long-term hearing problems. Like your eyesight, hearing loss worsens when it remains untreated, so the sooner you receive a diagnosis and treatment for your condition, the more that can be done to protect you from further damage to your hearing.
We have created a list of five unexpected signs of hearing loss in order to encourage residents in Petaluma, San Rafael, and surrounding communities to schedule a hearing assessment and get the help you need before the condition gets worse.
“Huh? What’d you say?”
A clear sign of a hearing problem is the need to ask people to speak up, speak more clearly, or repeat what they have said. Although some people mumble, an increased frequency to ask family, friends, and colleagues to repeat what they said can be an indicator that you aren’t hearing as clearly as you used to. Besides mumbling, other muffled sounds, like from the television, are additional early indicators of hearing loss.
Continuous Ringing in Your Ears
Another indicator of early stage hearing loss is a constant ringing, buzzing, hissing, or humming sound in your ears. Known as tinnitus, this hearing condition often leads to increased stress and fatigue along with a decreased capacity to concentrate and reduced productivity.
A common cause of tinnitus is exposure to an extreme noise event or ongoing exposure to loud noise in your work environment, which can cause permanent damage to your hearing.
Social Isolation
Withdrawing from community social events and avoiding family gatherings is another of the early signs of hearing loss. This usually occurs because keeping up with multiple conversations is both frustrating and exhausting. Avoiding these situations becomes the best way to cope with the discomfort, but many individuals who isolate from social interaction begin to experience depression and anxiety, leading to other serious cognitive and physical health issues.
“The phone line is always fuzzy!”
Those experiencing the early signs of hearing loss often complain that it is difficult to understand conversations while talking on the telephone. In spite of boosting the volume level on your telephone receiver and asking the other person to repeat themselves, the conversation continues to be garbled or unintelligible.
Whether you are aware of it or not, you rely so heavily on visual cues during a face-to-face conversation to help understand. When you speak on the phone, these visual cues are absent, causing you to rely on your hearing alone.
Problems Understanding Certain People
A critical sign of developing hearing loss is the inability to understand conversations with certain people. There are a couple of reasons related to this issue. Women and children tend to speak in higher pitched frequencies. The incapacity to hear higher frequencies is an early indicator of hearing loss. Additionally, certain accents and the way various people pronounce soft consonants like C, S, T, P, Sh, Ch, and others make following them in conversation quite a challenge, as whole words are lost in a sentence.
Schedule a Hearing Assessment from Park Place Hearing
Your hearing is an important part of communication, an active social life, rewarding relationships, and living an independent lifestyle. As your hearing begins to deteriorate, so does your quality of life in wine country and throughout the Bay area. Early intervention, which begins with scheduling a hearing assessment at one of our Park Place Hearing locations, provides you with a broader range of treatment options and a reduced risk of adding to the hearing damage you already have.
Contact us to schedule a hearing assessment and restore the quality of life you value.
