It Is Up To You and No One Else to Maintain Your Hearing Health
Hearing loss is much more common than most people know. To put it in perspective: You are at an average sized wedding party. An average sized wedding party has 100 guests. Do you know how many of them statistically would be living with some detectable degree of hearing loss? Thirteen or 14. Almost 14% of everyone in the U.S. over the age of 18 suffers from hearing loss.
And tragically, less than 20% of these people address their condition with appropriate treatment. There are all kinds of psychological and social motivators that explain this, but the most common reasoning is likely also the most shocking: hearing loss comes on incredibly gradually over such a long period of time that it is almost impossible for someone to notice that it is happening to them.
This may surprise you, but consider how accustomed you are to your own five senses. Our senses are how we interact with our environment and how we experience our world. If the intensity of one of your senses should diminish slowly over an extended period, how would you know?
This difficulty in even recognizing the situation for what it is is exactly why people need to take a proactive approach to their own hearing health. You get a physical every year, right? And you visit the eye doctor and the dentist for regular checkups? Why should your hearing be any different? Maintaining your hearing health benefits every dimension of your life.
Health
Your hearing is a cornerstone of your overall health just as much as regular exercise, a healthy diet, and proper rest all are. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to recognize how your health and safety immediately depend on your hearing. It is how you navigate crowds and spatialize yourself. But your physical safety does not depend on your hearing only in public. Your hearing is deeply related to your sense of balance. This means that even at home, by yourself in the environment in which you have the greatest degree of control that you can exert, your health and safety is still at risk if your hearing is impaired. Studies have proven again and again that an increase in hearing loss corresponds directly to an increase in injuries from accidental falls.
But left untreated, hearing loss’s consequences will continue to unfurl and tangle into all manner of aspects of your health. When people are unable to recognize that their hearing is going, what they often do notice is that they are fatigued more quickly by socializing. They likely do not recognize why exactly this is, but they feel it to be true, so they withdraw socially without understanding exactly why.
And the course from there is all too common. Social withdrawal leads to feelings of loneliness. Loneliness leads to depression. Depression leads to feelings of frustration and confusion. All of these bad feelings warp and amplify the effects of each other. This swarm of confused feelings, along with your brain attempting to correct its ability to hear by literally rerouting its own neural pathways, frequently leads to cognitive decline.
Your Professional Life
Though hearing loss is as common as explained above, it is quite rare as a congenital condition. It becomes more and more common with age. When symptoms are recognized in children it is imperative to take action as soon as possible to guarantee that normal childhood development can stay on schedule. If a child falls behind in this regard, it can be very difficult to catch back up.
But same as the challenges that hearing loss presents for keeping up at school, keeping up at work should be equally obvious. The disadvantages are immediate and their impacts are very real.
Relationships
Perhaps the truest standard to gauge one’s quality of life is the relationships they enjoy. Living with hearing loss means adding stress to what should be life’s greatest source of joy. The subtlety of whispered secrets and the timing of little jokes are the cornerstones of easy trust between friends.
Proper attention to hearing health needs to be normalized. Many times people who are beginning to suffer from hearing loss depend on a loved one to intervene and tell them that they are recognizing the presence of symptoms. Make an appointment today for you and a loved one to come in and get an annual exam. There is no more accurate way to know exactly how your hearing measures up.
