For people recently diagnosed with hearing loss, treatment can be a hard decision – but it shouldn’t be. Treating hearing loss means investing in your future and your quality of life. Hearing loss can create issues and disruptions in your life ranging from small misunderstandings to major health concerns. Treating hearing loss helps mitigate nearly every problem that can arise with hearing challenges.
Treating Hearing Loss With Hearing Aids
Hearing aids are often central to treating hearing loss. They are tiny, discreet devices that enhance sound and make it easier to comprehend speech. Hearing aids alleviate the mental strain, anxiety and stress that hearing loss can provoke. Today’s hearing aids are powerful digital sound processors and micro computers built for a wide range of listening environments. Special features mean that you can tailor your hearing aids capabilities to compliment the needs of your lifestyle.
When assessing hearing aids, quality is important. Talk with your hearing specialist about devices that deliver precision sound alongside durability and versatility. Unfortunately, with hearing aids, the marketplace is rife with products that offer you “savings” by selling you inferior devices. What may seem like an irresistible discount may actually stick you with hearing aids that are uncomfortable to your ears and unsuited to your needs.
Hearing Loss and Your Quality of Life
You may be surprised at the range of effects untreated hearing loss can have on your life. People with unaddressed hearing issues have elevated risks of depression, anxiety and social isolation. Workers with untreated hearing loss earn less, on average, than their peers with normal hearing.
By disrupting your ability to communicate, hearing loss can drive a wedge between your favorite activities and your ability to enjoy them. Once fun pastimes such as going to parties, visiting friends, seeing a concert or just watching television can become frustrating when you can’t keep up with the pace of speech around you.
Hearing loss can subtly alter your behavior. By making it harder to understand sounds, the world becomes more difficult to navigate. Many people with unaddressed hearing problems retreat from the discomfort of travel or going new places. Untreated hearing loss has been shown to be a catalyst in limited mobility and isolation.
When your quality of life declines, you lose many things that money can’t buy. From irreplaceable experiences, to deep and meaningful relationships and friendships, being able to hear and communicate plays a major role in helping you live your fullest life. When debating whether or not to treat your hearing loss, you must consider the things you value most in your daily life, and whether hearing better can help maintain your connection to them.
Hearing Loss and Your Health
Treating hearing loss is also critical for maintaining something priceless: your physical health. When hearing loss is left unaddressed, it can contribute to elevated risk for a wide range of health issues from falling injuries to dementia.
While hearing loss isn’t usually physically painful, it does cause a heavy amount of cognitive strain. With incomplete sound information coming in, the mind is constantly under stress to decipher meaning and direction from sound. To do this, the brain has to perform extra work and to help do this it pulls attention away from other important cognitive functions.
Attention directed away from balance and coordination for example, can make it harder for you to physically navigate obstacles in your path and make falling accidents much more likely. Distracted from proper coordination, the brain loses some of its ability to rapidly adapt and respond to other tasks.
Similarly, untreated hearing loss is linked to the onset and worsening of dementia. As cognitive attention is siphoned to compensate for hearing loss, it is thought this can cause other aspects of cognitive performance to become disorganized and perhaps precipitate the sharp cognitive decline that is dementia’s trademark. While untreated hearing loss can worsen the symptoms of dementia, treating hearing loss with hearing aids has been shown to improve functioning and cognitive grasp.
Get the Help You Need
Treating hearing loss can seem like a big investment at first, but it helps to consider what hearing aids help protect. Hearing aids link you to more than just hearing – they are part of the answer for staying connected to everything your hearing does for you. From staying on top of your job to staying close with your spouse, good hearing is part of the answer. Contact us to learn more about our comprehensive hearing health services!