Hearing loss in our daily lives
Hearing loss affects many people in their daily lives. It causes them to misunderstand their friends and family, misinterpret when they should meet people for appointments and create difficulty in simple tasks like answering the phone. Together, these items result in a dulling down of the experiences that can be had in our lives. The colourful tones that you can hear in familiar voices can be lost and lead to frustration for everyone.
However, these sounds that are lost are not the only inconvenience. When you stop enjoying sound-based activities like talking with friends, listening to stimulating music and watching television, it can have a massive impact on your life. Of course, when you then stop participating in these activities completely it can truly disrupt how you feel. The isolation of not being able to understand what your friend are saying puts you in a corner that is difficult to get out with and leads to you spending less time with them and more time by yourself.
John Hopkins Study
People often forget the importance in communicating with their friends and family to maintain an active mental capacity. John Hopkins study, which was 12 years in the making, found that this social isolation as a result of hearing loss was directly linked to dementia. Often people think dementia is just when you get a bit slow in the way you do things, but it is more than that. It is medically defined as a loss of brain function with symptoms including forgetfulness, impaired thinking and judgement, personality changes, agitation and loss of emotional control.
Why are they linked?
When you shut yourself out of company, the muscles in the brain that look after simple tasks like remembering where you are going to meet someone don’t get enough exercise. We all know what happens when you don’t exercise your body enough – you get unfit. Your brain works in the same way – when you don’t get it working away with friendly conversations then the muscles will weaken.
How can you prevent this from happening to you?
Firstly, you should make sure you are going to regular social events; go out for coffee with people you know and have a catch up. Perhaps start going to a walking group or a book club to discuss ideas that get your mind working. At least at this stage you will keep your mind active. Where there can be problems though is when you don’t hear these people correctly enough to engage with them. At this point, you need to get some advice to find out if there is something that you can do to hear them better.
Quite often, this may be a caused by a build up of ear wax and you just need a good clean to get yourself back to normal again. We can do this for you using our safe and gentle microsuction technique. If it’s more than that and you have an issue with your inner ear, then that unfortunately means you have a hearing loss. These aren’t as difficult to mitigate as they used to be – have a look at what Beethoven used to sort his hearing problem here.
We want to make sure that everyone can engage the best they can so if you think you have a hearing loss, no matter how big or small, we want to help. That’s our job and we are great at it. Give us a call on 0333 320 7788 and we’ll talk over what the problem seems to be and try our very best to make it better for you.
