Do you have friends who can get up early and stay up late day after day without getting tired while at the same time, a single day of work or a three-hour meeting leaves you feeling worn out?
If this sounds familiar, you may be suffering from what is known as listening fatigue.
What few people know is that hearing loss involves more than just struggling to understand speech and hear sound. It can also make you extremely tired.
Why does listening make you tired?
There are three areas of our brain that connect with the auditory system to help interpret sound and produce speech. For the listener with normal hearing these areas of the brain function as the perfect team, allowing communication to seem effortless.
However, with the addition of hearing loss, the brain has to work, think and concentrate harder than it would with normal hearing and this teamwork is disrupted, increasing the challenges of communication and leading to listening fatigue.
Ian Noon, Head of Policy and Research at the National Deaf Children’s Society in the United Kingdom, paints an accurate picture of what listening fatigue is like:
“It’s about the energy involved in lip-reading and being attentive all day long. Processing and constructing meaning out of half-heard words and sentences. Making guesses and figuring out context. And then thinking of something intelligent to say in response to an invariably random question. It’s like doing jigsaws, Sudoku and Scrabble all at the same time.”
As you may have experienced, a loss of energy due to hearing loss makes it difficult to perform at work or be active at home. A one or two hour meeting can make you feel tired, sleepy, and physically exhausted. And as your energy is expended throughout the day for listening, your ability to perform other tasks or activities is impaired. This can be incredibly frustrating and may even cause you to feel down and depressed.
But the good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way!
Here at Woodard, we have variety of products that have been specially developed to isolate sound and reduce fatigue.
Modern day hearing aids now come with features that help reduce listening fatigue by isolating and amplifying the sounds you want to hear and significantly reducing or removing the noises you don’t.
The ends result is a reduction in the amount of energy you spend listening and communicating, which leaves you with more energy to live your life the way you want to!
So, if you have been suffering from listening fatigue as a result of hearing loss, don’t wait another day to seek treatment. Come in today and let us get you on the road to feeling better.
Here at Woodard, we refuse to settle for less than the best and we hope you will do the same.
