It’s All In Your Head: Do I need hearing aids now or can I wait?

You were told you could benefit from hearing aids; what do you do now? Hearing loss can sneak up on you very slowly which is why it can be hard to know that you are struggling to understand what you hear. It can also make you feel like you may not need the help now, as you feel like you hear okay. But why do you want to do okay when you could do great?

Let’s talk about reasons why you would want to proceed with hearing aids sooner rather than later. One of the main reasons to do it as soon as you are aware of an issue is because your brain will adapt to hearing with the hearing aids easier. When our brain goes a long time without hearing sounds it will begin to forget that those sounds exist. When we reintroduce those sounds to our brain, it must relearn them again. This can take a few days to a few weeks to achieve.

Another reason to pursue hearing aids sooner than later is to help maintain our brain’s ability to process the sounds in our environment, especially speech sounds. We usually call this your word understanding ability. This is part of the audiogram we performed at your first visit with us. It is not a guarantee but being able to hear all the sounds in your environment helps our brain to maintain a good ability to understand speech. When we are not able to hear all the important speech sounds to hear clearly for a long time our word understanding ability can start to decrease. Unfortunately, although hearing aids may help maintain the level that you are at now, they do not help increase that ability once it has started to decline.

The use of hearing aids can also help improve your overall quality of life. You can hear your friends and family better and not strain to understand what is being said. This helps you to maintain your level of social life, whether you are busy in large groups or just having coffee with a good friend. Untreated hearing loss can cause us to become isolated without us noticing. We don’t want to see that happen and being able to hear and understand our family and friends helps us stay active.

There is great benefit in proceeding with hearing aids early into your hearing loss journey. It is also a commitment you will make to wear them consistently. Consistent use of hearing aids is very important to your success with them. As stated before, your brain needs to relearn sounds. If you don’t wear the hearing aids everyday your brain is not able to learn all the sounds in your environment and maintain that knowledge.

Overall, you will do better with hearing aids if you get them early into your hearing loss journey. Your brain will have a shorter time going without hearing some sounds which means it will adapt to hearing those sounds again easier and quicker. Hopefully by getting hearing aids early on you will also not experience a decrease in your social life but you will make a smooth transition with your hearing aids. When you are ready to start your better hearing journey, contact your local ENT and Audiologist to begin.