5 Reasons to Address Hearing Loss
- Hear more to keep your mind sharp. Protect your cognitive function, and ensure your mind stays sharp for many years to come by treating even mild hearing loss as soon as it is diagnosed. Recent ground-breaking studies reveal a significant link between untreated hearing loss and cognitive decline or dementia. Using hearing aids helps amplify sounds you have lost, stimulating your brain and keeping it active.
- Treat your hearing loss to lift your mood. There are quality-of-life and emotional benefits to treating even a mild hearing loss brought on by years of exposure to loud music, power tools, high-volume headphones, motor-sport engines, and noisy night clubs. According to the National Academy on an Aging Society, hearing loss can lead to more depression, social isolation, and dissatisfaction with life. By treating your hearing loss, you can again hear the uplifting sounds you may have lost over time, such as children’s laughter, birds singing, and ocean waves, and more. The advanced technology in many new hearing aids provides more clarity of these sounds.
- Increase your safety and awareness via hearing from all directions. Advanced directional microphone technology available with many new hearing aids lets you hear from the back and side—something really important when driving a car or carrying on conversations inside a car. Directional hearing increases your safety on the road and also in other settings, making it easier to hear voices more clearly in restaurants, at parties, or those times when your head is in the fridge and someone is talking at your back.
- Stop pretending you hear what people say. The powerful hearing aids of today capture the natural richness and variation of speech, so it’s easier to follow the conversation wherever you are. One of the most frustrating aspects of not hearing as well as you once did is not catching everything people are saying. New technologies help you decipher more speech details, even in the presence of music and noise. The newest devices help clarify the more subtle sounds of language—like the consonants B, S, F, T, and Z—so you can follow what someone is saying.
- Super-charge your social life. Re-engage with others and return to the things you used to enjoy before your hearing loss got in the way. Did you stop engaging in activities because you could no longer hear in certain environments? Some new state-of-the-art hearing aids cut out background noise so you can hear what you want to hear, even when the setting is noisy. These hearing aids are designed to reduce unwanted noise, and also to scan the listening environment and automatically adapt to it—even in wind. There are hearing aids that can actually “geo-tag” a location. For example, if it’s convenient for you to use the Wi-Fi at a certain coffee shop, don’t worry about the noise—your hearing aids will know when you’re there and adjust themselves accordingly. Recordings of virtually every listening situation have been used to create algorithms and “train” these new mini-computers for your ears.
