How Do You Know You Need Hearing Aids?

Time to Read: 7 minutes

You don’t need hearing aids. You can hear just fine. 

Mostly.

But just in case, let’s ask a few questions - just to make sure it is other people and not you.

Do people mumble all the time?

It’s annoying, isn’t it? No one knows how to speak properly anymore. Even worse, people will start conversations in different rooms and expect you to hear. Isn’t that terribly rude?

You wouldn’t be complaining at all about this if they didn’t do that.

Are you tired of asking people to repeat themselves because they’re not speaking clearly?

Again and again, people just don’t know how to talk properly. They’re not clear in what they’re trying to say. Perhaps they should phrase their sentences properly so you can understand them first time.

Are you constantly irritated by crowds and noisy environments? 

Isn’t it annoying that poor architecture in buildings makes everything unnecessarily noisy? Everything echoes and it all ends up sounding like white noise. It’s exhausting after a while too.

It is utterly impossible having a conversation under those circumstances, so after a while you don’t bother with it.

More Reading: The Problem With Noise Needs to Be Out In The Open.

Do you hate the way no one on TV can speak properly, forcing you to turn up the volume?

Actors mumble, then they speak too fast or the sound is muffled. Is it too much to ask professional thespians do their jobs and enunciate words properly? You’d think producers would have learned to fix the sound on TV programs and films since it’s been nearly 100 year since the start of the talkies.

There’s nothing wrong with your hearing and, if TV volume has to go up a little bit to make watching TV a half decent experience.

More Reading: Improve TV listening with hearing aids.

Is the phone signal so poor that you have to have complete silence to hear a phone call?

Why is it that we can make telephones small enough to fit in your pocket and not make them good enough to receive a call? It’s not like the good old days of the landline. Sure, those lines might sound tinny and crackly, but things are no better now. What’s the use of having a mobile phone when you need to be alone in a room in order to hear a caller?

It’s definitely nothing to do with you, because you’ve been using a telephone all your life and it’s only been a problem when they introduced new technology, which never works properly.

As much as you love your children and grandchildren, do you wish they would just speak properly for once?

They’re little fleas in a bottle, always running about. They will come up to you, say something which you don’t hear, and then they run off again. And they never speak slowly or clearly. Keeping up with the children is exhausting at the best of times and they make it such hard work by not speaking properly. 

Is all modern music is just awful? And do you find that even your favourite music isn’t as good as you remember it?

When was the last time you sat down and listened to music for pleasure? Did the rot start to set in when they replaced the warm authentic sound on vinyl records with harsh sound of digital compact discs?

And despite the fact that we have FM and digital radio stations these days, the sound coming out of the speakers isn’t any good. And singers don’t sing any more, they just murmur and stutter their way through songs, so you don’t have a hope of understanding the lyrics.

More Reading: Music To Your Ears.

Are you sure there is nothing wrong with your hearing?

If you found yourself nodding along to some or all of these statements, may we suggest you get your hearing testing.

When you get the test done at Value Hearing, it costs absolutely nothing - so what do you have to lose?

What you have to gain is bragging rights with the family, because if there is nothing wrong with your hearing, you’ll have an audiogram you can point to that says your hearing is A-OK, is theirs?

And, on the small off-chance, that you do have hearing loss, getting small discreet hearing aids means your family will never notice, but you will notice the difference. 

Listening situations will be much easier; you might even find that you have more energy.

In fact, there are a number of benefits with hearing aids that have nothing to do with being able to hear better - we have a list of five in a blog post here.

More importantly, addressing hearing loss only has substantial physical and mental health benefits. It can even reduce the risk of dementia and cognitive decline.