Time to Read: 4 minutes
Do I need to wear my hearing aids all the time?
In this video, Emma busts the myth that you should only wear your hearing aids when you think you 'need' them.
Emma, our audiologist explains the benefits of wearing your hearing aids all waking hours, how this helps rewire the brain and helps you get used to background noise, so you can understand conversations in background noise as well as you possibly can.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
Hi there.
I'm Emma from Value Hearing and today I'm going to talk to you about one of the most common myths associated with hearing aids.
We hear it almost every day in the clinic.
"Oh, I only wear my hearing aids when I go out."
"I don't need to wear them when I'm on my own at home, or I don't need to wear them when I'm having conversations in quiet because I do quite well."
"I only put them in when I need them in background noise."
Now, this is not a myth that we enjoy hearing at all.
Truthfully, hearing aids...we work with the ears, but we're essentially more so, working with the brain when we prescribe hearing aids. So we're
correcting for the deficit, for the damage in your hearing, but it's the brain that's receiving the corrected signal and processing it.
So, when the brain gets used to having a hearing loss, and then when we give you hearing aids and bring you back up to something closer to 'normal hearing' it can take a while for the brain to get used to it.
So by only wearing them when you think you need them; so by only wearing them when you think you need them - say in a noisy restaurant, for example, the brain is going to get a little bit of a surprise!
It's going to be hearing the cutlery, the clashing dishes, the other people around you, the kitchen in the background that it hasn't been used to hearing for a long time, and it will be paying more attention to that than the conversation you're trying to have because it perceives that
sound as abnormal or new.
Whereas if you wear at the hearing aids all day from the moment you wake up in the morning to when you go to bed at night - not swimming or showering with it of course - you'll find that the brain will start to rewire.
It will recognise that those clashing dishes for example that you'd hear in your own kitchen at home.
That is normal. That's just background noise.
It will hear the fridge motor, the traffic in the background, the birds in the trees, and it will start to learn that that is not a new sound anymore.
It's not something it needs to worry about and focus on, but is in fact completely insignificant background noise and by learning that and rewiring and retraining the brain, it means when you do go into the noisier environments and you hear everything else that "normal hearing" people are hearing, that the brain will be able to focus on the conversation and filter out that background noise for you a lot better.
So, please, it doesn't matter how well you have conversations in a quiet environment, please wear the hearing aids all waking hours, and you will benefit from them so much more.
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