The Holiday season provides numerous opportunities for families, friends and loved ones to socialize. However, countless individuals with hearing loss needlessly miss out on the joy that should exist when socializing. Untreated hearing loss creates a very real, invisible barrier that often goes unnoticed. Individuals with hearing loss can be surrounded by family and friends, and at the same time feel completely alone as they are unable to follow or participate in discussions or conversations. Some symptoms of this include silence, incorrect answers, smiling and laughing but not talking, sadness, unexplained frustration, and isolation. Treating hearing loss with hearing aids can completely change the way that an individual with hearing loss interacts in social situations.

Untreated hearing loss can lead to changes in the brain that make it difficult to process and understand speech, especially in noise. Treating hearing loss sooner rather than later helps to preserve an individual’s ability to understand. Even with hearing aids, some individuals will struggle to understand due to changes to the brain and auditory system caused by delaying the treatment of hearing loss.

If you have a family member who has hearing loss, there are things you can do to help conversations be more productive and joyful. Some strategies that help are eliminating background noise, speaking more slowly and distinctly to give the individual time to process, and rephrasing instead of simply repeating when someone does not understand. Patience and kindness help. 

If you suspect you or a loved one has an undiagnosed hearing loss, a complete audiometric evaluation will help determine if the problem is just a hearing loss, or if it is a more complicated problem involving a decreased ability to discriminate speech sounds or inability to separate speech from noise. For those who wear hearing aids several things can be done to improve holiday hearing. Having hearing aids deep cleaned, removing earwax, or if the hearing aids are more than a year old, having hearing re-tested and reprogramming hearing aids may help hearing and understanding.