“I only need to wear my hearing aids when I go out” is one of the worst things you can think or do for yourself after getting hearing aids.
Most of your hearing is done in the brain and not with your ears. Ears pick up sound and deliver it to the brain. When hearing loss is present, the brain is deprived of sound at a normal level—auditory deprivation. This becomes “normal hearing” for someone with hearing loss, but it’s not normal hearing.
Your brain needs to be regularly exposed to sounds at normal levels to put them into different categories as it once did. Using your hearing aids consistently will help retrain the brain to hear at a normal level again. While hearing loss can’t be “cured”, your hearing will be significantly improved.
You may feel you hear fine at home or that you don’t need to hear while reading a book or doing the crossword. Sounds like the furnace or air conditioning, footsteps on the floor, people moving around the house, etc. may not feel important.
However, it’s useful to hear these subtle sounds. As you hear more amplified sounds you build a tolerance to the louder volume levels, which helps amplified sounds seem more natural. This is done by the brain automatically without being aware that it’s happening. More exposure leads to optimal performance with hearing aids.
Hearing loss isn’t only present when you go out into the noisy world. While it may be more noticeable when you’re in more demanding listening environments, the loss is always there. If a hearing aid wearer only wears hearing aids occasionally, the brain has no idea what to do with all this newly introduced noise and stimuli. This can be overwhelming and cause people to reject their hearing aids saying, “all I hear is noise”.
When hearing aids aren’t worn regularly the brain reverts to hearing loss mode which puts hearing aid wearers back where they began—having trouble hearing. If sound is introduced on a regular basis by wearing hearing aids consistently, it’ll be more acceptable when background noise is introduced and help eliminate the over-stimulation effect. You’ll be immersing the brain with new sound, desensitizing it to extraneous sounds, and allowing it to focus on listening to more important things like speech.
This whole process doesn’t happen overnight. The more repeatedly hearing aids are worn, the faster all sounds, both background and foreground, will become more natural. The amount of time this can take will vary for everyone. For this reason, it’s crucial to use your hearing aids consistently.
It’s recommended to wear your hearing aids unless you’re sleeping, showering, having your hair done, swimming, or in a dangerously loud environment. Be patient and give your brain a chance to adapt to all the wonderful sounds of life you may have been missing!
It might also be worth looking into aural rehabilitation if you’d like to take things a step further. Aural rehabilitation is a specialized type of training designed to reduce the effort needed to listen to and understand speech.
