Living Well with Hearing Loss: Communication Strategies

For people with hearing loss, sometimes communication can seem difficult. For example, it may feel harder to have conversations in crowded rooms, and feelings of isolation in social situations soon become the norm.

Thankfully, you don’t have to let these situations affect your quality of life. There are ways to navigate these communication blockages more effectively. 

At the Hearing Associates of Las Vegas, we help our clients understand different strategies to ensure confident communication every time.

This article will dive into some of these empowering techniques that will help you have a more positive outlook on how you can manage your hearing loss and have an excellent everyday life. 

We will also look at ways friends or colleagues of people with hearing loss can help.

Understanding Hearing Loss

People can experience hearing loss due to many factors, which may include:

• Prolonged loud noise exposure: Let’s say you’ve been around extremely loud noises like at a music festival. This could have a negative impact on the delicate structure of your inner ear and lead to hearing loss.
• Age-related hearing issues: As people get older, hearing loss can occur naturally. This is due to the loss of sensory cells within the inner ear. Not every older person experiences this, but for those that do, assistive devices are there to help like hearing aids.
• Medical reasons: People with hearing loss may also be due to illnesses. For example, ear infections can form when you get sick and cause temporary hearing loss. There could also be a disorder that affects the inner ear causing this.
• Medication: When thinking about hearing loss to the inner ear, in particular the auditory nerve, specific drugs may have an impact on how well patients can hear. The loss is potentially a side effect of a medication that is supposed to help you, e.g. chemotherapy drugs.
• Genetics: Your lack of sound could also be part of your genetics. Perhaps this is something that your parents or grandparents also had to endure around your age. Even some children are born with certain mutations that impact how the ear develops.
• Injuries: Perhaps an unfortunate traumatic injury, like a hit to the head could have caused the hearing loss. These are just some of the various reasons individuals experience.

Communication Tips

There are a few ways we can better communicate with someone who has a loss of hearing. Or if you’re that person, I’m sure you might be familiar with how some of these techniques can help you at home or in public.

• Speaking clearly and not too fast will definitely help. It may not be a compassionate thing to shout at someone who has difficulty hearing. Similarly, being able to enunciate the words as clearly as possible will also be effective.
• Reduce communication in noisy environments, as loud background noises might make the lack of hearing worse. It’s better to avoid these distractions to ensure you can catch every word being said.
• Writing down notes can also help. Sometimes those with hearing difficulties can benefit from seeing things visually. If it’s an important conversation topic, writing and texting could come in handy.
• Be patient and repeat yourself when needed. This is key for both the individual who is less able to hear and for the other party involved. It may take a while for someone to process the conversation, so don’t feel frustrated if you have to repeat yourself.
• You can also consider using assistive listening devices to help amplify what other people are saying. This could be hearing aids or even alerting devices which are helpful at the door in case you have any visitors.

Loved Ones

Communication difficulties may be a struggle for loved ones, especially if they have seen a decline in an individual’s hearing over the years. But using these techniques with love and support will help better their quality of life and have them feel secure in their own homes.

Moreover, if you like, communication methods can be lighthearted like including exaggerated facial expressions and dramatized movements to make conversations more fun for everyone involved.

Tips for Video Calls

In professional settings, you may need to go on video calls. It’s important to always inform others of your difficulties so they understand if information is lost or if it takes a while to receive a response.

Online calls and meets also have their challenges like choppy internet connections or problems with the volume on the other person’s end. But not to worry.

We recommend if you have a hearing impairment use a good pair of headphones or a headset. This way you can sort the sound level that is much clearer without any background distractions.

Some video call features are also there to help with your communication. For example, you can raise a virtual hand in a group meeting if you wish to speak or to confirm to someone with hearing difficulties you wish to add your points.

Hearing Loss Communication Tips

Ultimately, effective communication strategies take place when the individual experiencing hearing difficulties expresses this to others and is able to confidently practice strategies to make conversations more clear in their daily life.

At the Hearing Associates of Las Vegas, we want to help put you at ease by discovering how to make your quality of life greater despite not having the clearest hearing.

Why not reach out to our medical advisers today to book an evaluation and find out what your hearing ailment might be if you don’t know already? And how we can improve that.