Emotional Factors of Hearing Loss is an insightful article into how hearing loss impacts a person’s emotional state from depression to unhappiness. The facts it addresses apply not only to those who lose their hearing later in life (which is harder to contend with as they have lost something), but also to those born with hearing loss like me. The following two are powerful statements and I can relate.
“Even when doing simple tasks, hard of hearing people must stop in order to concentrate on what is being said. The result is more stress. By itself, that is a minor problem. But people who are hard of hearing must be always alert to when conversation may or may not be taking place–particularly when background sounds exist.”
“Following a typical conversation, normal hearing participants generally retain a fairly good idea of the basic information that was exchanged, be it names or whatever. The hard of hearing person usually has been so focused on trying to understand the conversation that awareness of the complexity of the events discussed suffers, and memory of the conversation is badly limited.”
I am discovering how lucky I’ve been all these years to have retained information from many conversations, but I am also learning why it’s harder and drains my energy. I have always thought I was naturally a low energy person, but have since changed my mind to believe the energy I put into communication takes more out of me than the average person.
Many times, I sit in a conversation with an inkling of the topic, but unable to absorb the information and process it. The numbers are there, but the calculations aren’t working.