Untreated hearing loss can add a lot of stress to many aspects of your life, including at work. The good news is that treating your hearing loss with hearing aids can benefit your career in several ways.
Four Ways Hearing Aids Can Benefit Your Career
- Improves your ability to communicate. Hearing aids make it easier to understand speech and other sounds. This makes everything from client meetings to a team-building lunch with coworkers at Bistro St. Michael less stressful. Using them helps you feel more confident in your ability to communicate with others. It relieves anxiety about having an embarrassing or costly misunderstanding at work.
- It helps you focus. When you have hearing loss, you have to spend so much mental energy trying to understand what’s being said. This uses valuable mental resources that could be used on other aspects of your job. Hearing aids ease that burden and allow you to focus on the task at hand.
- It shows that you are a problem-solver. Taking control of your hearing health makes it clear to your employer and coworkers that you are willing to take important steps to improve your performance and solve any problems that might prevent you from doing your job to the best of your ability.
- It may increase your earning potential. Research has shown that hearing loss doesn’t just make your job harder; it can also hurt your wallet. A 2015 study found, “Controlling for education, age, sex, and race, individuals with hearing loss had 1.58 times higher odds of low income and 1.98 times higher odds of being unemployed or underemployed compared to normal-hearing individuals.”
Do I Need Hearing Aids?
While the benefits of hearing aids are obvious, the first signs of hearing loss can actually be quite subtle. This makes it harder for people to know if they have a problem with their hearing, and they may put off the help they need.
Keep an eye out for the following early signs of hearing loss, and if you experience any, schedule an appointment for a hearing test:
- You frequently ask others to repeat themselves or feel like voices sound muffled.
- Conversations in places with background noise become increasingly difficult to follow.
- You struggle to hear high-pitched sounds.
- You experience a ringing or buzzing in the ears (tinnitus).
- Phone conversations are hard to understand.
- You need to turn the volume up on the TV or radio louder than you used to.
- Family members or friends have commented on your hearing.
Call Prescott Ear, Nose, Throat & Allergy today to schedule an appointment to have your hearing checked by an expert.