At Arizona Balance and Hearing Aids, our team is committed to improving your life and how you enjoy it. Communication is essential to all relationships, from personal to professional and communication issues could be signaling hearing loss.

Day-to-day issues

Are you struggling to hear conversations? Can you hear your phone ring – in your pocket or purse? How about in the next room? Can you hear someone talking to you from the next room? Do you have to keep changing the tones and chimes on your phone because you are missing notifications? Are you turning up the TV and the radio in your car?If you answered “yes” – then it does seem communication issues are affecting your life.

“I’ll just deal with it”

Sure, you can keep turning up the TV and the radio, but what about the arguments when family members turn them down because they are too loud? Gradual hearing loss creeps into your every-day life and starts impacting a full range of things before you even realize it.First you may just miss parts of a word because different vocal tones change the pitch of a word – think about speech patterns and how vowels and consonants put different emphasis or a tonal quality on certain words. So, you start trying to guess what a word is when you miss part of it. That can certainly lead to issues both on a personal and professional level.

It gets a little worse

You start losing whole chunks of a sentence. You can’t hear the birds outside anymore or the wind through the trees. Could you hear the buzzer on the washer or the dryer when it turns off? How about the oven timer or the carbon monoxide alarm upstairs if you are downstairs?You find you can’t follow a conversation at a restaurant, around the water cooler at the office or during a conference you are attending. You have issues with accented or stuttered speech. While you may not personally know or work with anyone that fits that criteria – what about cashiers at stores, servers at restaurants, new people you meet through personal or professional relationships?

The strain is exhausting

Trying to fill in the gaps of a conversation you may be having because you can’t hear all of it is exhausting. You are straining to hear, straining to process, straining to answer appropriately. There’s tension headaches, grinding teeth – missed opportunities – it’s taking its toll physically before you know it.At home a pleasant conversation may be becoming a thing of the past. There’s yelling on both sides, you have to keep stopping a conversation and asking to have something repeated, you are interrupting over and over again, you can’t get the punchline of a joke. Family members would rather go to another room than sit with the television turned up – the volume is up on your phone and your electronic devices and you still are straining to understand because words at a certain pitch or tone escape you. You may get a little paranoid and start thinking people are deliberately leaving you out of things because you can’t hear them.If communication at work is essential and you are having communication issues the anxiety about your job is likely seriously stressing you out. Because you aren’t hearing everything, your boss may start thinking your inattention to what is going on around you means you don’t care about your job as much as you used to.

Communication is essential

Speaking, listening, enjoying – living – it all takes communication and hearing loss just messes with all those things! The average adult waits between five and seven years to get hearing loss addressed. Think of what you may miss in that time and what sort of impact that will have on your personal and professional life. There are hearing devices and hearing assistance instruments that can improve your hearing right now. Hearing aids are miracles of amplification and that are so much subtler than they used to be.Why wait? The caring team at Arizona Balance and Hearing can address your concerns, provide you with a comprehensive hearing test, and put you on the road to effective communication right now!