Many people think that hearing loss is just the functional inability to hear sounds as well as they could in their youth. The reality is that losing fidelity in this sense can have all sorts of knock-on effects on a person’s life. In some cases, the results can be tragic.
In this guide, we look at some of the ways poor hearing affects your mental health and well-being. Here’s everything you need to know:
It leads to listening fatigue and cognitive overload
The main problem with poor hearing is that it leads to a condition called listening fatigue. This is where the brain has to work harder than normal just to process and understand the words that other people are saying, because the ear can’t detect them sufficiently and provide enough signals to the auditory part of the brain.
Usually, understanding occurs automatically as soon as the sound is registered. If you have hearing loss, you have to use other parts of the brain to try to infer or guess what somebody is saying. The mental cost is a state of hyperfocus, which leads to exhaustion. This can then lead to a withdrawal from social situations because they become so tiring.
It leads to increased anxiety
Poor hearing can also lead to increased anxiety in some people. Hearing is ultimately an early warning system that tells individuals what’s going to happen next. For example, if you have good hearing, you can detect cars approaching from behind or somebody walking into a room. As a result, hearing is a kind of early warning system. It tells the rest of the brain what’s going on in the environment.
When it’s not available, it can lead to a state of hypervigilance, where you can’t rely on your ears and you’re constantly tracking the room and other people’s movements with other elements of your nervous system. In some cases, this can lead to generalised anxiety. Even if nothing is happening right now, you may still feel low-grade anxiety and an underlying sense of vulnerability if your hearing isn’t working properly.
This is one of the reasons audiologists highly recommend audiograms to characterise and determine the type of hearing loss that you have. Once you know what the problem is, you can get hearing aids to resolve it.
It can increase the risk of brain atrophy and dementia
Your ears aren’t just a sound detection system; they’re an integrated part of your nervous system. If they’re not working properly, they can’t feed the necessary signals to the brain to stimulate specific regions like the auditory cortex. In some cases, auditory deprivation can impair human brain functioning. When the brain has fewer clear signals arriving from the cochlea, it reorganises itself.
Research shows that individuals with hearing loss are more than five times as likely to develop cognitive decline. Their brains simply aren’t getting the stimulation required to form new neural connections as they get older. Furthermo
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