There’s holiday fatigue and for those with hearing loss, listening fatigue. The holidays bring us extra expenses, travel and emotional aloneness. We overschedule and go without sleep. With impaired hearing, the extra energy it takes to understand conversation in noisy settings (airports, in the car, big dinners & gatherings) creates additional mental exhaustion, irritability and headaches. In the end, we experience emotional aloneness because the loud environments further alienate us. Put the two together and we have a double whammy.
Holiday gatherings include music, overlapping conversations with kids shrieking. It makes it damn hard to process speech through mechanical means. People who have normal hearing have a natural ability to filter out background noise and hone in on speech. We don’t. Conversation in a noisy environment is also physically exhausting for us.
Have you heard of the cocktail party effect? “It’s the phenomenon where the partygoer can follow a single conversation in a noisy room.” It’s also referred to as cocktail party deafness because people normal hearing people naturally filter out excess noise. People who wear hearing aids and cochlear implants find this challenging. Hearing devices amplify life as a whole. Even though technology has improved to lower background noise, it ‘s invasive when it gets loud enough. It takes a lot of mental focus for to understand speech in those settings.
Save Your Sanity and Energy
Listening fatigue drains those of us with hearing loss both mentally and physically. Here are 3 quick tips for your upcoming holiday gatherings:
- Set a time limit for noisy situations.
- Take hearing breaks.
- Decide if you are in or out of the conversation (see below).
What does Listening fatigue look like? We have a hard time focusing on the person talking. It’s hard to match what we hear with what we see. (We are all using lipreading strategies to some degree.) We need more repeats. Sometimes we are short tempered. Our facial, neck and shoulder muscles get tense from concentration. We look mad because of our focused look. There’s only so much time we can stay in a noisy environment before feeling overwhelmed. These are all signs we should have taken a hearing break hours ago.
Plan Ahead
It’s not just what we will wear to these gatherings, it’s how we will hear. Before going, consider these:
- How many people will be there and where will it be?
- What is the expected noise level?
- Will there be a lot of strangers? (Strangers are hard to understand until we get familiar with them.)
- Plan your hearing breaks. Give yourself 10-15 minutes and hour of quiet time. Talk to the host about hearing breaks and see if they can help you find quiet space together.
- If going with someone else, plan when to leave together. If someone wants to stay longer, they can catch another ride home.
What are healthy boundaries for you? You know, before you lose your cool.
Hearing Breaks
Hearing breaks look different for everyone. Here are a few ideas. Use what works for you, or find your own creative solution. Take a time out. Go outdoors for a breather. Turn off your hearing devices for a complete brain break. Wash the dishes. Find a quiet room away from the noise.
Decide if you are in, or out. We have a 5 minute podcast on that HERE.) This guideline came from a local HoH friend. Be choosy with your conversations because we only have so much energy. Allow yourself to tune out of the conversations that don’t really matter. Ask yourself, am I in this conversation or am I out? Conserve your energy for the conversations that do matter.
Hearing breaks give us time to recharge and go back it. Without it, we are worn out and too tired to hear/lipread.
Tools to Reduce Listening Fatigue
There are other ways to reduce listening fatigue. Accommodations & technology also reduce our efforts to hear. First, use those hearing aid/cochlear implant programs by going into the ‘noise’ setting. The restaurant setting will work too. This focuses hearing aid microphones forward blocking noise to the side and behind you.
If you nee dmore, use automatic speech recognition (ASR) software built into your smartphone. Just like captions help us on the TV, they also help us in real-time. Whip out your phone and give it a try. It won’t be perfect but every little bit helps. Find your smartphone ASR features in your settings BEFORE you go. In your phone, go to settings-accessibility-hearing. For more information, go to our Smartphone Built-in Accessibility post. Get comfortable using this before you go. Use it at the store, restaurant or at home.
If you have a remote companion microphone, use it. These microphones zero in on what you want to hear. When in the car or on a plane, have your travel mate wear it. At a party, hold it out to the person talking. Who cares if it looks different as long as we can hear, right? Practice using it before you get in that social gathering so you’re used to it. Use at the store, with a waitress or on your spouse at home.
Hear Ye! Hear Ye!
Noisy environments are hard work for anyone with hearing loss. Listening fatigue drags us down. We can help ourselves with it but it’s also super nice if our hearing family and friends help us too. Create that quiet space, or corner, for anyone with hearing loss. If someone doesn’t understand why someone with hearing loss suddenly disappears, explain it. Grow their know. Invite the person with hearing loss to talk about when they come back.