Hearing Blog

Stimulate your brains

The new year is off and running!  The Christmas season is done and it is time for new beginnings.  Many of us make resolutions of better health and better fitness. I encourage you to add social activity to that list.  Being socially active helps us to stay mentally active.  Mentally sharp.  Plus being around others makes the days more interesting and invigorating.   

If you have a hearing loss then being socially active can cause you some stress.  It is harder to focus in noise and it simply takes more work than it does for someone with normal hearing.  If you know someone who has a hearing loss and wears hearing aids then please try and remember that they are hearing “aids”.   Look at them while you are talking to them.  They can’t hear you behind the menu if it is even a little noisy in the restaurant.  Speak a little more slowly…it helps.  Give them time to respond…their brains have to wait until they get the signal from the hearing aids before they can answer.  (that is a whole other article).  The severity of a person’s hearing loss will determine how much difficulty a person has understanding in groups of people.  Many factors go into “why” someone has such difficulties and while others who also wear hearing aids don’t seem to have hardly any problems in noise.  NO TWO PEOPLE ARE ALIKE!   No two hearing aids are identical either.  Just because they look similar doesn’t mean that they are.  There is a test we can do in our office called “QUICKSIN” that will actually provide us with a signal to noise ratio that is very enlightening as to how well you will understand in noise with hearing instruments.   This test helps us to determine the best style of hearing instruments; as well as, the technology level that will provide the patient with the best hearing success for their exact listening environments.   The breakdown of the test provide information as to whether or not accessories for your hearing instruments would also be beneficial. 

Are you social enough?  How much is enough…to ward off cognitive decline.  New hearing instruments released by The worlds leading hearing manufacturer; Starkey Hearing Technologies can now measure cognitive activities.  They were just mentioned in December’s TIME magazine!!  They provide a social “brain” score as well as a physical activity score.   This personal tracking allows the patient to take a pro-active approach to better health.  With the development of this technology also came research that now supports the amount of time that you should wear your hearing instruments per day to help diminish  cognitive decline.  Guess how long you should wear your hearing instruments per day?  Think about it…How many hours do you wear them?

Do you put them in as soon as you get up?  How many hours are you up a day?  Still thinking?  The number is 12 hours per day.  TWELVE!  Until this research it was generally thought that a minimum of 7 hours was good for most people.  Not anymore.  TWELVE!  Put them in and wear them.  The more you wear them…even if it is quiet in your house… the better your brain will be able to process all the sounds when you get into groups.   Remember; even if it seems quiet to you in your house, there is still many sounds and sound waves that are taking place that we want your brain to become privy to.  One of the reason’s that it seems so quiet is, well; because you have a hearing loss.  So put your hearing instruments in and wear them… as many hours a day as possible.  Stimulate, stimulate, stimulate your senses…at least 14 hours per day.  Remember; we hear with our brains… our ears are just the mechanism that gets the sound to the brain.   To Hear Better Is To Live Better!

By: Roseann B. Kiefer, B.A., BC-HIS

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