Dealing With Hearing Loss

Hearing is important, not only for convenience, but also for cognitive health—as an inability to participate in what for most people is an important part of social life, has been shown to accelerate cognitive decline:

14 Powerful Strategies To Prevent Dementia ← one of them is looking after your hearing

To this end, we’ve written before about ways to retain (or at least slow the loss of) your hearing, here:

5 Ways To Avoid Hearing Loss

But, what if, despite our best efforts, your hearing is declining regardless, or is already impaired in some way?

Working with the hand we’ve been dealt

So, your hearing is bad and/or deteriorating. Assuming you’ve ruled out possibilities of fixing it, the next step is how to manage this new state of affairs.

One thing to seriously consider, sooner than you think you need to, is using hearing aids. This is because they will not only help you in the obvious practical way, but also, they will slow the associated decline of the parts of your brain that process the language you hear:

ACHIEVE study finds hearing aids cut cognitive decline by 48%

…and here’s the paper itself:

Recruitment and baseline data of the Aging and Cognitive Health Evaluation in Elders (ACHIEVE) study: A randomized trial of a hearing loss intervention for reducing cognitive decline

Furthermore, hearing aid use can significantly reduce all-cause mortality:

Association between hearing aid use and mortality in adults with hearing loss in the USA: a mortality follow-up study of a cross-sectional cohort

Your ears are not the only organs

Remember, today’s about dealing with hearing loss, not preventing it (for preventing it, see the second link we dropped up top).

With this in mind: do not underestimate the usefulness of learning to lipread.

Lipreading is not a panacea; it has its limitations:

• You can’t lipread an audio-only phonecall, or a podcast, or the radio
• You can’t lipread a video call if the video quality is poor
• You can’t lipread if someone is wearing a mask (as in many healthcare settings)
• You can’t lipread multiple people at once; you have to choose whose mouth to watch (or at least, you will miss the first word(s) each time while switching)
• You can’t lipread during sex if your/their face is somewhere else (may seem like a silly example, but actually communication can be important in sex, and the number of times this writer has had to say “Say again?” in intimate moments is ridiculous)

However, it can also make a huge difference the rest of the time, and can even be a superpower in times/places when other people’s hearing is nullified, such as a noisy environment, or a video call in which someone’s mic isn’t working.

The good news is, it’s really very easy to learn to lipread. There are many valid ways (often involving consciously memorizing mouth-shapes from charts, and then putting them together one by one to build a vocabulary), but this writer recommends a more organic, less effort-intensive approach:

1. Choose a video of someone who speaks clearly, and for which video you already know what is being said (such as by using subtitles first, or a transcript, or perhaps the person is delivering a famous speech or reciting a poem that you know well, or it’s your favorite movie that you’ve watched many times).
2. Now watch it with the sound off (assuming you do normally have some hearing; if you don’t, then you’re probably ahead of the game here) and just pay close attention to the lips. Do this on repeat; soon you’ll be able to “hear” the sounds as you see them made.
3. Now choose a video of someone who speaks clearly, for which video you do not already know what is being said. You’ll probably only get parts of it at first; that’s ok.
4. Now learn the rest of what they said in that video (by reading a transcript or such), and use it like you used the first video.
5. Now repeat steps 3 and 4 until you are lipreading most people easily unless there is some clear obfuscation preventing you.

This process should not take long, as there are only about 44 phonemes (distinct sounds) in English, and once you’ve learned them, you’re set. If you speak more languages, those same 44 phonemes should cover most of most of them, but if not, just repeat the above process with the next language.

Remember, if you have at least some hearing, then most of the time your lipreading and your hearing are going to be working together, and neither will be as strong without the other—but if necessary, well-practised lipreading can indeed often stand in for hearing when hearing isn’t available.

A note on sign language:

Sign language is great, and cool, and useful. However, it’s only as useful as the people who know it, which means that it’s top-tier in the Deaf community (where people will dodge hearing-related cognitive decline entirely, because their social interaction is predominantly signed rather than spoken), and can be useful with close friends or family members who learn it (or at least learn some), but isn’t as useful in most of the wider world when people don’t know it. But if you do want to learn it, don’t let that hold you back—be the change you want to see!

Most of our readers are American, so here’s a good starting place for American Sign Language ← this is a list of mostly-free resources

Enjoy!