There are lots of potential causes of exhaustion, everything from the inability to sleep at night to respiratory issues like sleep apnea. But many individuals are surprised to learn that chronic tiredness and exhaustion can also be caused by something fairly common: hearing loss.
That’s at least partly due to the fact that hearing loss usually progresses slowly over time. You might not immediately detect the symptoms and, as a result, you may feel as though you are constantly tired for no reason. This experience can be really frustrating. This fatigue can frequently turn into irritability which could cause you to socially seclude yourself. Luckily, your energy levels will typically improve once you get your hearing loss treated.
Hearing loss moves slowly (and your brain compensates)
Hearing loss is typically a gradually developing condition that gets worse over time. You might not even recognize that you have a hearing impairment at first. If you aren’t specifically watching for them, even obvious symptoms, like cranking the volume on your audio devices way up, can be easy to miss.
One of the harder to miss symptoms of hearing loss is often fatigue. In spite of how much sleep you get, you could still feel fatigued. Unfortunately, many individuals don’t intuitively link this symptom with hearing loss.
Because the cause happens in your brain, the symptoms aren’t generally considered an ear problem. When your ears aren’t getting as much information, your brain works harder to make sense of it all. Just as prolonged periods of intense concentration can leave you fatigued, the extra brain power required to hear what people are saying can be exhausting. Left untreated, this exhaustion can grow worse over time, impacting your quality of life and your ability to complete daily routine activities.
The role of stigma
So when people begin to feel fatigue, why wouldn’t they simply go see a hearing specialist? There are many explanations: often individuals are busy or thinking about other things. But the perception of stigma is another cause which can be even more detrimental. People frequently feel as if others will think they’re old if they have hearing loss and that admitting it will ruin their lives. All of these things are false, and they stop many individuals from finding treatment.
However, as more people are open about their hearing loss experience, the stigma has started to fade. It’s becoming a more prevalent understanding that hearing loss can happen to individuals of all ages and today’s hearing aids are small enough that the few people who can’t let go of this stigma won’t even notice them.
Regrettably, this perception of social stigma can cause people in the early stages of hearing loss to put off on getting the treatment they need leading to more serious permanent hearing loss.
Treatment options for hearing loss-related fatigue
There are often no obvious symptoms of early stage hearing loss. That’s why hearing specialists prefer to take a preventative approach rather than the far more challenging and less effective reactive method. Hearing specialists advocate for routine screenings in order to create a baseline of your healthy hearing, that way they will be able to identify changes to your hearing in subsequent screenings. Early treatment will be a lot more effective once we have determined that baseline.
If your hearing loss is causing fatigue, there are a few steps you can take to lessen that exhaustion as much as possible. Some of the easiest and most common steps include the following:
- See a hearing specialist: Keeping an eye on the condition of your hearing is important. When hearing loss is in its early phases, your brain doesn’t have to work as hard as it does when the condition worsens, and a hearing specialist can identify hearing loss when it first begins to develop.
- Give yourself a rest in between conversations: In between conversation, take a quiet break somewhere. This can help your brain recuperate from all the work it’s doing and make everyday communication a little more sustainable.
- Be certain you use your hearing aids as frequently as you can: Hearing aids are manufactured to help you focus on the sounds of human speech, meaning conversation will be considerably easier to understand when you are hearing them. This means your brain won’t have to work as hard and you will not experience the same degree of fatigue.
- Try to locate more quiet, isolated spots for conversations: When there is a lot of background noise, it can be challenging to sort out voices, even with hearing aids in some cases. It will be easier, and less fatiguing, to understand conversations if you move them to a quieter spot.
So if you’re feeling an abnormal amount of fatigue and tiredness, with no evident cause, it might be time to plan a visit to your hearing specialist. You can lessen your fatigue and boost your energy by treating your hearing loss. Don’t let stigma cause your hearing loss to continue to be untreated.