How to Start Wearing Hearing Aids

Wearing hearing aids is crucial when it comes to combatting hearing loss. A proper hearing aid fitting is important when wearing hearing aids to ensure the most comfort and usability. Once you’ve been through the screening and been fitted for hearing aids, it’s time to learn how to wear your hearing aids effectively. Don’t worry; it just takes a little period of adjustment.

Initial adjustment to your hearing aids

If you’ve ever worn glasses or contact lenses you know that anything new that affects your senses takes a period of adjustment. Just like wearing bifocals, wearing hearing aids takes a bit of adjustment.

This is particularly true if you have experienced your hearing loss gradually over a long period of time. You don’t realize it right now, but your brain has become accustomed to a lack of hearing signals. Some people experience tinnitus along with their hearing loss because the brain is making up for the lack of incoming signals. If you have tinnitus, the hearing aids may bring relief. If you don’t have tinnitus your brain can leave you feeling a bit overwhelmed by the flood of signals suddenly coming in. Here’s what you can do in the first days to adjust. 

• Adjust to the Sound of Silence: Background sounds that you haven’t heard in ages will suddenly seem overly loud. That’s because you haven’t been hearing them. Something as simple as the sound of a fan can seem noisy. A spouse reading the newspaper over coffee in the morning can be a plethora of sounds you’ve forgotten. The rustling of the paper, the clink of the mug or the slurp of the coffee might be maddening at first.

• The best approach is to just find a quiet room and sit. Read a book if you want. Just sit in the silence and allow your brain to adjust to the normal background noises in your home.

• Adjust to Your Voice: Because hearing aids can block a portion of your ear canal it is common to experience an occlusion effect. Bone-conducted vibrations bounce off the bit of the hearing aid in your ear canal. This makes your voice sound funny to you. Its normal and you just need a strategy to adjust in the same way you have a strategy to adjust to silence. Take a magazine or book and read a bit out loud. Even better, ask a friend or family member listen to you read and ask them about your speaking volume. The occlusion effect can have an impact on your normal speaking volume. A friend can help you hit just the right spot. The occlusion effect can also cause you to suddenly hear your own eating and drinking. That’s normal and in just a few weeks your brain will tune it out again. Honestly, the sound of eating and drinking isn’t that exciting and it will soon bore your brain.

• Visit Friends: Visit a friend or a group of friends. Meet in a home or restaurant. Try to visit friends with different speech patterns. You are fine-tuning your brain’s ability to discern speech again. You may also find that it helps to look at people when they are speaking. If you are still having difficulty understanding speech, this is something the audiologist needs to know.

Don’t Get Frustrated – Be Patient

The most important thing you can do is incorporate wearing your hearing aids as part of your every day life. That means wearing them for as long as you can each day. In the beginning, wear them just a bit more each day. Remember you are retraining your brain; and your brain can get tired making you feel irritable or overwhelmed. Just understand that you are going through a normal adjustment period.

Try wearing your hearing aids in places that you usually have the most difficulty hearing. If restaurants and parties are your greatest challenges, then make sure you attend every party you can and spend plenty of time in restaurants. Remember that even people with perfect hearing have trouble in those situations. Don’t be frustrated if you don’t hear well at first. Be patient with yourself.

Your hearing aids should never cause you any physical discomfort. If you experience this sort of discomfort or pain, contact your audiologist immediately.