Wearing hearing aids when you dont need them

Most people with hearing loss quickly discover the amazing benefits of hearing aids when they start wearing them on a regular basis. However, if you have a mild or moderate hearing loss, you may feel like you only get the benefits of hearing aids in certain situations. For example, some people may only wear hearing aids while they are at work. Others may take them out in situations with a lot of background noise. However, wearing your hearing aids all the time—even when you don’t think you need them—can have a big impact on your long-term health. Specifically, here are three ways they can help.

1. Hear and Understand Medical Advice

The ability to properly hear, remember, and follow the advice of your doctor is key to your long-term health. For example, by some estimates, the US spends $100 billion each year on preventable hospitalizations due to a failure to properly take medications. Hearing loss not only makes it hard for you to hear the medical advice of your doctor, but it makes it harder to remember it as well. If you’re struggling to hear what’s being said, your brain is working overtime, which makes it harder for you to process and remember the information you’re trying to hear.

On the other hand, according to one study, people with hearing loss who wore hearing aids for a period of two weeks, improved their mental processing and memory. Because the participants in the study could hear better, they were using less brain power trying to hear, which freed up their mental processes and made it easier for them to process and remember information.

If you wear your hearing aids all the time, you lower the stress on your brain to understand what’s being said around you, which helps you remember everything better, including vital medical advice.

2. Improve Balance and Decrease Risk of Falls

According to the Centers for Disease Control, over 800,000 people over age 65 are hospitalized as a result of falls each year, and the average hospital cost of a fall injury is more than $30,000. The most common injuries from falls are a broken hip or head trauma. Unfortunately, people with hearing loss are at a greater risk of falls than people with normal hearing.

However, wearing hearing aids has shown to help. In a recent study conducted by the Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, people with hearing loss who wore hearing aids performed better on balance tests than when they did not wear their hearing aids. The study’s authors conclude that, if you have hearing loss, wearing hearing aids could improve your balance and actually decrease your risk of being injured from a fall.

3. Lower Your Risk of Mental Decline

Although everyone experiences some mental decline as they age, people with hearing loss are at a greater risk than others. Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine found that people with mild hearing loss were twice as likely to develop dementia, those with moderate hearing loss were three times more likely, and those with severe hearing loss were five times more likely to develop dementia as they aged.

The good news is that people who wear hearing aids to address their hearing loss can erase that risk almost entirely. According to research published in the Journal of American Geriatrics, a 25-year study found that, although people with hearing loss had a higher rate of mental decline, those who wore hearing aids showed no higher risk than people with normal hearing.

Improve Your Long-term Health

By wearing your hearing aids all the time, not just when it is convenient, you can stay healthier and more mentally alert. Additionally, you can lower your risk of negative health outcomes in the future.

“I only need to wear my hearing aids when I go out” is one of the worst things you can think or do for yourself once you have made the decision to wear hearing aids.

The majority of our hearing is done in the brain and not with our ears, this is why it is so important to consistently expose the brain to sound through the use of hearing aids. Yes, that is correct—the majority of our hearing is done in the brain. The ears pick up sound and deliver it to the brain. When hearing loss is present the brain is deprived of sound at a normal level (auditory deprivation). This becomes “normal hearing” to the person with hearing loss but it is not normal hearing. The brain needs to be consistently exposed to sounds at normal levels to put them into different categories as it once did. We are retraining the brain to hear again at a normal level. Unfortunately, you will never hear as well as you did when you were a teenager and the hearing loss cannot be “cured” but the hearing will be significantly improved.

Some people with hearing loss feel that their hearing is fine while they are at home or that they do not need to hear while reading the paper or watching television. They feel it is not important to hear the furnace or air conditioning running, footsteps on the floor, people moving around in the house, etc. Actually, it is very important to hear these subtle sounds. As you hear more amplified sounds you build a tolerance to the louder volume levels of sound which helps the amplified sounds seem more natural. More exposure leads to optimal performance with hearing aids. This is all done by the brain automatically without people being aware that it is happening.

Hearing loss is not only present when you go out into the noisy world. It may be more noticeable when you are in more demanding listening environments but the loss is always there. If a hearing aid wearer only wears the hearing aids occasionally, the brain has no idea what to do with all of this newly introduced noise and stimuli. This can be overwhelming and cause people to reject their hearing aids saying, “All I hear is noise”. If sound is introduced on a regular basis by wearing the hearing aids consistently, it will be more acceptable when background noise is introduced. When the hearing aids are not worn consistently the brain reverts back to the hearing loss mode which puts hearing aid wearers back to where they began—having trouble hearing. Consistent hearing aid use will help to eliminate this over-stimulation effect and sounds become very normal again. We are immersing the brain with the new sound, desensitizing it to the extraneous sounds, and allowing it to focus on listening to more important things like speech.

This whole process does not happen overnight. The more consistently hearing aids are worn, the faster all sounds, both background and foreground, will become more natural. The amount of time this process can take will vary for everyone. For this reason, wearing the hearing aids regularly throughout the day is critical to “hear” the best you can in multiple situations. There is no magic number of hours that are given to suggest that the hearing aids be worn throughout the day but they should be worn as much as possible. It is recommended to wear hearing aids all of the time; except when you are sleeping, showering, having your hair done, swimming or when in a dangerously loud environment. Be patient and give your brain a chance to adapt to all of the wonderful new sounds of life!

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