Hearing loss affects the way we communicate with others. When speech sounds a little quieter, you rely a little more on visual cues like facial expressions and body language. While those are effective at adding context in person, they aren’t as helpful during a phone conversation, often leaving you confused when trying to communicate.
Let’s look at a few ways you can make your next phone conversation more accessible.
Stream Audio Through Your Hearing Aids
Your hearing aids connect to your phone via Bluetooth®. That feature allows you to adjust the settings from your phone using your hearing aid companion app, and it also enables you to stream audio directly to your ears.
If your hearing aids aren’t already paired with your phone, place them in their case with the lid open to put them in pairing mode. Next, navigate to the settings menu on your phone and enable Bluetooth. Your hearing aids should pop up in the menu, and you just need to click on them to connect. Next time you have a phone call, change the audio from phone to Bluetooth.
Find a Communication-Friendly Environment
Hearing loss makes you more likely to fuse multiple noises in a busy environment, rather than understand each of them separately. That means that when you’re in a noisy environment, it will be difficult to understand the speech from your phone.
Next time you’re on a call, find a quiet place like your bedroom, private office or even your car if the weather’s nice. You’ll have an easier time understanding the conversation.
Ask for Rephrasing
You may have noticed that some sounds are harder to hear than others. That’s because hearing loss doesn’t affect all sounds equally. Your inner ear has a hearing organ called the cochlea, which has thousands of tiny hair cells that transmit sound to the brain. Some cells transmit high-pitched noises like the coach’s whistle during games at the Las Vegas Indoor Soccer field. Others focus on low-pitched noises. When the cells start to die off, you’ll notice that sounds at specific registers are harder to hear. Because of that, repeating a sentence word-for-word isn’t always helpful. Instead, ask the speaker to rephrase what they said when you don’t understand something.
Schedule a Hearing Appointment
If you don’t have hearing aids yet, or it’s been a while since your last service and repair appointment, contact us at Nevada Ear + Sinus Institute today. We’ll help you find the right devices or check your hearing aid’s programming to make every phone conversation more accessible.
Call Nevada Ear + Sinus Institute at (702) 735-7668 for more information or to schedule an appointment.