There are plenty of reasons why you might feel excessively tired, but have you considered hearing loss as a potential cause? Hearing loss doesn’t just affect what you can and can’t hear; it can have surprising ripple effects across your health and daily life, and one place where we see that is in the phenomenon known as listener’s fatigue.
Why Does Hearing Loss Make You Tired?
Listener’s fatigue is exactly what it sounds like: exhaustion that is caused by the effort of listening. At first, this may not make sense. After all, hearing and listening don’t seem to require much effort, so why should they tire us out?
If your hearing health is in top shape, then it’s true: listening doesn’t require much effort; sound waves enter the ear, are encoded in the cochlea, get passed to the brain and are finally processed by the auditory processing center. For people without hearing loss, this process happens smoothly and automatically.
However, with hearing loss, the brain needs to work much, much harder. The sound signals that reach the auditory processing center may be incomplete, distorted or missing altogether, obligating your brain to work harder to fill in the gaps. The auditory processing center already has a lot of jobs—it receives sound information, deciphers the sounds’ origins and meanings, filters out background noise and much more. Doing all of that with less sound information and also trying to fill in the gaps is going to overload it and use up your energy.
What Are the Impacts of Listener’s Fatigue?
Fatigue is always hard to work through, so its effects can be felt in many ways:
- Sleepiness
- Difficulty concentrating
- Memory issues
- Irritability and/or poor emotional regulation
- Decreased energy for/interest in hobbies
- Diminished work performance
- Poor physical health
What Can Help with Listener’s Fatigue?
If you’ve been feeling exhausted lately alongside other signs of hearing loss, treating hearing loss can help immensely. Hearing aids are the most common way to treat hearing loss, and they’re especially helpful with listener’s fatigue. Hearing aids can alleviate some of the energy burden on your auditory processing center by:
- Filtering out background noise so your brain doesn’t have to
- Amplifying the sound of speech so your brain won’t have to fill in the gaps
- Helping environmental sounds reach the auditory processing center more smoothly
The first step is diagnosing hearing loss; once you have your diagnosis, you and your hearing healthcare provider can build a treatment plan that addresses hearing loss and, as a result, your listener’s fatigue. Contact The Hearing Solution today to schedule a hearing test.