Your hearing aids help you connect with others. With the need for social distancing and staying home to stay safe, you may be tempted to give your ears a break and leave your hearing devices in their case while at home. Don’t do it.
Below are the top reasons hearing experts recommend wearing your hearing aids every day, even if you are stuck at home.
Brain Activation
Keeping your brain active is key to long-term cognitive health. Dr. Frank Lin conducted a study that tracked 639 adults over a 12-year period. They found that those with mild hearing loss doubled their risk of developing dementia, moderate hearing loss tripled the risk and those with severe hearing loss were five times more likely to develop dementia than those with normal hearing.
Even if you don’t need your hearing aids to help you interact with others and participate in direct person-to-person communication, access to incidental sounds helps keep your brain active and processing sounds. A study by Dr. Douglas Beck looked at the importance of incidental sounds to early learning in pediatric populations. The researchers found that giving children access to as many sounds as possible was critical for early development.
Emergency Alerts
Being able to hear alarms and sirens is important to your safety, especially when at home. If you are not wearing your hearing aids, you could miss the warming from your smoke detector or the sound of a police car pulling up to your home.
Connectivity
In addition to helping you connect with family and friends, Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids can connect to a number of devices, including smartphones, tablets and televisions.
Streaming sound directly to your hearing aids helps eliminate distracting background noise that can make sounds, specifically speech, harder to understand. This also ensures you do not have to turn your devices up to a dangerously loud volume in order to hear.
This is a challenging time for everyone. While you are spending more time at home, make sure you are taking the necessary precautions to keep you and your hearing safe. To learn more or to schedule an appointment, contact the experts at Evergreen Speech & Hearing today.