Approximately 15% of U.S. adults have hearing loss. Adjusting to life with hearing loss is tricky. Even after you get your first pair of hearing aids, your brain might need help making sense of speech. Not because the sound isn’t getting there, but because they’re so unused to processing language.
Similar to how your legs might have difficulty finishing a 5k run along Shoreline Park after months of rest, difficulty understanding speech is a common experience for new hearing aid users.
Let’s take a look at three helpful ways you can retrain your brain to get the most benefit from your devices.
1. Start With Calm Listening
Your brain needs time to adapt to sounds you may not have heard in years, like the hum of your refrigerator or birds outside. Begin by wearing your hearing aids in quiet environments at home. Read aloud to yourself or listen to audiobooks while following the text.
2. Gradually Increase Complexity
Once you feel comfortable in quiet settings, introduce more challenging environments. Start by watching TV with subtitles. Then try small group conversations, background music or outings to mildly busy places. This progressive exposure helps train your brain to focus on and understand speech amidst noise.
3. Consider Auditory Training
Auditory training helps people with hearing loss or auditory processing disorder (where the brain receives but cannot process sound) understand speech. A few types of auditory training exercises include:
- Phoneme discrimination. Phoneme discrimination involves learning to tell the difference between similar speech sounds like “b” and “p.”
- Speech-in-noise. Speech-in-noise training improves your ability to understand speech in challenging environments, like crowded restaurants or busy streets, by helping your brain filter out background noise.
- Auditory memory exercises. Auditory memory exercises involve repeating back words, sentences or short lists after hearing them, strengthening the brain’s ability to retain and process spoken information.
- Auditory comprehension training. Auditory comprehension training involves listening to spoken passages, like short stories or conversations, and answering questions to test and improve understanding.
Talk to Your Hearing Specialist
If you just got your first pair of hearing aids but still struggle to understand those around you, contact ENT Associates of Santa Barbara today. We can help define a structured plan to get your brain back into speech-understanding mode.