What Is Listening Fatigue?

Like your eyes, your mind, and your body, your ears may also experience fatigue. If you’ve ever gone on a long and strenuous hike, you know the feeling of being fatigued afterward. Similarly, you may notice that your eyes feel tired and strained after staring at a computer screen all day, day after day.

Although listening is often thought of as a passive activity, your ears and mind constantly work to take in sounds and process them. Listening fatigue impacts everyone but can be incredibly taxing on individuals with auditory problems.

Before you can take action to combat listening fatigue, you need to understand what it is and its symptoms. Follow along as El Dorado Hearing explains the ins and outs of listening fatigue.

What Is Listening Fatigue?

Watching lengthy presentations or sitting on hours of Zoom calls can leave you feeling tired. After all, you’ve listened much throughout the day — even if you weren’t always giving it your full attention. But if you have hearing loss, your ears are working overtime to try to take in and process the conversations around you. Due to working in overdrive, those with hearing loss are more likely to experience listening fatigue more quickly than those with normal hearing ability.

Even though you aren’t consciously aware of the extra efforts your ears are putting in to process sound, you’ll likely notice auditory exhaustion later on. As a result, many individuals with hearing loss tend to avoid noisy environments where they will have difficulty understanding and participating in conversations. Frequently this social isolation can lead to feeling alone or depressed.

Symptoms of Auditory Fatigue

Many individuals experience the symptoms of auditory fatigue without realizing that is the problem they are dealing with. Instead, they simply think their lethargy results from a lack of sleep or another culprit.

Symptoms of listening fatigue include:

• An increased sensitivity or loss of sensitivity towards sounds
• A noticeable discomfort from certain sounds
• Excessive feelings of tiredness and lethargy
• Brain fog or mild headaches

Listening fatigue impacts everyone differently, so it is important to begin paying attention to what may be causing your overall fatigue.

How to Prevent Listening Fatigue

Are you tired of feeling tired? Follow these tips to help prevent listening fatigue:

• Utilize hearing aids – If you have hearing loss, you need to begin wearing hearing aids regularly. Without hearing aids, you require your ears to work harder than they need to. As a result, they’re going to feel fatigued much faster.
• Take a sound break – Our ears are constantly being stimulated by sounds. From conversations with friends and songs playing on the radio to noisy restaurants and work meetings, our ears rarely get a break from taking in sound. Allow your ears to relax by taking some quiet time to yourself, helping to prevent overstimulation and, thus, fatigue.
• Reduce background noise – Instead of going places where your ears are going to work overtime to decipher speech and process sound, spend your time in places with minimal background noise. Reducing your time in noisy environments will help give your ears a break.

By taking action to prevent listening fatigue, you’ll feel better rested throughout the day — allowing you to put your best self forward.

Do Hearing Aids Help Listening Fatigue?

Because listening fatigue is often a result of your ears being overworked, hearing aids can help individuals experiencing hearing loss minimize the chance of auditory fatigue. Hearing aids enhance the sounds of the world around you, limiting how often your ears need to strain themselves to engage in conversations and decipher various sounds in their environment.

This ensures that your ears don’t need to work as hard, meaning they won’t get tired as quickly as they did without hearing aids.

If you believe your listening fatigue may result from untreated hearing loss, we recommend scheduling an appointment for a hearing evaluation. This will allow a hearing specialist to gauge your hearing loss and provide a recommended treatment plan to restore your hearing and minimize your listening fatigue.

Have Listening Fatigue? Call El Dorado Hearing

Do you feel completely exhausted and run down by the end of the day due to auditory fatigue? If so, the team at El Dorado Hearing can assist. Our hearing specialists are highly experienced and offer an in-depth hearing assessment to evaluate whether you have hearing loss and the extent to which the loss affects you.

We can provide a recommended treatment plan that will help your ears process sounds more efficiently and, as a result, reduce the likelihood of hearing fatigue.

If you are ready to regain control of your hearing, visit us at one of our hearing clinics. For the best hearing aids Tucson has to offer, contact us today to set up an appointment with one of our caring and expert hearing specialists!