Natural Ways to Improve and Maintain Your Hearing

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Key Takeaways:

  • The best way to maintain hearing and prevent hearing loss is to maintain good overall health.

  • Healthy decisions to maintain hearing and stay well include: regular exercise, not smoking, using hearing protection in loud settings, and seeing your doctor for regular check-ups.

  • Hearing is about more than just the ears - it's aso the brain. Meditation is an example of an activity that can help clear the mind, allowing you to hear more clearly.

  • Monitoring hearing regularly helps keep an eye on your hearing and supports good overall health.

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If you have hearing loss, the most effective way of treating it is with hearing aids. But there are other ways to maintain and improve your hearing naturally. In this article, we will explore several areas: Preventing hearing loss through lifestyle modifications and optimizing your receptive listening or processing skills. Hearing well is about more than just the ear—it’s also about your overall health.

Hearing versus Listening

Hearing is about more than just detecting sound in your environment. In fact, it's also about processing. So if you're feeling stressed, overwhelmed, or have quite a bit of trouble hearing in background noise, there are actions you can take to help to more easily understand speech.

Meditation

Have you experienced when someone was talking to you and you heard the words they said, but couldn't process it? Do you find your mind is racing and feel distracted by work or other thoughts? If you have any "mental noise" interfering with your ability to focus, that can impact your ability to listen and understand. Meditation is beneficial for stress management and to help quiet your mind. When we feel stressed, focusing on conversation or sounds around us can be hard because we are so distracted or preoccupied with other thoughts.

Clearing your mind can improve your focus and ability to receive information. Additionally, people who suffer from tinnitus find that meditation can help to reduce their tinnitus volume, enhancing their ability to hear and receive what others are saying.

Games and Listening Skills     

There are programs designed specifically for people with hearing impairments that aim at helping them improve their listening skills through games and puzzles. For example, clEAR is a science-based approach to improving speech understanding. These exercises target specific areas such as speech recognition skills or speech in noise using games, which are fundamental aspects related directly to how well we understand what's being said around us. The more we practice these skills, the stronger they can become.

Visual Cues     

Many of us use lipreading to reinforce our understanding of conversation visually. Lip reading is another excellent way for people who are hard of hearing or struggle in noisy environments to understand speech better. Nancy Tye-Murray at Washington University in St. Louis is an expert in this area and has shown that combined auditory-visual modalities are helpful for auditory rehabilitation programs to help improve speech understanding.

And, by paying attention not just to what someone says but also to how they say it, we can gain valuable insight into what they mean beyond their words. Here are some tips that can improve communication:

  • Make eye contact

  • Get their attention before speaking

  • Be within 5 to 7 feet

  • Face your conversation partner

  • Reduce any background noise

Optimizing your listening environment can go a long way to improving communication.

Conclusion

While there are natural ways to improve and maintain your hearing health, a hearing test is the best way to know your hearing status. If you have hearing loss, hearing aids will help you hear your best. Combining the tips on this list with properly fit hearing aids and regular hearing tests will keep you on top of your hearing health.

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