No doubt if you are a new hearing aid user, you are somewhere in-between amazement at what you can now hear (and what you have been missing), whilst also experiencing disbelief at the volume of the new world around you. As most new hearing aid wearers have been living without the full sound spectrum for in most cases many years (if not decades), it comes as no surprise that there is a significant adjustment period after your first pair of hearing aids have been fitted.
Why are environmental sounds so unusually loud?
This is the first question many new hearing aid users have. If you’re heading into the hearing aid clinic for adjustment after adjustment after your first hearing aid fitting, than more than likely you are suffering from ‘non-acclimatised hearing aid usage’ than you are poorly programmed hearing aids. So if you haven’t had your new hearing aids for long, than the first thing to do is to learn about what’s involved in adjusting and acclimatising to hearing aid usage.
How long does it take to acclimatise to hearing aids?
Adjusting to hearing aids can take weeks or even months. The general consensus is that the longer you have waited to address your hearing, the longer it will take to adjust to your hearing aids. This is because usually if someone has waited longer to get a hearing aid, there hearing levels have gotten poorer over time, and they have more significant hearing loss. As a result, it is a bigger adjustment to the volume of the real world, versus someone with a mild hearing loss who only has a small amount of amplification applied to their new hearing aids.
How will I know if I have acclimatised?
The main way you will know that you have fully adjusted to your hearing aids is once you genuinely forget you are wearing them. This usually happens once you find you are not bothered by the volume of the world around you, and instead you only notice how ‘dull’ everything is when you forget to put them in.
If you have previously read about neural plasticity, this concept and process applies to what happens as your brain acclimatises to hearing better again with your new hearing aids. Neural plasticity is a fascinating and clever process that occurs over time within your brain, and hence the most important factor to fully acclimatise to your hearing aids is that you wear them consistently every day!
