Congratulations on your new hearing aids! You’re on your way to clearer hearing and confident communication. As you begin adjusting to wearing them throughout your daily life, it’s common to feel tired at the end of the day. What you’re experiencing is auditory fatigue, and it’s due to your ears and your brain both working harder than before.
Why New Hearing Aids Make You Feel Tired
If you’ve been living with untreated hearing loss for a while, your ears and brain have taken in less sound information and become accustomed to that workload. Now that you’re wearing hearing aids, you’re hearing sounds that you haven’t heard for a long time, sounds that your brain is no longer familiar with.
In order to process all this new sound information, your brain needs to use more energy, and that’s what causes you to experience auditory fatigue. This could manifest as extreme tiredness, sounds seeming louder, background noise being overwhelming and irritability with the sound of your own voice, breathing or footsteps. This is all normal.
The good news is that this won’t last forever. It can take a few weeks to fully adjust, but as your brain relearns how to process sound and filter out background noise, it will get back into shape and need less energy. Your auditory fatigue will diminish and then go away.
Tips to Minimize Tiredness While Adjusting to Your New Hearing Aids
- Start slow. Only wear them for a few hours on the first day, then gradually build up how long you wear them every day.
- Start at home. Wearing your hearing aids in noisy environments immediately is a recipe for overstimulation and auditory fatigue. Start at home, in a controlled and calm environment.
- Play hearing games with yourself. Make it fun! Challenge yourself to hear as many individual soft noises as you can and find out exactly where they’re coming from—the humming of the refrigerator, for example. Get used to the sound of your own voice by narrating your actions out loud, singing songs or making funny voices.
- Be smart when you go out in public. If you go to a noisy environment, such as a restaurant, use your noise program and turn the volume down one or two levels.
Be patient with yourself, and don’t let exhaustion prevent you from enjoying the benefits of your new hearing aids. At your follow-up appointment (which usually happens two to four weeks after you get your hearing aids), you can discuss auditory fatigue with your audiologist and get advice on the adjustment period. Our team is here to support you throughout the adjustment process and the rest of your hearing journey.