Congratulations on your new hearing aids! This is an exciting step in your hearing health journey, and it will benefit your whole quality of life as you reconnect to the world of sound. Now the process of acclimating to your hearing aids begins. As you adjust to wearing them, you may notice some surprising effects. One such effect is extreme tiredness.
The Ear and the Brain: How Hearing Works
You may think that the hearing process happens entirely in your ear, but it technically happens in your brain. Sound waves enter your ear through the outer ear, then travel to the inner ear. The inner ear transforms those sound waves into electric signals, which are then transmitted to your brain to be interpreted as sound.
When you have hearing loss, the brain receives bad or incomplete signals from the ear, either because sound waves didn’t reach the inner ear (which is the case with conductive hearing loss) or because the inner ear could not transmit sound information (which is the case with sensorineural hearing loss).
How Hearing Loss Affects Your Brain
Think of your brain as a muscle. If you have hearing loss, the brain receives less or incomplete sound information, which causes the muscle to grow weak and out of shape. Its ability to process large amounts of sound information deteriorates.
How Wearing Hearing Aids Makes You Tired
Now that you’re wearing hearing aids, your brain is suddenly getting a massive increase in sound information it’s receiving from the ear. This is a great thing! However—to go back to the muscle comparison—this will make your brain “sore,” as if working out for the first time in a long time. When your brain runs low on energy, you’ll feel tired and perhaps experience some brain fog.
Remember: you’re hearing more things now that your hearing aids are in. Sounds you’d stopped noticing you couldn’t hear are coming through again, crystal clear. This can be overstimulating and exhausting. What’s important to remember is that this is a normal part of the adjustment period.
How Long Will Exhaustion Last?
This fatigue you’re experiencing won’t last forever. You may experience fatigue for the first few days or weeks after getting your new hearing aids, but it will go away as your brain adjusts to receiving more sounds. After some time, your brain will become adept again at processing this quantity of sound information, and you’ll notice the fatigue decreasing as that happens. In fact, if you suffered from listener’s fatigue before getting hearing aids, your new hearing aids will help alleviate that once you’ve properly acclimated.
How long it lasts depends on how long you’ve gone with uncorrected or under-corrected hearing loss (i.e., how out of shape your brain was prior to getting your new hearing aids) and how long you wear your hearing aids in the first few days. Challenge yourself every day to wear them an hour longer than you wore them the day before.
If you need to take a break from your hearing aids due to negative side effects, do so. But tell your audiologist or other hearing care professional so they can help solve the problem. At your follow-up fitting appointment, report on how fatigue is affecting you and how long you’ve worn your hearing aids every day; your audiologist may have some adjustments or recommendations for you.