10 Ways Good Hearing can Help Keep Seniors Young

Wanna stay young? It all starts with your ears. It’s not too tough keep up with your hearing as you age. If you do, you can experience many youthful benefits. From doing better in school and at work to staving off dementia, let’s see how you can maintain your youth further into your senior years simply by protecting your ears. Just because it comes with the territory as you get older, you don’t have to take hearing loss lying down. Instead, do all you can to act and feel young.

1. Your risk of falling will lower if you protect your ears. Individuals who can’t hear well don’t have as much of a stable awareness of their surroundings, and can trip and fall easier. People with a 25-decibel hearing loss are three times more likely to fall than others with no hearing impairments, says Johns Hopkins Medicine.

2. Hone a sharp mind. Dementia is a very real possibility for older seniors but it doesn’t have to happen to you. The National Institute on Aging has linked hearing loss with dementia, thanks to the brain shrinkage we experience as we get on in years.

3. Have productive interactions in daily life. Hearing loss can unfortunately bar people from getting the information they need to go about their daily lives. It’s tough to effectively communicate with anyone from friends and co-workers to check-out clerks and butchers when you suffer from hearing loss.

4. Become a better student in school. Have you taken the leap to go back to school? That’s great but you won’t learn as well if you constantly have to sit up front and ask the teacher to repeat herself. Maintaining a healthy level of hearing means you can understand the teacher’s instructions more clearly. In addition, you can interact with your classmates and participate in projects much more easily.

5. Hear better at work. Improve your job performance with better hearing. If you can’t hear well, you obviously can’t pick up on important instructions or safety precautions. You certainly can’t readily participate productively in coworker discussions or meetings. The result? An impact on your job performance.

6. Increase blood flow to your ear canals. Exercise is great for the ears. Via aerobic activity, you send oxygen-rich blood flow to the ears which protects them from additional hearing loss.

7. Better mental health. Falls and other events are big problems for seniors. Hearing loss can compound these risks. When you end up in the hospital, you have long periods where you’re relatively inactive as your recuperate. This can easily lead to feelings of depression.

8. Get more friends and have better sex. Sounds too good to be true but it’s not. Studies reveal that hearing impaired seniors who wear hearing aids, along with seniors who have no hearing loss, tend to have an improved social life and sex life. They also experience better mental health and independence

9. Boost your self confidence in everyday situations. Those who have trouble hearing fear they won’t be able to engage in a healthy back and forth discussion, so they tend to stay away from social situations. Take back your self confidence and self-esteem.

10. Have a quicker reaction time in your environment. When you have a healthy hearing level, you can better react to fire alarms and sirens so you can get out of the way and not get hurt.