Like all of our senses, hearing is hugely important for our overall well-being.
The whole purpose of the senses is to connect us to our environments so we can live within it safely, relevantly and beneficially.
Our Senses
- keep us from harm
- make us aware of opportunities and resources
- providing us with accurate and timely information for making decisions
- stimulate new goals and help us pursue them
When our senses are reduced or distorted, it means we will get less information from the environment. Less information from the environment means:
- Less certainty…
- increased stress and anxiety
- Less access to opportunities and resources…
- decreased physical, social and mental activity
- Less accurate and timely information…
- less confidence in decision-making
- increased dependence on others
- increased avoidance of new situations
- Less stimulation of new goals…
- less reason to ‘get up in the morning’ and things to look forward to
It’s no wonder, then, that reduced hearing is frequently associated with an increased risk of anxiety, depression and social isolation.
How Hearing Affects Our Emotional and Psychological Wellbeing
Out of all our senses, hearing is especially relevant to our emotional and psychological wellbeing because of the role it plays in spoken language and music. Both these activities are about connecting us to the hearts and minds of other people—whether it’s our families, friends, colleagues, professionals and even strangers we meet for the first time.
When this connection to others through language and music is compromised, we increasingly feel like we’re an outsider looking in: the universe seems to continue without us. We no longer feel part of it, and it’s as if we no longer count.
To feel connected, we have to remain involved. We have to feel we’re part of that continuous receiving and giving back within our own communities and social circles. If we don’t, we become disconnected.
Emotions tell us when we’re ‘out of kilter’
Our negative emotions exist to tell us when things are ‘out of kilter’:
When we feel sad, it’s because we feel we’re missing something we value.
When we feel anxious, it’s because we’re missing certainty.
When we feel lonely, it’s because we’re missing connectedness.
When we feel scared, it’s because we believe we’re missing resources face a challenge.
When we feel angry or annoyed, it’s because something’s gotten in the way of how we want things to be.
Negative emotions are there to motivate us to action: to act in a way that will move us back to those positive feelings such as ‘happiness’ and ‘peace’. These positive emotions tell us that we’re in balance with ourselves and our universe.
Readying us for action
Negative emotions trigger chemical changes in our body that ready us for action. They channel energy into the parts of our physical body (including the brain) that are most likely to enable us to restore our balance with our universe.
Most of the time, this works very well—just as ‘feeling hungry’ will prompt us to look for food, and once we’ve eaten, our hunger subsides. If we feel lonely, for example, the correct response is to seek out connection with others and those feelings of loneliness subside.
When ‘restoring our balance’ is not achieved
But what if hearing difficulties makes it a struggle for us to connect with others because “they’ve started mumbling” or “complain we’re not listening”? And what if the place we’d normally meet with friends is so noisy we feel we cannot really ‘connect’? What if we find listening so mentally exhausting that it’s easier to stay at home?
Then the loneliness (negative emotion) may continue, and those chemical changes in the body and brain might persist far longer than they’re supposed to.
The longer these ‘short term’ chemical changes persist over the ‘long term’, the greater the risk of physical changes to our cognitive function, immune system, cardiovascular health, and sleep. All such changes make our bodies more vulnerable to unrelated ‘insults’ to our health. For example, if our immune system is reduced, we become more prone to infection.
It’s (not that) complicated
The influence of our emotional and psychological wellbeing on our physical health has long been recognised through phenomena such as psychosomatic disease and the placebo/nocebo effect, even though we don’t fully understand all the mechanisms involved. We also don’t really know how one individual might be affected compared to another. Perhaps we’ll never know; there are simply too many hidden interactions between our physical health and our thoughts, feelings and actions.
But we might summarise it like this:
C – The Choices we make
I – based on the Information we receive
R – through the Relationships we nurture
C – given (the constraints on) our Capacity
L – and the Lessons we’ve learnt
E – from the Events we’ve experienced …through the Choices we make
This is what we call the Audify C.I.R.C.L.E. of Life, with hearing right at its centre.
The information we receive, the relationships we nurture, and the events we experience are ALL profoundly affected by the performance of our hearing capacity. Reduced or distorted hearing acts as a constraint on our capacity, which affects our relationships and the information we receive, which compromises the decisions we make, the events (opportunities) we can experience, and the lessons we can learn.
Conclusion
We’re born with our senses for a reason. For 99% of the world’s population, hearing plays a central role in connecting us to one another through language and music. It therefore stands to reason that our shared goals, our shared reality and our shared experience will depend largely on our shared sense hearing and the ability to hear accurately at a level that others expect.
So if our hearing is reduced or distorted, it will ultimately affect our thoughts and feelings, which in turn will affect our goals, relationships, choices, actions and—ultimately—how our physical bodies interact and respond to the world in which we live.
Perhaps we’ll never know for certain just how great an impact our hearing has on our physical wellbeing. But we do know it affects our thoughts and emotions… and we do know that our thoughts and emotions affect our physical wellbeing.
It’s therefore just common sense for all of us to keep our hearing at its best. That’s why those who know, audify.
