Julie Raney is a certified and licensed audiologist. She has a B.S. in Communication Sciences and Disorders and a Master’s Degree in Audiology from Idaho State University. She has worked as a clinical audiologist in Colorado since 2005. She specializes in hearing amplification for adults and delivers her services in both English and Sign Language.

Loneliness and Your Health

Connection isn’t just something that we crave. It’s vital to our health and wellbeing. In the same way that we need proper nutrition and rest, we also need social interaction. Our connections with our loved ones give meaning and purpose to our lives. They also create a sense of safety and a feeling of community and belonging.

When we don’t feel connected or we experience prolonged loneliness, the body starts reacting. One of the first responses is an elevated feeling of stress and anxiety. The body produces more cortisol, the stress hormone that prepares us to fight off a threat or flee from danger. Ongoing feelings of loneliness are extremely harmful to your health. With more cortisol and adrenaline in the body, we start to notice some negative effects. This can include:

Elevated heart rate
Higher blood pressure
Increased risk of heart disease or a stroke
Increased risk of diabetes
Lower immune system response

What Causes Loneliness?

There are a number of factors that may increase your risk of feeling lonely. For example:

Living alone
Living far away from family and friends
Living in a rural area
Experiencing the loss of a loved one
Being a woman
Being an older adult
Having several health conditions
Dealing with a chronic illness
Hearing loss

These are some of the main factors that can lead to loneliness.

How is Loneliness Connected to Hearing Health?

Hearing loss is actually a major risk factor for experiencing loneliness. If you’re living with untreated hearing loss, you’ve experienced firsthand how hard it is to communicate. You may have to ask people to repeat themselves, and you still don’t understand what was said. You may feel frustrated and cut off from your loved ones.

Maintaining close relationships is more challenging when you have hearing loss. You lose the ability to banter back and forth, tell jokes, or call to each other from another room. Untreated hearing loss can make you feel isolated and alone.

Hearing loss can also make you more likely to stay home and stop socializing altogether. After all, it can be frustrating for everyone when you can’t hear, and you feel bad asking people to repeat themselves. You’ve also felt embarrassed when you misheard what someone said and you answered inappropriately. Finally, social events just aren’t as fun as they used to be. You can’t keep up with all the conversations, or even figure out who’s speaking. Older adults with hearing loss often choose to stay home and sink deeper into loneliness.

Treating Hearing Loss to Lessen Loneliness

The good news is that hearing loss is treatable! If the cause of your loneliness is hearing loss, a quality pair of hearing aids can help you be more social and help you reconnect with the people you love the most.

Industry-leading hearing technology makes it easier than ever to hear with hearing aids. Modern hearing devices deliver crisp, clear sounds. They also have advanced features that make it easy to focus on conversations, hear speech sounds, and ignore background noise that gets in the way.

Inconspicuous devices sit in your ear, in the ear canal, or fit snugly behind the ear. Some hearing aids can even connect directly to your phone, so you can stream audio to your hearing aids, hear sounds clearly, and even control your hearing aids using a smartphone app.

Addressing Your Hearing Health

Hearing health matters. Regardless of your age, you should enjoy being social and spending time with family and friends. Hearing loss can lead to loneliness and a host of other health concerns, but treating hearing loss is easy. Contact us today to schedule an appointment for a hearing test!