Silence really is golden

I got fitted with a new pair of hearing aids the other day (more on these soon) and one thing that really struck me almost straight away was how much quieter silence is with them on.

Seems like a weird thing to say. Silence is silence, right? It’s no noise. That’s what I thought but the difference in my perception of a silent room while wearing my old Starkey Destinys and wearing these new aids is amazing.

What I used to think was a silent room was actually being filled with tiny buzzes and sounds from things like computer fans, people tapping, shuffling etc. It’s difficult to explain but now that I’m wearing new aids I can really appreciate just how much ambient noise I was hearing that I didn’t need to. That’s not to say that I’m hearing less with my new aids, I’m just hearing a lot more of the sounds I want to hear and much less of the ones that I don’t.

With my new aids environments seems calmer. There’s less of a rush of competing sounds. Less of a cacophony. Which is fantastic because when someone is talking or there’s another sound that I actually want to hear then there’s less sounds competing for my attention.

When I used to think about noise reduction features in hearing aids I always thought about them reducing, for example, music at a party so that you could hear speech, or reducing road noise while your driving. In the last week I’ve realised that noise reduction does much more, so much more – all the little noises count too.

Silence really is golden.