In the last month or so I have had several patients comment about how their brain fog or even brain fatigue resolves when they are wearing their hearing aids. This is not an uncommon event. The reason for this is the same reason that we see an increase in dementia with patients that have hearing loss. The brain is working harder to hear, and thus becomes more stressed without hearing assistance.
Brain fog is manifest by lack of mental clarity, memory problems, and issues with concentration in general. Overall stress and lack of sleep can be obvious causes but one of the ways to treat brain fog is to use hearing aids if you have a hearing loss. Even mild hearing loss can stress out the hearing centers of the brain. With this increased mental effort, there is the risk of increased cognitive decline thus possibly resulting in Alzheimer’s disease.
This is why people wearing hearing aids can have much better levels of concentration and memory function, as well as the feeling of less stress, even in environments where there is loud conversation or other noises. Noise can be stressful just by itself . Hearing aids can diminish the bothersome nature of restaurant noise , or other crowded environments . Help with speech clarity in these noisy environments can decrease the brain’s stress overall when trying to converse with other people around you.
So, in addition to getting an appropriate amount of sleep and exercise, think about hearing aids, or at least evaluating your hearing when it comes to understanding causes of brain fog, and poor concentration as we get older. We are happy to help in any way we can here at Southlake Hearing and Tinnitus Center.