Going out for a hot meal at your favorite Dakota Dunes restaurant is a perfect way to spend your Friday night, or a nice way to get over the mid-week slump. But if you have hearing loss, you may discover that keeping up with the conversation is harder at a restaurant than it is at home or in the office.
Why Restaurants Can Be Challenging Listening Environments
When you’re in a busy environment, you rely on a skill called the “cocktail party effect,” so named because you employ it to understand the speech of one person in a busy crowd. A 2021 study[1] found that people with hearing loss are more likely to fuse sounds together when there is competing background noise, making the cocktail effect more difficult to employ. The louder the background, the greater the difficulty.
Restaurants are packed with sounds. Plates and silverware clatter, people talk at nearby tables, servers move around the room and music may be playing in the background. All of those sounds compete with the conversation you’re trying to follow.
At home, you don’t encounter nearly as much background noise. Even your workplace may be relatively quiet compared with a busy restaurant. That difference can make hearing difficulties much more obvious when you’re dining out.
As hearing loss progresses and background noise increases, words don’t need to sound quite as similar for them to be indecipherable.
What To Do if a Restaurant Conversation is Out of Reach
It’s easy to blame the restaurant when you find yourself struggling to follow conversations. After all, some restaurants really are pretty loud. But if you consistently have trouble understanding people in noisy environments, it may be worth considering whether hearing loss is contributing to the problem.
Our specialists at Ear, Nose & Throat Consultants can conduct a hearing test and, if necessary, get you started on the right treatment path to improve your restaurant experience for easier dining.
[1] Glyde, H., Cameron, S., Dillon, H., Hickson, L., Seeto, M., & Goldsworthy, R. (2021). The effects of hearing impairment and aging on spatial release from masking. Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 22, 493–507. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10162-021-00790-7