If you suspect you have hearing loss, or if your hearing loss is already confirmed and you want to take proactive steps to prevent further loss, check out these five exercises you can do to help facilitate your hearing capabilities.
Stretch your body
Stretching and deep breathing, such as is practiced in yoga, can actually help improve hearing. How?
You’ve probably heard that yoga has an array of great health benefits. Yoga can help improve hearing because the stretching, deep breathing, and light exertion increases blood flow to all areas of your body, including the capillaries in your ears which depend on blood circulation to function.
Increased blood flow also facilitates the removal of toxins and waste from the body and improves nerve function—all which can positively affect your hearing!
Keep moving
In addition to stretching and deep breathing, it’s important to stay active throughout the day to keep that blood moving and extend the benefits to your ears and other areas of your body.
Some activity every day is ideal—whether it’s a jog or just a walk around the block. Yoga can qualify—and even gardening and housework can get that blood pumping!
If you love to listen to music while you exercise, try to keep ear buds and earphones with loud music to a minimum, as repeated exposure to loud music can also cause hearing loss, and could sabotage the hearing benefits you are getting from the exercise.
Play games and solve puzzles
You may think that your ears are the heavy lifters in hearing and listening comprehension, but it’s actually your brain that does most of the work. Your ears bring the sound in, but your brain is the one that interprets and gives those sounds meaning. So anything you can do to exercise your brain will help your hearing abilities as well.
Just like the body needs exercise to keep the blood flowing and for everything to work properly, the brain needs to be worked out as well.
Puzzles and games such as Sudoku, crossword puzzles and word searches are fun, and they actually exercise your brain and prevent laziness or atrophy that can affect not only your ability to hear, but mental faculties and cognition as well.
Even social games like bingo, poker and hearts can give your brain a workout while having a good time with friends.
Practice and focus on hearing
You can also do specific hearing exercises that can sharpen your hearing abilities and help you distinguish sounds.
One exercise you can try will help your focus and train your hearing in an atmosphere with background noise:
Turn on a radio or TV to a comfortable volume. Then turn on music or another source of competing noise. Then have another person walk around the room reading sentences from a book or magazine. Close your eyes and repeat the sentences back to them, picturing where in the room they are when they are reading them. This exercise can do a lot to improve your focus and concentration in a noisy, distracting environment.
Focus your hearing
Another exercise is one you can try by yourself in almost any setting. Whether you are at a park or in a restaurant or bus, close your eyes and listen. Pick out the sounds you hear around you. Identify the sound and locate where it is coming from. This exercise can help you to decipher sounds and concentrate in noisy environments where there is a lot of distraction.
Hearing evaluations can be done by your physician or audiologist and can detect changes in hearing ability much sooner than you would ever notice it on your own. And the earlier it’s detected, the better: because there are exercises and devices that can help halt the progression of hearing loss so it doesn’t get any worse.
The first step to halting hearing loss and preventing further damage is to recognize your situation. Come in today for a hearing screening and formulate a strategy to train your brain to listen actively and effectively.
Diablo Hearing Services 2301 Camino Ramon, STE 106 San Ramon (925) 394-4646