
2. Needing to Up the Volume
Realizing that you’re regularly mishearing conversations isn’t the only sign that you might be experiencing early-onset hearing loss, and you might notice that it feels like the volume has been turned down on life itself – and this generally gets worse as whatever is causing your deafness progresses over time. One way in which you might notice that you’re experiencing gradually declining hearing is that you are constantly needing to turn up the volume on everything around you in order to hear.
This is pretty easy to notice in the era of televisions and smartphones: If you have to increase the volume to the point where the system warns you it might cause damage to your hearing (or people around you start to complain that things are far too loud), it’s likely that the problem isn’t everything else, but might be your declining hearing instead.
Remember that increased volume can also make hearing damage worse over time.