In a previous blog post, I explained why I feel that spouses aren't reliable judges of whether our hearing is declining—because spouses often don't speak to or listen to each as carefully as they do with others. It's when you start having trouble understanding friends, coworkers, and casual acquaintances that you should really start worrying about hearing loss.  

Other clues to declining hearing are how loud you need to set the television, radio, music players, computer speakers, and so on. Telephones are a good test, too, because they rely entirely on hearing, and don't offer the visual clues we get from face-to-face communication.

Crowds and noisy places are another special situation. Even when formal hearing testing doesn't show any deficits, many people have trouble understanding speech when there is a lot of background noise. This is an annoying but very common problem, but the cause is probably more of a language-processing issue than actual hearing loss.

Common sense solutions are the best approach to managing this: Try to stand near and maintain eye contact with the person speaking, and focus your attention on that person, while tuning out the background noise as much as possible.

I'll write soon about what to do if you appear to have true hearing loss.