Tag Archives: academics

How much listening is too much?

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– Michele

Listening is hard work. At the end of a long day of meetings I’m exhausted. When I share this with my hearing colleagues they’ll say “Oh, I know—me too!” But is it the same? Really? 

Studies have shown that users of hearing aids like me, who rely on speech reading along with amplification, experience listening fatigue as much higher rates than hearing people (e.g., Bess and Hornsby, 2014). We are working much harder than everyone around us to piece things together and make sense from what we are able to hear. Most listening fatigue studies are on school-aged children and the few studies of adults show that “Adults with hearing loss require more time to recover from fatigue after work, and have more work absences.” (Hornsby et al., 2016). As academics, our jobs require us to listen to others all the time—in our classes, in faculty meetings, in seminars, and when meeting with students. How do we recognize cognitive fatigue due to too much listening and mitigate this fatigue so that we can manage our work responsibilities? This is a tremendous challenge for deaf/HoH academics and The Mind Hears will explore this topic in several blog posts. 

In this post I share how I figured out my daily listening limit, which turns out to be 3 hours with good amplification and clear speech reading. For many years, I pushed through my day not paying attention to how much time I was spending in meetings and classes. Some days I felt okay while other days I ended up utterly exhausted. The kind of exhausted where I can’t track conversation and even have trouble putting my own sentences together. When this happens, I can’t converse with my family and exercise class is out of the question because I can’t follow the instructor. I just take my hearing aids out and lie on the floor with the dog— I don’ need to speech read him and he gets me. Yay dogs!  

When I explain to my listening fatigue to non-native English speakers, they get it right away. They recognize that this listening fatigue is just like when they first moved to a country with a new language; while they had good command of the new language, following it all day exhausted them. Exactly! Except I’m not going to get any better at my native language.

After a while—actually a really long while because for many years I tried to work as if I was a hearing person due to internalized ableism, which really is a whole different blog topic—and now this sentence has really gotten off track so I’m going to start over. After a while, I started to realize that for my own health I needed to avoid becoming so exhausted that several times a week, I could only commune with the dog.

undefinedIt turns out that my fancy new Garmin watch that tells me to “MOVE” every hour also detects my stress level. This image at left is from a day at a conference. All I did that day was sit in one room listening to talks with occasional breaks for coffee and meals. My heart rate stayed elevated all day due to the work of following the conversation and the anxiety of constantly deciding whether I should ask for clarification on something I may have missed or just let it go. When even my watch is telling me ‘enough is enough’ or more specifically “You’ve had very few restful moments on this day. Remember to slow down and relax to keep yourself going”, it might be time to figure out how much listening is too much

So last February I tracked both my hours each day spent listening and my evening exhaustion level in my bullet journal. 

Actually, I didn’t track this much detail—I just made marks in my bullet journal for each hour and then noted whether this was manageable. Below are two example pages. For the day on the left, the 3 Xs represent 3 hours of listening and this was an OK day. The image on the right is from another day that month. The horizontal line below the Xs means that I was on the floor with the dog that evening after 5 hours of listening. 

Yes, I know that my handwriting is messy and I tend to kick a lot of tasks to the next day. But this blog post is not about my untidiness and unreliability. What I learned from this exercise was that any day including more than 3 hours of listening would be a tough an unmanageable day. Armed with this knowledge, I could start to try to rearrange my schedule to avoid having days with more than 3 hours of listening. 

Interestingly, this goes against the advice that many academics give each other. Early career researchers are encouraged to push all meetings to one day so that you have a day free for research. This is great advice… for a hearing person. For many deaf/HoH, we may do better with two free mornings a week rather than 1 full day so that no one day is overloaded with listening.

So how successful have I been? Moderately. While I have control over some aspects of my schedule, I don’t over others. I schedule my one-on-one meetings with my research assistants on days that I don’t have a lot of other meetings. If I’m teaching a 3-hour lab, sometimes it’s just impossible for me to have no other teaching or meetings that day. But I am considering restructuring my lab activities so that I don’t need to be ‘on’ the whole time. I’ve also started talking with my department head about my effort to limit my daily meetings; this involves educating him on why listening fatigue is different for me than for hearing faculty. Had I been more savvy, I might have negotiated a listening limit when I was hired. Take note of this, future academics! 

I’m still sorting out how to manage my day and eager to learn more from others on how they successfully manage listening fatigue. As I mentioned at the start of this post, The Mind Hears wants to have a series of posts about listening fatigue. Tell us how has this fatigue affected your work day and your health. What solutions have you found?

References cited

  • Bess, F.H., & Hornsby, B.W. (2014). Commentary: Listening can be exhausting—Fatigue in children and adults with hearing loss. Ear and hearing, 35(6), 592.
  • Hornsby, B.W., Naylor, G., & and Bess, F.H. (2016). A taxonomy of fatigue concepts and their relation to hearing loss. Ear and hearing, 37(Suppl 1), 136S.

Traveling and Conferences: When Bacteria Has a Party

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In my first post for The Mind Hears, I want to tell you a little about my background, then outline some strategies that I’ve found successful for traveling and attending conferences.

I have been a regular at my ENT’s (ear, nose, and throat doctor) office since I was young, getting new tubes, replacement tubes, removing cholesteatomas, and repairing perforated ear drums. On a good day, I have about 50% of normal range of hearing—less if I have sinus or ear infections. Because I had my right ear completely reconstructed, I am unable to use any hearing aids effectively. Due to my upbringing in a impoverished rural town, I didn’t have access to speech therapy or options to learn American Sign Language. My loss of hearing wasn’t pronounced as an official disability, so I moved through most of my life trying to find creative ways to be successful at school or professionally. Now I wish I had spoken up more, but the aforementioned lack of resources and accommodations made it difficult.

Traveling is a necessity for (geo)scientists, from fieldwork, attending conferences, or networking with the scientific community. The quickest mode of transportation is air travel with changing pressure and humidity which apparently has a big impact on my sinus system. I remember attending the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco as an undergraduate in 2006, overwhelmed by the size of the conference and harder of hearing than usual. I thought I happened to catch a cold and tried to communicate my fellow scientists in loud poster sessions. I repeated this trip a few more times in graduate school and sure enough, the bacteria in my sinuses decided to have a party that moved to my ears. We all have flora in systems, mine just like to come unannounced and frequently. Later in graduate school, I traveled to Italy for fieldwork and I found myself with (surprise!) a sinus infection. It was not fun being in a foreign country and being unable to communicate at all in the local language; in addition, the infections made communicating effectively with my own team difficult. Nevertheless, I powered through these situations.

circe quote

Because of my experiences, I’ve found myself being more vocal about my needs; I’ve realized that I’m my best advocate. Here are some strategies that have helped me.

Medical help: I have built a great relationship with my ENT and we’ve developed a system for traveling which helps prevent weeks of sinus congestion and nearly complete deafness. I travel for my job too often to make visits to the ENT feasible prior to every trip; but occasional visits a few times a year help. Please note, this is my personal plan; please consult your physician. I take steroidal prednisone and prescription-strength Sudafed right before a flight—this medication regime means I have a better chance of flying with limited, or even better, no sinus impacts. One downside to the medications, however, is that I’m sensitive to the steroid; I feel amped and often can’t sleep that first night if there are significant time zone changes—west coast to east coast in particular. This is not a minor downside; my reaction can make important meetings stressful. But the benefits far outweigh the cons. Since I’ve become a chronic sinus infection patient, normal antibiotics on existing infections don’t work. Proactively heading off infections is my preference, since if I’m at a conference or meeting, I cannot wait the two weeks for the medications to work. Waiting would mean that I’d miss conferences with breakthrough discoveries and vital conversations. I don’t love that I have to depend on medication and the side effects, but it helps me to be an active participant in conferences rather than a passive observer.

Communication tips:

  • Live-captioning platforms and apps are improving, and more conferences are starting to use them for conferences and poster sessions.
  • Teleconferencing:
    • An example is InnoCaption, an app for both Android and iPhone that can be used for teleconferencing meetings. A federally administered fund pays for it, and you must register, as it enables a live stenographer to generate captions. It requires a 4G network or reliable Wi-Fi.
    • Another approach is using smarter work phones that can use programs such as CapTel to do live captioning. These are phones such as the Cisco (model 8861) that does live captions during video. There are also applications such as Jabber that enable you to transfer captions to a computer screen for smart accessibility.
  • Traveling to foreign countries: Google Translate now has several offline dictionaries! Five years ago if you didn’t have Wi-Fi or data, you didn’t have Google Translate. But I recently used Google Translate successfully for Spanish! Google Translate is simple to use by talking into your smartphone—you can get good translations to or from English.

Conferences:

  • I find it helpful to I sit up front in conference rooms both to hear better and be seen.
  • If I didn’t quite catch the presentation, I ask the speakers for business cards to get a copy of presentations or posters.
  • Depend on the conference moderators: Another technique to anticipate impaired hearing depends on the conference size and style. I’ve asked moderators in advance (via email) to repeat questions from the audience if I’m a speaker. This helps to ensure I understand the question and help with accents. I’ve had mixed results—often there is no moderator to contact directly; it means I have to track down that individual in person before the session, which is a lot of work.
  • Normalize captions: The best way to normalize is to use Google Slides or captioned presentations for everyone all the time!

What tricks and tips do you use for communicating?

circeBIO: Circe Verba, PhD, is a research geologist, science communicator, and STEMinst at a government lab. She earned her doctorate in geology and civil engineering at the University of Oregon. Dr. Verba specializes in using advanced microscopy (petrography and electron microscopy) and microanalysis techniques to tackle challenges facing the safe and efficient use of fossil energy resources. Outside of the lab, Dr. Verba is an avid LEGO buff, even designing her own set featuring field geology and a petrographic laboratory.