@jeffrey: Please read what the OP wrote. It does not jibe with your interpretation, IMO.
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The op also said it had a dizzying affect in his mental health. How do we interpret that?
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@jeffrey: IMO, you ought not to be so contrary and willing to defend the indefensible.
The OP used hyperbole and loaded semantics to describe his mental state. It purposely conveyed a sense of urgency (whether warranted or not). He was not obliged to play the Drama Queen, and might have described his predicament in the more innocuous (ie., cookies and diets) terms that you have chosen. He did not do so, and adopted, by his own choice, a more alarmist tone, which was duly and responsibly decoded and responded to by our mutually-supportive online community.
Helpful folks here attempted to steer the OP into venues more conducive to finding appropriate help to alleviate the OPâs stated distress.
They were shat upon in short order, just for trying to help with what, in the final analysis, may be a case of a purposely overstated personal problemâŚ
I urge you to direct your obviously significant energy surplus towards the defense of another, more worthy cause.
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Well it really doesnât matter since we havenât heard from the op. And consider the number of responses this may be a bit overwhelmingand probably does address his original question. Unfortunately
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@hass5744: Youâre correct, but - to clarify - I have chosen to respond to 1.) irresponsible dramatization of a relatively trivial sensory overload phenomenon, and 2.) to the litigious âpiling onâ response directed towards members who were simply responding to the angst initially communicated by the OP.
The OPâs presence is not required to validate my objections to the above.
âirresponsible dramatizationââŚ? âlitigious piling onâ? Oh come on. Those words are themselves a bit of dramatization. âHyperbole and loaded semanticsââŚ? Again, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to quote:
whereâs the hyperbole, the dramatization? The OP writes of a âdizzying effectâ caused by constant jumping between different media and media sitesâclearly, this is meant as a metaphor; the OP isnât actually feeling dizzy. If you were to switch radio stations every two minutes over many hours, going from classical to pop to talk radio to NPR and on and on, you may well call that âdizzyingâ. Thatâs not a matter of mental disease, that would be NORMAL.
ââdoctor, it hurts when I lift my armâ
â"stop lifting your arm!
the OP had decided to stop already with the constant jumping from one internet site to the next! Of course itâs distracting!
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Hi all, I hope you had a nice week. I am quite overwhelmed by the reaction my post has generated but also happy to see that some people seem to think that the I offered hypothesis might be valid.
It has been two weeks since I disconnected my hearing aids from every electronic device. Since then, my media consumption has dropped significantly. I now use my computer speakers to listen into whatever media I want to play and, sometimes, Iâll put on my bluetooth headset. If I am in an environment in which I donât want to make noise or if I canât be bothered to put on my headset, I donât play anything.
During this period, I also have stopped having headaches and feeling mentally drained. During this period, I have not talked to any specialists and thereâs nothing else I am aware has changed in my everyday life.
Importantly, does not mean that the hypothesis is confirmed. A proper study to see the effect of over-listening, to borrow a term that some of you have used, in mental health should be more rigorous by having a more precise treatment, having a control group and using a sample size larger than one.
In my last reply to this thread, I described the erratic behaviour of my hearing aids when it comes to modes. I now wonder whether I can go back to using my hearing aids as bluetooth headsets but not without deactivating the AutoSense feature. My new theory is that the abrupt change in volume can bother me enough to cause me mental drain.
Now, I will address some comments. Some offer their own theories for the issue at hand. Others have misinterpreted me, and I am not without fault. Those who are not medical experts will not know what to make of concepts such as: âbeing mentally offâ or âhaving a dizzying effect in my mental healthâ. This is the reason I have written âhaving headachesâ and âfeeling mentally drainedâ in bold font, so that I can refer back to these notions and ask to be careful when interpreting their meaning. After reading my post, a specialist would have, most likely, made further questions to precisely determine the nature of my ailments. In my defense, I will say that I did not come here asking for help.
That being said, there are other misinterpretations that betray a lack of reading skills. Other comments go further and display a momentary, I hope, absence of critical thinking. I will leave to the reader to decide which is which.
I will also say the drama here is innecesary, I can continue to learn about my mental condition and the effect the bluetooth in my hearing aids can have on me without engaging with it, but I take pleasure in telling people how wrong they are. So, I am happy to partake.
I agree that feeds are trouble. I have managed to purposely stay away from a few of them but sometimes I just fall back in. What does LI refer to?
Yes, it could be attention deficit disorder. It could also be information overconsumption. During the pandemic, when I was online all my waking hours because I couldnât go out, I definitely felt mental fatigue from being in front of screens and being connected all day.
Yes, some of the other comments seem to make it seem as this is an overconsumption of information. I think the issue here is more of a sensorial overload.
This is true. Like I said in the first reply of my thread, there are more effective solutions. However, there are hazards that I would do well to avoid. See the next comment by jeffrey.
This is a great analogy, I wish I had come up with it.
I was actually being disingenuous when offering that perhaps I had not made myself clearâI already knew that I had, since everyone else was able to tell what I meant. Your insistence at using this interpretation, that I am looking to âisolate from the worldâ, is telling.
Everyone is different. Furthermore, consider this. Imagine someone telling you they have headaches after watching television. You tell them you donât and that âyou guess youâre luckyâ. You probably already have an idea what kind of person youâre being, you donât need me to spell it for you.
Interestingly enough, the invention of agriculture has not been good for our health. Technology rarely comes in optimal form. Cars didnât have airbags at first. Before declaring blind faith in technology, it would be good to try and develop more nuanced perspectives.
This is ridiculous. You canât take a single observation and then make a conclusion about the entire male population born after a given year.
Letâs be clear, I came here to share an experiment and to see whether other people thought this was a plausible hypothesis because it, in theory, makes sense to them, or because they have experienced something similar themselves. Read the first paragraph of the post.
If youâre going to be gatekeeping, you should at least be consistent. Why not complain here, here, here, or here? None of these meet your criteria, and I have not looked beyond the first half of the front page.
Here are a few more you posts you need to intervene to make sure they are staying within the boundaries of allowed topics of the forum:
- What is it about analog sound you like best?
- Viagra and sudden hearing loss
- How Do You Clean Your Ears?
- Does Having to Concentrate Just to Understand Ever Keep You from Remembering Conversations?
- Hearing Loss and Mental Health?
It is up to me to decide whether I am being bothered by sensory overload. It might not be up to me how to address it, since I am not an specialist, but youâre no one to me that I am being bothered by something trivial. Regardless, if you think it is trivial, you are most welcome to stay uninvolved.
Funny you chose to characterize jeffreyâs and one elseâs intervention as âpiling onâ, when you have made almost a third of replies to this thread. Whoâs piling on who really?
Regarding what you perceived to be angst, you would do better in life if you focused only in substance. At the very least, you would be following forum guidelines, which, by looking at other of your replies in this thread that I am not quoting because I do not find relevant, seems you have never read.
I am sorry I did not use the cookies and diets terms, perhaps Iâll try apples next.
Once again, I will refer you to the forum guidelines. Itâs interesting that other people have decided to share how hearing loss affected them personally, what decisions they had to face, whether they would succumb to ever worsening loss, and yet, I am the Drama Queen after having described a condition and a procedure.
The community has been supportive, not you. You said my issues are trivial and then called me a Drama Queen.
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My grandmother would have told me, at this juncture: âSay good night, Spud.â
I agree with some of your sentiments @hi1, but not all, but such is lifeâŚ. We are all extremely complicated individuals, especially when hearing loss is thrown into the equationâŚ. Personally, I have suffered various bouts of mental health, perhaps induced in part from SSNHL many years ago, it was certainly a contributing factor, to my depression, which rearâs itâs ugly head every once in a whileâŚ. Severe Anxiety on the other hand, I can pinpoint exactly to Sepsis, for I never actually knew what Anxiety was, until after my first bout of Sepsis, I have now had Sepsis twice⌠I do find your experiment on media/computer overload via Bluetooth somewhat fascinating, I tend to be OTT/OCD, surrounded with technology, simultaneously streaming on my smart TV, iMac hooked up, iPad also going, along with my iPhone, use this to spell check as I am very dyslexicâŚ. If you looked behind my TV and IMac, you would probably say WTF 
wires, splitterâs, TV connector, RJ45âs, Roger ASLâs, SSD portable hard drive, all going in different directions, and me plonked in the middle of this workstation, I have a close similarity of this setup, in my pool room 
yeah, I am slightly obsessive 
Fortunately, I do recognise my obsession, so I will restrict my, âsit down sessionsâ, to certain hours only, although it must be said my iPhone never leaves my side⌠So I am always connected, or wired into the Internet! TBVH, I couldnât envisage living without Bluetooth, I need it to hear, or to function in this hearing world, and without it, I would be very isolatedâŚ. As always, YMMV⌠Cheers Kev 
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Your view is absolutely valid ibawaya, and does very much belong here, I think. Our ears and brains have a two-way traffic in immense detail, as Prof Nina Kraus points out. Assistive devices surely become part of that system. Listener fatigue may well be elevated by a mis-fitted or ill-designed hearing aid.
If that stress impacts upon mental health, and Iâm sure it can, then such points do need bringing out here: there may be audiologists and manufacturers reading these usersâ posts. And even if not, some of what we glean together may reach them second hand.
Fatigue? I recall hazily that some early work in CD recording and broadcasting, which compared traditional clean analogue with sampled and digitised mp2/mp3, uncovered measurable (skin galvanic) stress in listeners. In such âlossyâ audio, detail is removed to reduce bandwidth. The maths says that aural masking prevents us noticing that. But might we suppose the subconscious brain could puzzle about it? And what happens when our hearing is already challenged?
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I must be more patient than your grandmother then.
Snap your fingers together spud. It works for me
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I mentioned my profession not to add credence to what I was saying, but as part of the anecdote I was relating. That is, as a remote counselor, I wondered if I and/or my peers are being affected by too much zoom/videoconferencing time. It was somewhat surprising to me that a good bit of good research in the area shows that technology can cause various problems.
I joined this site because I have a hearing loss, which has been distressing and frustrating to me as it is to most people. I appreciate the many helpful posts I find here.
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You may have hit the proverbial âNail on the Headâ
I demoâd a pair of Phonak Marvels 2 years ago, and Autosense had a very deleterious effect on me.
Yes, the sudden changes in what Phonak perceived was right vs what I wished to perceive were enough to send me back to the Oticon world of Open sound.
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And here I am wearing my hearing aids, gratetful I can hear
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@hass5744: I hit the Like button, rather than saying something innocuous like âGood for you.â (It tidies things up, and is good for our Community Spirit âŚ)
FYI/Have a nice day, and be nice!
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@flashb1024: 
Flash , is that switching something that my old pair of Unitron North Moxi Fit 800 could have done? Because whenever my former audiologist would check my usage, it would come back that I spent most of my time in a noisy environment, which is impossible.
Those aids would change programs on me spontanulously, and annoy me to the point that I put them in my drawer and only wore them when absolutely necessary. These descriptions of Phonaq program switching make me wonder, since Unitron and Phonaq are the same company.
[@tenkan , @Neville , @Um_bongo or anyone else who is able to provide me with insight is, of course, welcome to answer, too!]
Iâm guessing that would be SoundNav? in Unitron speak.
IMHO automatic environmental changes do not always correspond to our individual scenarios, and are at the very least, totally distracting!
Sonovaâs idea of noisy environment, canât possibly be a one size fits all, just as their Auto music program is never reliable.
Absolutely true!
Iâm certain most of us feel the same.