Martin Callaghan is already teasing me about my pace before we've gone a quarter mile up the trail at Blue Hills Reservation, some crack about a gym teacher having to slow down for a school principal, and I laugh a half-second late, because the wind ate half of what he said. That's when I stop walking. Not because of Martin. Because I realize I haven't heard a single bird in the trees above us, and somewhere in that silence is where this whole hearing loss journey actually starts to make sense to me.
Quick disclosure before we go further — this post contains affiliate links, and if you buy something through one of them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only talk about supplements I've actually tried myself, alongside my own hearing aids, and I'm not a doctor, an audiologist, or any kind of health professional — just a retired principal who got tired of guessing what people were saying to me. You can find my full disclosure here.
Thirty years of cafeterias and gymnasiums did something to my ears long before any professional put a name to it. I called it "battle-hardened." Everyone around me probably had another word for it.
The Myth That Kept Me From Getting Help Sooner
Here's the myth almost everyone my age believes about age-related hearing support: that it announces itself, that there's a single clear morning when the world gets quiet enough that you finally know, without a doubt, it's time to do something. I believed that myth for years. It kept me nodding along in noisy hallways and cafeterias long after I should have asked for help.
The truth is close to the opposite. Hearing fades in such a straight, gradual line that your brain quietly fills in the gaps long before you'd ever notice one existed. That's not just a guess on my part — about one in three adults between the ages of 65 and 74 has measurable hearing loss, and among adults 75 and older, close to one in two is affected. Most of those people never got a dramatic before-and-after moment. They got years of exhaustion instead, the kind my audiologist later called listening fatigue, and for a long time I mistook it for just being tired from a long career.
What Are the Real Warning Signs?
Look, forget waiting for the dramatic moment. Watch for the small compensating habits instead — asking "what?" more than once in a normal conversation, turning the television up past where anyone else in the room is comfortable, letting the phone ring through to voicemail because a call feels like more effort than it should, or having a seat you always request at a restaurant without quite admitting why. Those are the tells. None of them feel like hearing loss while they're happening. They just feel like personality.
My granddaughter called to me from the hallway one afternoon, and I answered her — clearly, confidently — without ever lifting my head from what I was doing. She told me later I'd answered a question she hadn't actually asked. That's the kind of moment that should worry you more than any hearing test. Not because it's dramatic. Because it's so easy to miss entirely.
Turning Up the Volume Wasn't the Fix
For a long stretch, my solution to all of this was the volume dial. I kept turning the television up, a notch at a time, telling myself the actors were mumbling more than they used to. My wife noticed long before I admitted anything, and she eventually started hiding the remote just to make a point. Cranking the volume higher didn't make speech any clearer — it just made everything louder and more distorted at once, and it took her hiding a television remote before I really understood what she'd been trying to tell me, something I ended up writing about afterward in My Wife Noticed Before I Did — How Hearing Loss Sneaks Up on You After 50.
The Adjustment Period Nearly Won
Getting my first pair of hearing aids was its own kind of overwhelming. I walked out of the office and nearly jumped when a car passed — I could hear gravel under the tires, the click of a turn signal, sounds I hadn't noticed in years. It was too much information all at once, and before long I'd taken them out and left them in the case more often than not. I told myself I'd get back to it. Mostly, I didn't, for longer than I want to admit.
My neighbor Glenda is the one who talked me out of quitting for good. She wears hearing aids herself, and one evening over the fence she just said, flat out, how much she hated the adjustment period, the way everything sounded sharp and strange and a little too bright at first. Hearing her say it out loud, without any embarrassment, was oddly one of the most relieving conversations I'd had in a long time. If she could push through it, so could I.
The Restaurant Seat I Never Skip Anymore
Restaurants used to humble me more than anything else. I let hostesses seat us wherever there was an open table, which usually meant somewhere near the kitchen doors or right under a speaker, and I'd spend the whole meal piecing together conversation from context clues and lucky guesses. Learning to actually hear better in a noisy restaurant is a bigger topic than just picking a seat, but the seat is where it starts — these days I ask for a corner booth, away from the bar and the kitchen, every single time, and it's made more difference than any gadget I own. The Restaurant Roar: Why I Stopped Nodding Along and How I Reclaimed My Seat at the Table goes into the rest of what I learned the hard way.
Three Years In: My Honest Audifort Review
Three years into hearing aids and trying to support what's left of my hearing, I've landed on a short list of things that actually earned a place in my routine. Audifort is one of them — I noticed it because the ingredient list is aimed at general ear health support, and unlike a couple of things I tried early on, it didn't upset my stomach or leave me wondering what I'd just swallowed. Deciding to try supplements at all, despite plenty of skepticism from professionals in my life, was its own decision I didn't take lightly. I can't tell you it's fixed anything. What I can tell you is that the good days in my notebook have been showing up more often since I started.
Some mornings the forced-air heat in my study kicks on with a soft hiss that sounds so much like someone starting a sentence that I still glance toward the door, half expecting my wife standing there. The window behind the desk stays cracked to the backyard whenever the weather cooperates, which probably says something about how much I've come to trust my own ears again, at least in a quiet room.
That notebook habit hasn't been perfect, by the way. I let it lapse for a stretch at one point, told myself I'd remember how I'd been feeling without writing it down, and then honestly couldn't tell if a good stretch was Audifort working or just good luck. Lesson learned — if you're going to track something, track it consistently, or don't bother pretending your memory is reliable. I've also tried things that did nothing at all, a grocery store vitamin that mostly just changed the color of things I won't describe here, and a budget option called ZenCortex that never quite hit the mark for me. Whatever presbycusis is doing to my ears — my audiologist's fancier term for old-man hearing — no bottle has undone it, and I don't expect one to.
For anyone curious, I wrote up a longer version of all that note-taking in The TV Volume Test: How I Tracked 120 Days of Audifort to See Results (2026 Update), if you want the fuller log. On nights when a low ringing shows up, usually after too much time in a loud room, I've leaned on Quietum Plus as well, mostly for the settling-down effect at bedtime.
Whether it's actually safe to combine something like that with hearing aids is a fair question on its own, and for me the two have simply coexisted without any trouble. Hearing aids and supplements were never competing solutions in my mind, either — they're different tools for different parts of the same problem, and treating them like rivals is its own kind of myth worth correcting.
So When Should You Stop Waiting?
None of this happens in a room by itself, either. Gyms, cafeterias, and echoing hallways do something different to clarity than a quiet living room does. And the isolation that piles up from constantly missing pieces of conversation is its own weight, heavier some days than the hearing loss itself. You stop raising your hand in a group conversation. You let a joke go past without asking anyone to repeat the punchline. That adds up faster than anyone warns you about.
I think about maintaining my hearing the way I think about maintaining my old car. High mileage, a little rattle that never fully goes away, but it still runs fine as long as I keep up with the maintenance instead of waiting for a full breakdown. Audifort fits into that maintenance routine for me, not as a repair, just as one more thing that helps the whole system run a little smoother.
So here's the correction to the myth, plainly: don't wait for hearing loss to announce itself, because for most people it never will. Watch the small compensating habits instead — the volume creep, the seat you always request, the calls you let ring through — and treat those as your actual warning system. If you notice any of them in yourself, or in someone you love, don't wait around for a louder sign that isn't coming.
Check out Audifort and see if it helps your daily logbook
One more note from your friendly retired principal: this is my life and my notebook, not medical advice. Your ears are your own, so work with a real audiologist or doctor before starting any new supplement routine. We only get the one set of ears — worth taking care of them.