Often people assume when a person is wearing hearing aids they work in a similar way to glasses: put them on and all is fixed! Well, I can tell you first-hand that this is not the case. Even as someone who has been around the Deaf community and hearing aid users their whole life, I still made assumptions about how they worked. I thought that I would put on my hearing aids and magic would happen. I was hoping that all of my hearing struggles would be taken care of and I could go on with my life.
Well, that didn't happen. I put on my hearing aid for the first time and was immediately overstimulated. After just one hour I needed to take it off for the rest of the day. Each day, I increased my hearing aid wear time by only a couple of hours until I was able to fully utilize it for the entire day. This process took me two weeks to fully adapt to the hearing world without being overstimulated. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence for people who are hard of hearing or deaf. Even after months of daily wear, people sometimes still find their brains needing a break from all the sounds and noises.