What Did You Say?

A few years ago I was at a steakhouse with a client and his wife. Loud place. Open kitchen, a bar three deep, music just a little too high.

His wife told a story about their daughter, and I laughed. Big laugh. Nodded like I was right there with her.

The story was about their daughter’s surgery.

She looked at me like I’d grown a second head. I wanted to crawl under the table. I hadn’t been rude. I hadn’t been checked out. I just didn’t hear her. I caught the tone and the rhythm and filled in the rest, the way I’d apparently been doing for a while without knowing it.

On the drive home I thought about how many times my wife had said “you’re not listening” that year. I always figured she was wrong. Turns out she was half wrong. I was listening. I just wasn’t hearing.

Two weeks later I sat in a little booth with headphones on and pressed a button every time I heard a beep. The audiologist turned the screen around and showed me a dip in my results right around one particular frequency. She said she sees that shape every day.

“Shoot a lot without ear protection?”

Yep.

“Mow your own lawn? Run power tools?”

Yep and yep.

“Go to a lot of concerts in your twenties?”

Guilty.

That dip has a name. Audiologists call it a noise notch, and it’s the fingerprint of a lifetime of loud stuff. Most men reading this have one forming right now and have no idea.

Hearing loss sounds like a small problem. A little “what?” here and there. Turn the TV up a notch. No big deal.

It’s a bigger deal than that.

In 2024, the Lancet Commission on dementia looked at 14 risk factors you can actually do something about, and concluded that dealing with them could prevent or delay nearly half of dementia cases. Hearing loss was on the list, and it was tied with high cholesterol as the biggest one, linked to about 7 percent of cases. In the studies they reviewed, each 10 decibel drop in hearing raised dementia risk by somewhere between 4 and 24 percent.

Then there’s the ACHIEVE trial, the largest randomized study ever done on this. They took 977 adults between 70 and 84 with untreated hearing loss and gave half of them hearing aids and audiologist support. I’ll be straight with you about what it found. Across the whole group, there was no significant difference after three years. But in the group that was already at higher risk for cognitive decline, the hearing intervention slowed decline by 48 percent.

That’s not a miracle cure. It’s a strong signal that your ears and your brain are connected, and that doing nothing isn’t free.

The research isn’t settled on exactly why. One theory is that when your brain has to strain to make out every word, it pulls resources from memory and thinking. Another is simpler. Guys who can’t hear stop showing up. They skip the dinner, sit quietly at the party, stop calling friends because the phone is hard. Isolation is its own risk factor.

And there’s this, from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders: about 8 percent of adults 20 to 69 have depression. Among adults with moderate or worse hearing loss, it’s about 18 percent.

You don’t need a study to understand that one. When you can’t follow the conversation, you start pulling back. Pull back long enough and you’re a stranger at your own table.

From that same NIDCD data:

Sixteen percent. That means for every six guys who need help hearing, five are just white knuckling it. Smiling and nodding. Laughing at surgery stories.

I get it. Hearing aids feel like a getting old thing. Nobody wants to be that guy.

But nobody thinks you’re weak for wearing reading glasses. Nobody thinks your truck is old because you put new tires on it. You maintain the stuff you depend on. Your hearing is how you close deals, hear your kids, and catch the thing your wife said once and won’t say again.

Here’s the part most guys never learned.

The CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health sets the recommended limit at 85 decibels averaged over an eight hour day. Above that, you’re slowly doing damage.

And the scale isn’t linear. For every 3 decibels louder, NIOSH says you should cut your exposure time in half.

What’s 85 to 90 decibels? A lawn mower. A vacuum. Power tools. What’s 95 and up? Chainsaws. Bulldozers. A siren going by.

Here’s the field test. If you have to raise your voice to be heard by somebody about three feet away, you’re probably at 85 or higher. If you have to shout, you’re in the 95 range. That’s your signal to put something in your ears.

So that Saturday you spent edging, mowing, and blowing leaves for three hours without plugs? That counts. So does the concert. So does the drive with the windows down and the stereo cranked. It all goes on the same tab, and the tab never gets erased.

November means a lot of you are heading to a deer stand or a duck blind. Let’s talk about guns, because this is where men do the most damage in the fewest seconds.

NIOSH treats 140 decibels peak as the line for impulse noise. Most rifles, shotguns, and pistols land somewhere between 150 and 165 decibels, and big calibers can go well past that. A single shot can permanently damage your hearing. Not a season of shots. One.

Here’s what the science says to do:

A suppressor helps too, but it doesn’t make a rifle quiet. You still need protection.

You can’t fix what you haven’t measured. And most guys haven’t had a real hearing test since a school nurse made them raise their hand in third grade.

You’ve got two options.

The fast one. If you have AirPods Pro 2 or newer and an iPhone, there’s a built in hearing test. It takes about five minutes, it was validated against the clinical gold standard, and the FDA authorized it in 2024. Go somewhere quiet, sit down, and do it today. It’ll give you a number for each ear and tell you if you’ve got loss.

The real one. Book an appointment with an audiologist and get a full audiogram. Ask for a copy of the results, because that’s your baseline. If you’re over 40, this should be on the same list as your bloodwork and your colonoscopy.

Either way, you want a number. Then you test again in a year or two and see if it’s moving.

First, don’t panic. Second, don’t wait years like most people do.

Since October 2022, adults 18 and older with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss can buy hearing aids over the counter without a prescription or exam. They cost a fraction of what prescription aids used to, and some earbuds now have a hearing aid mode built in.

But see a professional, not a store shelf, if any of this sounds like you:

And sometimes it’s just earwax. Seriously. Rule that out before you spend a dime.

I’m not a doctor, and nothing here replaces one. This is the stuff I wish somebody had told me at 35.

Here’s the kit. Most of it costs less than lunch.

Foam earplugs everywhere. A box in the truck. A box in the garage. A box in the range bag. A pair in your travel kit. When they’re within arm’s reach, you’ll use them.

Learn to put them in right. Most guys just jam them in halfway, which does almost nothing. Roll the foam into a thin tube. Reach over your head with the other hand and pull the top of your ear up and back to straighten the canal. Slide the plug in deep and hold it there for 20 or 30 seconds while it expands. Done right, it should feel like you’re underwater.

Turn down the earbuds. If you’re listening at max volume in the gym or on a plane, you’re doing damage. Use noise cancelling so you don’t have to crank it to drown out the room. A lot of guys go by a simple rule: keep it around 60 percent volume, and take a break every hour or so.

Use the loud sound features. Most newer earbuds have settings that cut sudden loud noise. Turn them on.

Thanksgiving is three weeks out. Christmas comes right behind it. You’re about to spend a lot of time in loud rooms full of people you love.

Small moves make a big difference:

Because here’s what really happens when you can’t hear. People don’t tell you. They just start leaving you out of things. Your wife stops telling you the small stuff because it’s not worth repeating three times. Your kids stop trying. The old guys at the end of the table just get quieter every year.

Don’t become that guy because you were too proud to wear earplugs and get a five minute test.

And if there’s a guy in your life who keeps saying “what?” forward him this one. He’s not ignoring you. He might not know.

Friday we’re going after the most underused sales asset in your business. You already have it. It’s just stuck in your clients’ heads.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus