Forty-three. That's how many nods I counted in one ordinary week — not nods of agreement, not a laugh at a joke that landed, just the automatic tilt of the head that closes out a sentence I never actually caught. The number stopped me cold. It's the biggest myth in hearing health: that the nod is the harmless part, the polite cover that spares everyone an awkward repeat. I believed it longer than I'd like to admit.
Here's the thing nobody tells you: the nod isn't neutral. It erases your own evidence. Every time I nodded instead of asking someone to repeat themselves, I threw away a data point about whether my hearing was holding steady or slipping — and I had nothing left to go on but my mood, which is a terrible judge of anything.
Mood is exactly how I ended up spending two weeks squirting a decongestant spray up my nose, dead certain my ears were just clogged from a cold. They weren't. All that bought me was a raw nose and the same muffled clatter from the kitchen whenever my wife loaded the dishwasher — close enough to register as sound, too far to turn into words. Guessing had sent me chasing the wrong problem entirely.
The Myth of the Harmless Nod
Picture the food court at South Shore Plaza in Braintree on a Saturday afternoon — trays clattering, a dozen conversations bouncing off hard tile and glass, somebody's phone playing a video two tables over. My wife asked me something across that table last month, and I nodded twice before admitting I hadn't caught a single word of it. That's an echoing room doing exactly what echoing rooms do to speech, and no hearing aid fixes that completely.
That's where the myth falls apart. Real communication with the people you love isn't built on everything being fine — it's built on both sides trusting that a yes means yes. Nod through enough of those moments and the people around you quietly stop checking whether you actually heard them. That's not politeness. That's isolation, dressed up as manners, and it happens so gradually you don't notice you've been cut out of half your own conversations.
Guessing Feels Like Progress
Guessing feels like progress because your mood fills in the blanks your ears leave empty. A good day at the food court convinces you the whole problem is solved. A bad phone call convinces you it's hopeless. Neither feeling is true, and both of them erase the same amount of real information: none.
My friend Kwok-Wing Lau, a retired science department head who never takes a claim at face value, caught me repeating something I'd read off a supplement label about inner-ear circulation. He asked where the claim actually came from. I didn't have a good answer — just a bottle, not anything he'd trust enough to cite to his old department. That conversation sharpened my thinking more than any of the bottles themselves ever did.
The clinical name for what's actually happening, if you want it, is presbycusis — age catching up with the ears the same way it catches up with knees and eyesight. Knowing the word never once helped me catch what my wife said over the clatter of trays. It just gave the guessing a fancier name.
Counting Instead of Nodding: A Lesson in Real Communication
Once I stopped trusting my mood and started counting instead, the picture got honest fast. Phone calls wore me out in a way dinner never did — by the third call of a day I was drained in a way that had nothing to do with the topic. Some nights there's a ringing underneath everything that has nothing to do with how loud the day actually was. None of that showed up when I was just nodding and hoping for the best.
A cardinal landed at the feeder outside the kitchen window one afternoon, and the song came through whole — every rise and drop of it, not just a vague shape of noise that might have been a bird. I wouldn't have trusted that as proof of anything if I hadn't been counting all the other yeses and nos around it. A good moment by itself is just a mood. A good moment next to a stack of honest counts is information.
Beatrix Haverford, a woman I met in an audiology waiting room years ago, told me once that she's worked out every seating trick there is for hearing on the train down to New Haven — which seat, which side, which car. I started doing the same thing at the food court: back to the wall, away from the kitchen pass-through, facing whoever's talking. I wrote more about that particular trick, and why the aids alone don't solve it, in the restaurant test and why aids aren't always enough.
I've tried more than one supplement alongside my hearing aids, compared brands against each other more than I probably needed to, wondered more than once whether supplements add anything real on top of the aids themselves, and kept a rough eye on whether the monthly cost was earning its place — not because I think any of them are a cure (I'm no kind of medical authority, and I don't pretend to be one), but because the aids-plus-supplement combination is its own ongoing experiment, not so different from tracking your own gas mileage before deciding whether a repair actually fixed anything, and guessing isn't how you run an experiment. I wrote about the longer stretch of that tracking in the dinner table silence that changed my retirement.
Explaining any of this to my wife took its own kind of practice — a different conversation than the one about hearing aids themselves, and not one I can compress into a paragraph here. The frustration underneath all of it is real too, and it doesn't fully disappear just because the counting works. Protecting what hearing I've got left matters to me now as much as managing what's already gone.
Count the Catch, Not the Mood
If the number forty-three sounds familiar, you don't need my whole system to start. Pick a handful of conversations that matter — a phone call, a dinner, a stop at a noisy counter somewhere — and ask yourself one honest question afterward: did I actually catch that, or did I just let it go? Count the yeses. Not percentages, not decibels. Just yes or no, every time, for as many days as you can stand it.
I built a fuller version of that counting habit, and if you want the long way I got there, start tracking your own journey walks through it. You don't need my notebook, my pens, or my forty-three nods. You just need one honest answer at a time, which is about as much wellness advice as I've got for one sitting.