Reality TV star Holly Hagan discusses her 'awkward' long-term health battle as she seeks to break stigma

Earlier this year, the Geordie Shore star was diagnosed with profound hearing loss, after going for a hearing test when she realised she found it increasingly difficult to hear conversations in noisy settings. She has since started wearing a hearing aid to help her to be able to hear better - and now she wants to break the stigma around them.

“When you’re in an environment and having to ask people to repeat themselves like once, twice, three times – it’s just so awkward. Some people need glasses and there isn’t a stigma around glasses, so there shouldn’t be around hearing loss,” she said.

It was three months ago that Hagan, aged 32, first went for a hearing test at Boots and discovered that she did have “quite severe to profound hearing loss specifically for high frequency,” according to an interview she gave to OK! magazine. The TV personality, who is now a mum-of-one, explained: “That means the clarity of people’s words is what I was missing out on.”

She said she booked the test because she was avoiding certain social situations where she knew that I was going to have to just work extremely hard to constantly have to try to decipher what people are saying before they’re going to say it.

She also admitted that she thinks her health issue may have began almost two decades ago. When asked if she thought going to all those nightclubs on Geordie Shore had affected her hearing, she said: “Yeah, I mean I’ve been in the nightclubs since I was 14 and our meeting point was always by the speaker, so I can’t really put the blame on Geordie Shore only! Aside from Geordie Shore, we were also doing club appearances – more nightclubs. It was just an accumulation of all of those different things.”

Hagan, who first appeared on reality show Geordie Shore back in 2011, shares 15-month-old son Alpha Jax with her professional footballer husband Jacob Blyth, whom she married in 2022.