Anxiety comes in two varieties. You can have common anxiety, that feeling you get when you’re coping with an emergency situation. Some people experience anxiety even when there aren’t any specific situations or concerns to attach it to. Regardless of what’s happening in their lives or what they’re thinking about, they often feel anxiety. It’s just present in the background throughout the day. This second form is usually the kind of anxiety that’s not so much a neuro-typical reaction and more of a mental health concern.
Unfortunately, both forms of anxiety are pretty terrible for the human body. It can be particularly damaging if you feel extended or chronic anxiety. When it feels anxiety, your body secretes all kinds of chemicals that heighten your alert status. For short periods, when you genuinely need them, these chemicals are good but they can be damaging if they are produced over longer time periods. Over time, anxiety that can’t be managed or controlled will begin to manifest in certain physical symptoms.
Bodily Symptoms of Anxiety
Some symptoms of anxiety are:
- Fear about impending crisis
- A pounding heart or shortness of breath often connected to panic attacks
- A feeling of being agitated or aggravated
- Fatigue
- Melancholy and loss of interest in activities or daily life
- Overall pain or discomfort in your body
- Queasiness
But persistent anxiety doesn’t always appear in the ways that you might anticipate. In fact, there are some pretty interesting ways that anxiety might actually end up affecting things as apparently vague as your hearing. For instance, anxiety has been linked to:
- High Blood Pressure: And a few of the consequences of anxiety are not at all surprising. Elevated blood pressure is one of those. Known medically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have extremely adverse effects on the body. It is, to make use of a colloquialism, bad news. High blood pressure has also been known to lead to hearing loss, dizziness and tinnitus.
- Tinnitus: Did you realize that stress not only exacerbates tinnitus but that it can also be responsible for the onset of that ringing. This is known as tinnitus (which can itself be caused by several other factors). For a few, this might even manifest itself as a feeling that the ears are blocked or clogged.
- Dizziness: Prolonged anxiety can occasionally make you feel dizzy, which is an issue that may also be related to the ears. After all, the ears are typically in control of your sense of balance (there are these three tubes inside of your inner ears that are regulating the sense of balance).
Anxiety And Hearing Loss
Because this is a hearing website, we typically tend to give attention to, well, hearing. And how well you hear. So let’s talk a little about how anxiety impacts your hearing.
The isolation is the primary issue. People often pull away from social experiences when they have hearing loss, tinnitus or balance issues. Maybe you’ve experienced this with someone you know. Maybe your mother or father got tired of asking you what you said, or didn’t want to be embarrassed by not understanding and so they stopped talking so much. Issues with balance present similar difficulties. It can be hard to admit to your friends and family that you have a difficult time driving or even walking because you’re experiencing balance troubles.
There are also other reasons why anxiety and depression can result in social isolation. When you do not feel like yourself, you won’t want to be around other people. Sadly, one can wind up feeding the other and can turn into an unhealthy loop. That sense of isolation can develop quickly and it can result in a number of other, closely related problems, such as decline of cognitive function. For somebody who suffers from anxiety and hearing loss, fighting against that move toward isolation can be even more difficult.
Determining How to Correctly Treat Your Hearing Loss Troubles
Getting the proper treatment is significant especially given how much hearing loss, tinnitus, anxiety and isolation feed each other.
All of the symptoms for these conditions can be assisted by obtaining treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. Interacting with others has been shown to help reduce both depression and anxiety. Chronic anxiety is more severe when there is an overwhelming sense of separation and dealing with the symptoms can be helpful with that. So that you can decide what treatments are best for you, talk to your doctor and your hearing specialist. Hearing aids could be the best solution as part of your treatment depending on the results of your hearing exam. And for anxiety, medication and other kinds of therapy might be required. Tinnitus has also been shown to be successfully treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We understand that your mental and physical health can be seriously impacted by anxiety.
We also realize that hearing loss can bring about isolation and mental decline. In conjunction with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a difficult time. Fortunately, a favorable difference can be accomplished by getting the right treatment for both conditions. The health impacts of anxiety don’t need to be permanent. The effect of anxiety on your body doesn’t have to be long lasting. The sooner you find treatment, the better.