Anxiety comes in two varieties. You can have common anxiety, that feeling you get when you’re involved with an emergency situation. And then there’s the type of anxiety that isn’t actually connected to any one worry or situation. Regardless of what’s happening around them or what they’re thinking about, they frequently feel anxiety. It’s just there in the background throughout the day. This kind of anxiety is normally more of a mental health concern than a neurological response.
Regrettably, both types of anxiety are harmful for the human body. Extended periods of chronic anxiety can be especially negative. Your alert status is heightened by all of the chemicals that are produced when anxiety is experienced. It’s a good thing in the short term, but damaging over a long period of time. Specific physical symptoms will start to appear if anxiety can’t be treated and lasts for longer periods of time.
Bodily Symptoms of Anxiety
Symptoms of anxiety typically include:
- Physical weakness
- A pounding heart or difficulty breathing commonly associated with panic attacks
- Feeling agitated or aggravated
- Loss of interest and depression
- Feeling like something horrible is about to occur
- Queasiness
- General aches or soreness in your body
But sometimes, anxiety manifests in surprising ways. Indeed, there are some pretty interesting ways that anxiety might actually wind up affecting things as seemingly obscure as your hearing. As an example, anxiety has been linked to:
- Tinnitus: Did you realize that stress not only exacerbates the ringing in your ears but that it can cause the development of that ringing. This is known as tinnitus (which, itself can have any number of other causes too). For some, this might even reveal itself as a feeling of blockage or clogging of the ears.
- High Blood Pressure: And some of the consequences of anxiety are not at all surprising. Elevated blood pressure is one of those. Known scientifically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have very negative effects on the body. It is, to make use of a colloquialism, bad news. High blood pressure has also been known to cause hearing loss, tinnitus and dizziness.
- Dizziness: Persistent anxiety can occasionally make you feel dizzy, which is an issue that may also be related to the ears. Remember, the sense of balance is controlled by the ears (there are these three tubes inside of your inner ears which are controlling the sense of balance).
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Since this is a hearing website, we typically tend to give attention to, well, hearing. And your how well to hear. So let’s talk a little about how your hearing is impacted by anxiety.
The solitude is the primary issue. When someone has hearing loss, tinnitus or even balance problems, they tend to withdraw from social interactions. Perhaps you’ve experienced this with someone you know. Perhaps your mother or father got tired of asking you what you said, or didn’t want to deal with the embarrassment of not comprehending and so they withdrew from conversations. The same is true for balance problems. It may affect your ability to drive or even walk, which can be humiliating to admit to family and friends.
Social isolation is also connected to depression and anxiety in other ways. When you do not feel yourself, you don’t want to be around others. Unfortunately, this can be somewhat of a loop where one feeds the other. The negative impact of isolation can occur rapidly and will lead to various other issues and can even result in cognitive decline. For somebody who deals with anxiety and hearing loss, battling against that move toward isolation can be even more challenging.
Determining How to Correctly Treat Your Hearing Loss Issues
Getting the correct treatment is significant particularly given how much hearing loss, tinnitus, anxiety and isolation feed each other.
All of the symptoms for these conditions can be helped by obtaining treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. Connecting with others has been shown to help reduce both depression and anxiety. Certainly, dealing with these symptoms can help with the sense of isolation that might make prolonged anxiety more severe. Consult your general practitioner and hearing specialist to look at your options for treatment. Hearing aids could be the best solution as part of your treatment depending on what your hearing test reveals. The right treatment for anxiety might involve therapy or medication. Tinnitus has also been found to be successfully treated by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We recognize that your mental and physical health can be seriously impacted by anxiety.
Isolation and cognitive decline have also been recognized as a repercussion of hearing loss. In conjunction with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a difficult time. Luckily, treatments exist for both conditions, and obtaining that treatment can make a huge, positive difference. The health affects of anxiety don’t need to be permanent. The effect of anxiety on your body does not have to be long lasting. The key is getting treatment as soon as you can.