There are two types of anxiety. When you are involved with a crisis, that feeling that you get is known as common anxiety. And then you can have the type of anxiety that isn’t really connected to any one event or concern. Regardless of what’s going on around them or what they’re thinking about, they regularly feel anxiety. It’s more of a generalized sensation that seems to be there all day. This kind of anxiety is normally more of a mental health concern than a neurological response.
Unfortunately, both kinds of anxiety are pretty terrible for the human body. Long periods of persistent anxiety can be especially negative. Your alert status is heightened by all of the chemicals that are secreted when anxiety is experienced. It’s good in the short term, but damaging over a long period of time. Over time, anxiety that cannot be managed or brought under control will begin to manifest in certain physical symptoms.
Anxiety Has Distinct Bodily Symptoms
Some symptoms of anxiety are:
- Feeling as if you are coming out of your skin
- Bodily discomfort
- A thumping heart or shortness of breath commonly associated with panic attacks
- Queasiness
- A feeling that something terrible is about to occur
- Physical weakness
- Loss of interest and depression
But chronic anxiety doesn’t necessarily appear in the ways that you would anticipate. In fact, there are some pretty interesting ways that anxiety could actually end up impacting things as seemingly vague as your hearing. As an example, anxiety has been connected with:
- High Blood Pressure: And then there are some ways that anxiety affects your body in precisely the way you’d expect it to. Elevated blood pressure is one of those. Known scientifically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have extremely adverse effects on the body. It’s definitely not good. High blood pressure has also been recognized to cause hearing loss, tinnitus and dizziness.
- Dizziness: Persistent anxiety can occasionally cause dizziness, which is a condition that could also be related to the ears. After all, the ears are typically responsible for your sense of balance (there are these three tubes in your inner ears that are regulating the sense of balance).
- Tinnitus: Are you aware 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 can itself be caused by a lot of other factors). In certain circumstances, the ears can feel blocked or clogged (it’s staggering what anxiety can do).
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Generally on a hearing blog like this we would normally concentrate on, well, hearing. And how well you hear. So let’s talk a bit about how anxiety impacts your hearing.
To start with, there’s the isolation. When a person suffers from tinnitus, hearing loss or even balance issues, they often distance themselves from social contact. Perhaps you’ve seen this with someone you know. Maybe a relative just withdrew from conversations because they were embarrassed that they have to constantly repeat themselves. The same is true for balance problems. It can be difficult to admit to your friends and family that you have a difficult time driving or even walking because you have balance troubles.
Social isolation is also connected to depression and anxiety in other ways. When you don’t feel yourself, you don’t want to be with others. Sadly, one can end up feeding the other and can become an unhealthy loop. The negative impact of isolation can occur rapidly and will lead to several other problems and can even result in mental decline. For someone who deals with anxiety and hearing loss, battling against that shift toward isolation can be even more difficult.
Figuring Out How to Effectively Treat Your Hearing Loss Troubles
Hearing Loss, Tinnitus, anxiety and isolation can all feed on each other. That’s why finding the correct treatment is so key.
All of the symptoms for these disorders can be assisted by obtaining treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. Interacting with other people has been demonstrated to help relieve both depression and anxiety. Certainly, dealing with these symptoms can help with the sense of isolation that could make chronic anxiety more extreme. So that you can determine what treatments will be most effective for your situation, check with your doctor and your hearing specialist. Hearing aids could be the best choice as part of your treatment depending on the results of your hearing exam. The best treatment for anxiety might involve medication or therapy. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been proven to help deal with tinnitus.
Here’s to Your Health
We know, then, that anxiety can have very real, very severe repercussions for your physical health in addition to your mental health.
We also know that hearing loss can lead to isolation and cognitive decline. In conjunction with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a difficult time. Luckily, treatments exist for both conditions, and getting that treatment can make a huge, positive difference. Anxiety doesn’t have to have permanent effects on your body and the impact of anxiety on your body can be reversed. The key is finding treatment as soon as you can.