There are two types of anxiety. When you are coping with an emergency situation, that feeling that you have is known as common anxiety. And then there’s the type of anxiety that isn’t really connected to any one event or concern. They feel the anxiety regularly, regardless of what you’re doing or thinking about. It’s more of a general sensation that seems to pervade the day. This kind of anxiety is normally more of a mental health problem than a neurological reaction.
Regrettably, both kinds of anxiety are pretty terrible for the human body. It can be particularly harmful if you have extended or chronic anxiety. Your alert status is raised by all of the chemicals that are released when anxiety is experienced. It’s a good thing in the short term, but harmful over extended periods of time. Certain physical symptoms will begin to appear if anxiety can’t be treated and remains for longer periods of time.
Anxiety Has Distinct Bodily Symptoms
Symptoms of anxiety frequently include:
- Loss of interest and depression
- Fear about impending crisis
- Exhaustion
- A racing heart or shortness of breath often linked to panic attacks
- Nausea
- Feeling as if you are coming out of your skin
- Bodily pain
But persistent anxiety doesn’t necessarily appear in the ways that you may anticipate. In fact, there are some rather interesting ways that anxiety might actually end up impacting things as apparently vague as your hearing. As an example, anxiety has been linked to:
- High Blood Pressure: And a few of the consequences of anxiety are not at all unexpected. Elevated blood pressure is one of those. Known medically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have various negative secondary effects on you physically. It is, to make use of a colloquialism, not so great. High blood pressure has also been known to lead to hearing loss, tinnitus and dizziness.
- Tinnitus: You probably understand that stress can cause the ringing in your ears to get worse, but did you know that there is evidence that it can also cause the ringing in your ears to progress over time. This is called tinnitus (which can itself be caused by several other factors). For a few, this could even reveal itself as a feeling of blockage or clogging of the ears.
- Dizziness: Persistent anxiety can occasionally cause dizziness, which is a condition that could also stem from the ears. Remember, the sense of balance is controlled by the ears (there are these three tubes in your inner ears which are controlling the sense of balance).
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Since this is a hearing website, we usually tend to give attention to, well, hearing. And your how well to hear. So let’s talk a bit about how anxiety impacts your hearing.
First of all, there’s the solitude. People often pull away from social experiences when they have hearing loss, tinnitus or balance troubles. 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 deal with the embarrassment of not understanding and so they withdrew from conversations. The same is true for balance problems. It may influence your ability to drive or even walk, which can be embarrassing to admit to family and friends.
Social isolation is also connected to anxiety and depression in other ways. Typically, you aren’t going to be around people if you aren’t feeling like yourself. Unfortunately, this can be somewhat of a loop where one feeds the other. The negative impact of isolation can occur quickly and will bring about several other problems and can even result in mental decline. For somebody who struggles with anxiety and hearing loss, battling against that shift toward isolation can be even more challenging.
Figuring Out How to Correctly Treat Your Hearing Loss Issues
Finding the correct treatment is significant particularly given how much hearing loss, tinnitus, anxiety and isolation feed on each other.
All of the symptoms for these disorders can be helped by getting treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. And when it comes to anxiety and depression, connecting with others who can relate can be really helpful. At the very least, dealing with these symptoms can help with the sense of solitude that might make chronic anxiety more severe. In order to decide what treatments are best for you, check with your doctor and your hearing specialist. Depending on what your hearing test shows, the best treatment for hearing loss or tinnitus could be hearing aids. The best treatment for anxiety may involve medication or therapy. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been shown to help deal with tinnitus.
Here’s to Your Health
We recognize, then, that anxiety can have very real, very serious repercussions on your physical health and your mental health.
We also know that hearing loss can bring about isolation and mental decline. In conjunction with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a difficult time. Thankfully, treatments exist for both conditions, and obtaining that treatment can make a big, positive difference. Anxiety doesn’t have to have permanent effects on your body and the impact of anxiety on your body can be counteracted. The sooner you get treatment, the better.