There are two kinds of anxiety. When you are coping with a crisis, that feeling that you get is referred to as common anxiety. And then you can have the type of anxiety that isn’t actually connected to any one worry or event. No matter what’s happening in their lives or what’s on their mind, they frequently feel anxiety. It’s just there in the background throughout the day. This sort of anxiety is normally more of a mental health concern than a neurological response.
Both types of anxiety can be very detrimental to the physical body. Prolonged periods of chronic anxiety can be especially bad. When it’s anxious, your body produces all kinds of chemicals that heighten your alert status. For short durations, when you really require them, these chemicals are a positive thing but they can be harmful if they are produced over longer time periods. Specific physical symptoms will begin to manifest if anxiety can’t be managed and lasts for longer periods of time.
Anxiety Has Distinct Bodily Symptoms
Some symptoms of anxiety are:
- Feeling like you are coming out of your skin
- Loss of interest and depression
- A racing heart or difficulty breathing commonly linked to panic attacks
- Paranoia about impending crisis
- Nausea
- Bodily discomfort
- Tiredness
But sometimes, anxiety is experienced in surprising ways. Indeed, there are some fairly interesting ways that anxiety could actually end up impacting things as seemingly vague as your hearing. For example, anxiety has been connected with:
- High Blood Pressure: And some of the consequences of anxiety are not at all surprising. In this case, we’re talking about elevated blood pressure. Known scientifically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have an array of negative secondary effects on your body. It is, to use a colloquialism, not so great. High blood pressure has also been known to cause hearing loss, tinnitus and dizziness.
- Tinnitus: You probably know that stress can cause the ringing in your ears to get worse, but did you realize that there is evidence that it can also cause the ringing in your ears to develop over time. This is known as tinnitus (which, itself can have numerous other causes as well). For some, this could even manifest itself as a feeling that the ears are blocked or clogged.
- Dizziness: Prolonged anxiety can sometimes cause dizziness, which is an issue that could 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 which are regulating the sense of balance).
Anxiety And Hearing Loss
Because this is a hearing website, we usually tend to focus on, well, hearing. And how well you hear. So let’s talk a little about how anxiety impacts your hearing.
To start with, there’s the solitude. When someone suffers from tinnitus, hearing loss or even balance issues, they tend to pull away from social interactions. You might have experienced this with your own family. Perhaps a relative just withdrew from conversations because they were embarrassed that they have to constantly repeat what they said. The same goes for balance issues. It might impact your ability to drive or even walk, which can be humiliating to admit to friends and family.
There are also other reasons why anxiety and depression can lead to social isolation. Usually, you’re not going to be around people if you aren’t feeling like yourself. Unfortunately, this can be somewhat of a loop where one feeds into the other. The negative impact of isolation can occur rapidly and will result in numerous other problems and can even result in mental decline. For somebody who suffers from anxiety and hearing loss, fighting against that move toward isolation can be even more difficult.
Figuring Out How to Effectively Treat Your Hearing Loss Troubles
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 disorders can be helped by obtaining treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. And in terms of depression and anxiety, interacting with others who can relate can be really helpful. At the very least, treating these symptoms can help with the sense of isolation that could make prolonged anxiety more severe. Consult your general practitioner and hearing specialist to look at your options for treatment. Depending on the results of your hearing test, the best treatment for hearing loss or tinnitus could be hearing aids. The best treatment for anxiety may include medication or therapy. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been proven to help control 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. Together with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a challenging time. Fortunately, a positive difference can be achieved by getting the right treatment for both conditions. Anxiety doesn’t have to have long lasting effects on your body and the impact of anxiety on your body can be counteracted. The sooner you find treatment, the better.