Anxiety comes in two kinds. When you are involved with an emergency situation, that feeling that you have is referred to as common anxiety. Some people feel anxiety even when there are no specific situations or concerns to connect it to. Regardless of what’s going on in their lives or what they’re thinking about, they frequently feel anxiety. 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.
Unfortunately, both kinds of anxiety are pretty terrible for the human body. It can be particularly harmful if you have prolonged or chronic anxiety. Your alert status is raised by all of the chemicals that are secreted during times of anxiety. For short periods, when you genuinely require them, these chemicals are good but they can be harmful if they are present over longer periods of time. Over time, anxiety that can’t be treated or brought under control will begin to manifest in certain physical symptoms.
Anxiety Has Distinct Bodily Symptoms
Symptoms of anxiety commonly consist of:
- Feeling like something dreadful is about to happen
- A racing heart or difficulty breathing often linked to panic attacks
- Loss of interest and depression
- Bodily discomfort
- Fatigue
- Feeling as if you’re coming out of your skin
- Nausea
But chronic anxiety doesn’t always manifest in the ways that you may predict. Indeed, there are some rather interesting ways that anxiety might actually wind up affecting things as seemingly vague as your hearing. For instance, anxiety has been linked to:
- High Blood Pressure: And then there are a few ways that anxiety affects your body in precisely the way you’d expect it to. Elevated blood pressure is one of those. Known medically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have all kinds of negative secondary effects on you physically. It is, to use a colloquialism, bad news. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be caused by high blood pressure.
- Dizziness: Dizziness, which can also be caused by the ears, is commonly a symptom of persistent anxiety. After all, the ears are typically in control of your sense of balance (there are these three tubes in your inner ears which are regulating the sense of balance).
- Tinnitus: You probably know that stress can cause the ringing in your ears to get worse, but did you realize that there’s evidence that it can also cause the ringing in your ears to develop over time. This is known as tinnitus (which, itself can have any number of other causes as well). In some circumstances, the ears can feel clogged or blocked (it’s amazing what anxiety can do).
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Typically on a hearing blog like this we would normally concentrate on, well, hearing. And your ability to hear. Keeping that in mind, you’ll excuse us if we take a little time to talk about how hearing loss and anxiety can influence one another in some relatively disturbing ways.
The isolation is the first and foremost concern. People often pull away from social activities when they suffer from hearing loss, tinnitus or balance issues. You might have seen this in your own family. Perhaps one of your parents got tired of asking you to repeat yourself, or didn’t want to deal with the embarrassment of not comprehending and so they stopped talking so much. Problems with balance come with similar difficulties. It may affect your ability to walk or drive, which can be humiliating to admit to friends and family.
Social isolation is also connected to depression and anxiety in other ways. Normally, you’re not going to be around anyone if you’re not feeling like yourself. Unfortunately, this can be somewhat of a loop where one feeds the other. That feeling of isolation can develop quickly and it can result in a variety of other, closely associated issues, such as decline of cognitive function. For somebody who suffers from anxiety and hearing loss, fighting against that shift toward isolation can be even more challenging.
Determining How to Correctly Treat Your Hearing Loss Troubles
Tinnitus, hearing loss, anxiety and isolation can all feed on each other. That’s why getting the best treatment is so key.
If hearing loss and tinnitus are symptoms you’re dealing with, obtaining proper treatment for them can also help with your other symptoms. And in terms of depression and anxiety, interacting with others who can relate can be very helpful. Prolonged anxiety is more severe when there is a strong sense of separation and managing the symptoms can help with that. Check with your general practitioner and hearing specialist to examine your choices for treatment. Depending on what your hearing test shows, the best treatment for hearing loss or tinnitus may be hearing aids. And for anxiety, medication and other kinds of therapy may be necessary. Tinnitus has also been found to be effectively treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We understand 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. When you add anxiety to the recipe, you can have a pretty difficult situation. Fortunately, a favorable difference can be achieved by getting the right treatment for both conditions. The health impacts of anxiety don’t have to be permanent. The effect of anxiety on your body does not need to be long lasting. The key is getting treatment as soon as possible.