Anxiety comes in two varieties. When you are involved with an emergency situation, that feeling that you have is called common anxiety. Some people experience anxiety even when there are no specific events or worries to attach it to. No matter what’s happening around them or what they’re thinking about, they often feel anxiety. It’s just there in the background all through the day. This kind of anxiety is usually more of a mental health issue than a neurological response.
Unfortunately, both types of anxiety are harmful for the human body. Long periods of chronic anxiety can be particularly bad. Your alert status is raised by all of the chemicals that are secreted when anxiety is experienced. For short periods, when you genuinely require them, these chemicals are good but they can be harmful if they are produced over longer periods of time. Specific physical symptoms will start to manifest if anxiety can’t be treated and remains for longer periods of time.
Anxiety Has Distinct Bodily Symptoms
Symptoms of anxiety commonly include:
- A feeling of being agitated or aggravated
- Feeling like something dreadful is about to occur
- Loss of interest and depression
- Panic attacks, shortness of breath and raised heart rate
- Physical weakness
- Overall pain or discomfort in your body
- Nausea
But in some cases, anxiety manifests in unexpected ways. Anxiety can even effect obscure body functions including your hearing. For instance, anxiety has been associated 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 medically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have very negative effects on the body. It’s definitely not good. High blood pressure has also been known to lead to hearing loss, dizziness and tinnitus.
- Dizziness: Prolonged anxiety can sometimes make you feel dizzy, which is a condition that may 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 which are controlling the sense of balance).
- Tinnitus: You probably know that stress can make the ringing your ears worse, but did you know 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 many other causes too). For a few, this might even reveal itself as a feeling of blockage or clogging of the ears.
Anxiety And Hearing Loss
Because this is a hearing website, we usually tend to give attention to, well, the ears. And your how well to hear. So let’s talk a bit about how your hearing is impacted by anxiety.
The isolation is the primary concern. When a person has tinnitus, hearing loss or even balance issues, they tend to withdraw from social interactions. Perhaps you’ve seen this with someone you know. Maybe your mother or father got tired of asking you to repeat yourself, or didn’t want to be embarrassed by not understanding and so they stopped talking so much. Problems with balance present similar troubles. It could affect your ability to walk or drive, which can be embarrassing to admit to friends and family.
Social isolation is also connected to depression and anxiety in other ways. When you do not feel like yourself, you don’t want to be with other people. Sadly, one can end up feeding the other and can turn into an unhealthy loop. That feeling of isolation can develop quickly and it can result in a host of other, closely related issues, including cognitive decline. It can be even more difficult to combat the effects of isolation if you have hearing loss and anxiety.
Getting The Proper Treatment
Finding the proper treatment is significant especially given how much hearing loss, tinnitus, anxiety and isolation feed on each other.
All of the symptoms for these conditions can be assisted by obtaining treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. Interacting with other people has been shown to help alleviate both anxiety and depression. Prolonged anxiety is more severe when there is a strong sense of solitude and managing the symptoms can be helpful with that. Consult with your general practitioner and hearing specialist to look at your options for treatment. Depending on what your hearing test shows, the right treatment for hearing loss or tinnitus may involve hearing aids. The right treatment for anxiety might involve therapy or medication. Tinnitus has also been found to be effectively treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We recognize that your mental and physical health can be severely impacted by anxiety.
We also know that hearing loss can result in isolation and mental decline. In conjunction with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a challenging time. Fortunately, a positive difference can be accomplished by getting the right treatment for both conditions. Anxiety doesn’t need to have permanent effects on your body and the impact of anxiety on your body can be reversed. The key is getting treatment as soon as possible.