There are two types of anxiety. When you are involved with a crisis, that feeling that you get is referred to as common anxiety. Some individuals experience anxiety even when there are no particular situations or concerns to link it to. They feel the anxiety frequently, regardless of what you’re doing or thinking about. It’s more of a general sensation that seems to be there all day. This sort of anxiety is normally more of a mental health issue than a neurological reaction.
Unfortunately, both forms of anxiety are harmful for the human body. Long periods of chronic anxiety can be especially bad. 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 damaging over a long period of time. Over the long run, anxiety that cannot be managed or brought under control will begin to manifest in certain physical symptoms.
Anxiety Has Distinct Bodily Symptoms
Symptoms of anxiety typically include:
- Panic attacks, difficulty breathing and increased heart rate
- Physical weakness
- Fear about impending crisis
- Overall pain or soreness in your body
- A feeling of being agitated or aggravated
- Loss of interest and depression
- Queasiness
But chronic anxiety doesn’t always manifest in the ways that you would predict. In fact, there are some rather interesting ways that anxiety might actually wind up impacting things as seemingly vague as your hearing. As an example, anxiety has been associated with:
- Dizziness: Persistent anxiety can occasionally cause dizziness, which is an issue that may also be related to the ears. After all, the ears are generally responsible for your sense of balance (there are these three tubes in your inner ears which are controlling the sense of balance).
- Tinnitus: Did you realize that stress not only exacerbates the ringing in your ears but that it can cause the development of that ringing. This is called tinnitus (which, itself can have a variety of other causes as well). In some circumstances, the ears can feel blocked or clogged (it’s amazing what anxiety can do).
- High Blood Pressure: And a few of the consequences of anxiety are not at all unexpected. 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’s certainly not good. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be caused by high blood pressure.
Anxiety And Hearing Loss
Because this is a hearing website, we typically tend to concentrate on, well, hearing. And how well you hear. So let’s talk a bit about how your hearing is impacted by anxiety.
The isolation is the primary concern. People tend to pull away from social activities when they suffer from hearing loss, tinnitus or balance issues. You might have experienced this with your own family members. Maybe a relative just withdrew from conversations because they were embarrassed by having to constantly repeat themselves. The same goes for balance issues. It could influence your ability to drive or even walk, which can be humiliating to admit to family and friends.
There are also other reasons why depression and anxiety can lead to social isolation. Typically, you’re not going to be around people if you aren’t feeling like yourself. Sadly, one can end up feeding the other and can become an unhealthy loop. That sense of isolation can set in quickly and it can lead to a variety of other, closely related issues, like decline of cognitive function. It can be even more challenging to combat the effects of isolation if you’re dealing with hearing loss and anxiety.
Determining How to Correctly Treat Your Hearing Loss Troubles
Getting the correct treatment is important especially given how much hearing loss, tinnitus, anxiety and isolation feed each other.
All of the symptoms for these conditions 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. Prolonged anxiety is more severe when there is an overwhelming sense of isolation and treating the symptoms can be helpful with that. Talk to your general practitioner and hearing specialist to look at your possibilities for treatment. Hearing aids could be the best solution as part of your treatment depending on what your hearing test reveals. The best treatment for anxiety might involve therapy or medication. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been demonstrated to help manage tinnitus.
Here’s to Your Health
We recognize, then, that anxiety can have very real, very serious consequences on your physical health in addition to your mental health.
Isolation and cognitive decline have also been recognized as a repercussion of hearing loss. Coupled with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a difficult time. Fortunately, a positive difference can be accomplished by getting the correct treatment for both conditions. The health affects of anxiety don’t have to be permanent. The effect of anxiety on your body does not need to last. The sooner you get treatment, the better.