Anxiety comes in two forms. When you are involved with an emergency situation, that feeling that you get is referred to as common anxiety. Some individuals feel anxiety even when there are no specific situations or concerns to connect it to. They feel the anxiety regularly, regardless of what you happen to be doing or thinking about. It’s just there in the background all through the day. This sort of anxiety is normally more of a mental health issue than a neurological response.
Unfortunately, both forms of anxiety are harmful for the human body. It can be particularly damaging if you experience extended or chronic anxiety. Your alert status is heightened by all of the chemicals that are secreted when anxiety is experienced. It’s good in the short term, but harmful over extended periods of time. Over time, anxiety that can’t be treated or controlled will begin to manifest in distinct physical symptoms.
Physical Symptoms of Anxiety
Symptoms of anxiety often include:
- Exhaustion
- Fear about approaching crisis
- Overall aches or discomfort in your body
- Queasiness
- Depression and loss of interest in activities or daily life
- Feeling as if you’re coming out of your skin
- A thumping heart or difficulty breathing typically connected to panic attacks
But chronic anxiety doesn’t always manifest in the ways that you would predict. In fact, there are some rather interesting ways that anxiety could actually end up affecting things as apparently obscure as your hearing. For instance, anxiety has been linked to:
- Dizziness: Dizziness, which can also be related to the ears, is commonly a symptom of persistent anxiety. Do not forget, your sense of balance is governed by the ears (there are these three tubes in your inner ears that are regulating the sense of balance).
- 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 many negative secondary effects on your body. It’s certainly not good. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be triggered by high blood pressure.
- Tinnitus: Are you aware that stress not only exacerbates the ringing in your ears but that it can also be responsible for the onset of that ringing. This is called tinnitus (which can itself be caused by numerous other factors). In some circumstances, the ears can feel clogged or blocked (it’s staggering what anxiety can do).
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Since this is a hearing website, we typically tend to focus on, well, the ears. And your how well to hear. So let’s talk a bit about how anxiety impacts your hearing.
To start with, there’s the isolation. When a person has hearing loss, tinnitus or even balance issues, they often withdraw from social contact. You may have seen this in your own relatives. Perhaps one of your parents got tired of asking you to repeat yourself, or didn’t want to deal with the embarrassment of not understanding and so they stopped talking so much. The same holds true for balance problems. It may influence your ability to drive or even walk, which can be embarrassing to admit to friends and family.
Social isolation is also connected to anxiety and depression for other reasons. Usually, you’re not going to be around anyone if you aren’t feeling like yourself. Unfortunately, this can be something of a loop where one feeds into the other. That sense of solitude can set in quickly and it can result in a number of other, closely related issues, such as decline of cognitive function. For somebody who deals with anxiety and hearing loss, fighting against that move toward isolation can be even more difficult.
Figuring Out How to Properly Manage Your Hearing Loss Troubles
Tinnitus, hearing loss, anxiety and isolation can all feed each other. That’s why finding the correct treatment is so crucial.
All of the symptoms for these disorders can be helped by obtaining treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. And when it comes to depression and anxiety, connecting with others who can relate can be really helpful. Chronic anxiety is more serious when there is a strong sense of separation and treating the symptoms can help with that. Talk to your general practitioner and hearing specialist to examine your possibilities for treatment. Depending on what your hearing test shows, the right treatment for hearing loss or tinnitus could involve hearing aids. And for anxiety, medication and other kinds of therapy may be required. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been shown to help manage tinnitus.
Here’s to Your Health
We understand that your mental and physical health can be severely affected by anxiety.
Isolation and cognitive decline have also been recognized as a consequence of hearing loss. When you add anxiety to the recipe, it makes for a very difficult situation. Luckily, we have treatments for both conditions, and obtaining that treatment can make a huge, positive difference. Anxiety doesn’t have to have permanent effects on your body and the impact of anxiety on your body can be reversed. The key is finding treatment as soon as you can.