Anxiety comes in two varieties. When you are dealing with an emergency situation, that feeling that you get is referred to as common anxiety. Some individuals experience anxiety even when there are no specific situations or concerns to connect it to. Regardless of what’s happening around them or what they’re thinking about, they frequently feel anxiety. It’s just present in the background throughout the day. This kind of anxiety is normally more of a mental health concern than a neurological reaction.
Regrettably, both types of anxiety are pretty terrible for the human body. It can be particularly damaging if you have sustained or chronic anxiety. Your alert status is raised by all of the chemicals that are secreted during times of anxiety. It’s a good thing in the short term, but harmful over a long period of time. Over time, anxiety that cannot be managed or controlled will begin to manifest in distinct physical symptoms.
Bodily Symptoms of Anxiety
Symptoms of anxiety commonly include:
- Feeling agitated or aggravated
- Nausea
- Bodily discomfort
- Panic attacks, shortness of breath and raised heart rate
- Fatigue
- Fear about impending disaster
- Depression and loss of interest in activities or daily life
But persistent anxiety doesn’t always manifest in the ways that you would anticipate. Anxiety can even impact vague body functions such as your hearing. As an example, anxiety has been linked to:
- Dizziness: Chronic anxiety can sometimes make you feel dizzy, which is an issue that may also be related to the ears. Keep in mind, the sense of balance is controlled by the ears (there are these three tubes inside of your inner ears that are controlling the sense of balance).
- Tinnitus: Are you aware that stress not only exacerbates tinnitus but that it can also be responsible for the onset of that ringing. This is called tinnitus (which, itself can have any number of other causes as well). In certain circumstances, the ears can feel blocked or clogged (it’s staggering what anxiety can do).
- High Blood Pressure: And some of the consequences of anxiety are not at all surprising. Elevated blood pressure is one of those. Known medically 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 brought about by high blood pressure.
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Generally on a hearing blog such as this we would tend to concentrate on, well, hearing. And your how well to hear. So let’s talk a little about how your hearing is impacted by anxiety.
First of all, there’s the solitude. When someone has hearing loss, tinnitus or even balance problems, they tend to pull away from social interactions. Perhaps you’ve seen this with somebody you know. Maybe one of your parents got tired of asking you to repeat yourself, or didn’t want to be embarrassed by not comprehending and so they stopped talking so much. Problems with balance present similar troubles. It can be tough to admit to your friends and family that you have a hard time driving or even walking because you’re experiencing balance troubles.
There are also other ways anxiety and depression can result in social isolation. Normally, you’re not going to be around people if you aren’t feeling like yourself. Unfortunately, this can be something of a circle where one feeds into the other. The negative effects of isolation can happen quickly and will result in several other issues and can even result in mental decline. For somebody who struggles with anxiety and hearing loss, battling against that shift toward isolation can be even more difficult.
Determining How to Correctly Treat Your Hearing Loss Issues
Finding the correct treatment is important particularly given how much hearing loss, tinnitus, anxiety and isolation feed each other.
If hearing loss and tinnitus are symptoms you’re dealing with, getting correct treatment for them can also help with your other symptoms. Connecting with others has been shown to help reduce both depression and anxiety. Prolonged anxiety is more severe when there is an overwhelming sense of solitude and managing the symptoms can be helpful with that. In order to determine what treatments are best for you, talk to your doctor and your hearing specialist. Hearing aids may be the best choice as part of your treatment depending on what your hearing test reveals. The most appropriate treatment for anxiety may include therapy or medication. Tinnitus has also been shown to be successfully treated by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We know, then, that anxiety can have very real, very severe repercussions on your physical health and your mental health.
We also realize that hearing loss can bring about isolation and mental decline. When you add anxiety to the recipe, you can have a pretty difficult situation. Fortunately, a favorable difference can be accomplished by getting the correct treatment for both conditions. The health affects of anxiety don’t need to be permanent. What anxiety does to your body doesn’t need to last. The key is getting treatment as soon as possible.