There are two forms of anxiety. When you are dealing with a crisis, that feeling that you have is known as common anxiety. And then you can have the type of anxiety that isn’t actually connected to any one worry or event. No matter what’s happening in their lives or what’s on their mind, they often feel anxiety. It’s more of a general feeling that seems to be there all day. This kind of anxiety is usually more of a mental health problem than a neurological reaction.
Unfortunately, both types of anxiety are harmful for the human body. Extended periods of persistent anxiety can be particularly negative. 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 a long period of time. Specific physical symptoms will start to appear if anxiety can’t be managed and persists for longer periods of time.
Anxiety Has Distinct Bodily Symptoms
Symptoms of anxiety frequently include:
- General pain or soreness in your body
- Nausea
- Loss of interest and depression
- Panic attacks, difficulty breathing and increased heart rate
- Feeling like something terrible is about to happen
- Physical weakness
- Feeling as if you’re coming out of your skin
But in some cases, anxiety manifests in surprising ways. Anxiety can even impact obscure body functions like your hearing. As an example, anxiety has been connected with:
- Dizziness: Persistent anxiety can occasionally make you feel dizzy, which is an issue that could also stem from the ears. After all, the ears are generally in control of your sense of balance (there are these three tubes inside of your inner ears that are regulating the sense of balance).
- High Blood Pressure: And then there are some ways that anxiety affects your body in precisely the way you’d expect it to. In this case, we’re talking about elevated blood pressure. Known medically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have very adverse effects on the body. It is, to make use of a colloquialism, bad news. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be brought about by high blood pressure.
- Tinnitus: Did you realize that stress not only worsens tinnitus but that it can cause the development of that ringing. This is called tinnitus (which, itself can have any number of other causes as well). For a few, this might even manifest itself as a feeling that the ears are blocked or clogged.
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Typically on a hearing blog such as this we would tend to concentrate on, well, hearing. And how well you hear. With 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 disconcerting ways.
First off, there’s the isolation. When a person has tinnitus, hearing loss or even balance issues, they tend to distance themselves from social contact. Perhaps you’ve experienced this with somebody you know. Maybe a relative just stopped talking as much because they were embarrassed by having to constantly repeat what they said. Issues with balance come with similar difficulties. It might affect your ability to drive or even walk, which can be embarrassing to admit to friends and family.
Social isolation is also connected to depression and anxiety in other ways. When you don’t feel yourself, you won’t want to be around other people. Unfortunately, this can be something of a circle where one feeds into the other. That sense of isolation can set in quickly and it can lead to a number of other, closely related problems, including cognitive decline. For somebody who deals with anxiety and hearing loss, fighting against that shift toward isolation can be even more challenging.
Finding The Correct Treatment
Hearing Loss, Tinnitus, anxiety and isolation can all feed on each other. That’s why finding the best treatment is so key.
All of the symptoms for these disorders can be helped by obtaining treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. Connecting with other people has been shown to help reduce both depression and anxiety. Prolonged anxiety is more severe when there is a strong sense of solitude and treating the symptoms can help with that. Seek advice from your general practitioner and hearing specialist to explore your options for treatment. Depending on the results of your hearing test, the best treatment for hearing loss or tinnitus may involve hearing aids. And for anxiety, medication and other forms of therapy may be required. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been shown to help control tinnitus.
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 shown as a consequence of hearing loss. When you add anxiety to the recipe, it makes for a pretty difficult situation. Fortunately, a positive difference can be achieved by getting the right treatment for both conditions. The health impacts of anxiety don’t have to be permanent. What anxiety does to your body doesn’t have to be long lasting. The key is finding treatment as soon as you can.