Anxiety comes in two kinds. When you are coping with a crisis, that feeling that you get is referred to as common anxiety. Some individuals experience anxiety even when there aren’t any distinct events or worries to link it to. No matter what’s going on around them or what’s on their mind, they regularly feel anxiety. It’s more of a generalized sensation that seems to pervade the day. This second kind is usually the type of anxiety that’s not so much a neuro-typical reaction and more of a mental health concern.
Regrettably, both forms of anxiety are pretty terrible for the human body. It can be particularly harmful if you have extended or chronic anxiety. When it feels anxiety, your body secretes all sorts of chemicals that raise your alert status. It’s good in the short term, but damaging over a long period of time. Certain physical symptoms will start to appear if anxiety can’t be managed and persists for longer periods of time.
Bodily Symptoms of Anxiety
Symptoms of anxiety typically include:
- A thumping heart or shortness of breath commonly linked to panic attacks
- Nausea
- Tiredness
- Paranoia about approaching crisis
- Feeling agitated or aggravated
- Melancholy and loss of interest in activities or daily life
- Bodily pain
But in some cases, anxiety manifests in unexpected ways. Anxiety can even effect vague body functions such as your hearing. For instance, anxiety has been connected with:
- Tinnitus: Are you aware 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 can itself be caused by several other factors). For a few, this may even reveal itself as a feeling of blockage or clogging of the ears.
- Dizziness: Prolonged anxiety can sometimes cause dizziness, which is an issue that may also stem from the ears. After all, the ears are generally in control of your sense of balance (there are these three tubes in your inner ears that are controlling the sense of balance).
- High Blood Pressure: And then there are certain ways that anxiety affects your body in exactly 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 an array of negative secondary effects on you physically. It is, to use a colloquialism, not so great. High blood pressure has also been recognized to lead to hearing loss, dizziness and tinnitus.
Anxiety And Hearing Loss
Since this is a hearing website, we usually tend to focus on, well, the ears. And how well you hear. So let’s talk a bit about how anxiety impacts your hearing.
The solitude is the first and foremost concern. When somebody has hearing loss, tinnitus or even balance problems, they tend to pull away from social interactions. Maybe you’ve experienced this with somebody you know. Maybe your mother or father 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. Issues with balance present similar troubles. It can be difficult to admit to your friends and family that you have a difficult time driving or even walking because you’re experiencing balance troubles.
Social isolation is also associated with anxiety and depression in other ways. When you do not feel like yourself, you don’t want to be with other people. Sadly, one can wind up feeding the other and can turn into an unhealthy loop. That sense of isolation can set in quickly and it can lead to a variety of other, closely related issues, such as decline of cognitive function. For somebody who deals with anxiety and hearing loss, battling against that shift toward isolation can be even more difficult.
Figuring Out How to Properly Treat Your Hearing Loss Troubles
Tinnitus, hearing loss, anxiety and isolation can all feed on each other. That’s why getting the proper treatment is so important.
If tinnitus and hearing loss are symptoms you’re dealing with, getting proper treatment for them can also assist with your other symptoms. Interacting with other people has been shown to help alleviate both depression and anxiety. Chronic anxiety is more severe when there is a strong sense of isolation and dealing with the symptoms can be helpful with that. Check with your general practitioner and hearing specialist to examine your choices for treatment. Hearing aids may be the best choice as part of your treatment depending on the results of your hearing exam. And for anxiety, medication and other types of therapy could be required. Tinnitus has also been shown to be successfully treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We know, then, that anxiety can have very real, very serious consequences for your physical health in addition to your mental health.
Isolation and cognitive decline have also been recognized as a repercussion of hearing loss. When you add anxiety to the recipe, you can have a pretty difficult situation. Fortunately, a favorable difference can be achieved by getting the right treatment for both conditions. Anxiety doesn’t have to have permanent effects on your body and the impact of anxiety on your body can be counteracted. The key is getting treatment as soon as possible.
