There are two kinds of anxiety. When you are coping with an emergency situation, that feeling that you get is called common anxiety. Some individuals experience anxiety even when there are no distinct situations or concerns to attach it to. No matter what’s going on in their lives or what they’re thinking about, they frequently feel anxiety. It’s just there in the background all through the day. This kind of anxiety is usually more of a mental health problem than a neurological reaction.
Both forms of anxiety can be very damaging to the physical body. Extended periods of persistent 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 treated or brought under control will start to manifest in certain physical symptoms.
Anxiety Has Distinct Physical Symptoms
Some symptoms of anxiety are:
- General aches or soreness in your body
- Feeling like something dreadful is about to happen
- Melancholy and loss of interest in activities or daily life
- Feeling like you’re coming out of your skin
- A racing heart or shortness of breath commonly associated with panic attacks
But persistent anxiety doesn’t always manifest in the ways that you may predict. In fact, there are some pretty interesting ways that anxiety could actually end up affecting things as seemingly obscure as your hearing. For example, anxiety has been associated with:
- Dizziness: Persistent anxiety can occasionally cause dizziness, 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 in your inner ears which are regulating the sense of balance).
- Tinnitus: Are you aware that stress not only exacerbates tinnitus but that it can cause the development of that ringing. This is known as tinnitus (which can itself be caused by several other factors). For a few, this might even reveal itself as a feeling of blockage or clogging of the ears.
- High Blood Pressure: And some of the effects 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 you physically. It is, to use a colloquialism, bad news. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be caused by high blood pressure.
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Since this is a hearing website, we typically tend to focus 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 feed each other in some fairly disturbing ways.
The isolation is the primary issue. People often pull away from social experiences when they suffer from hearing loss, tinnitus or balance issues. You might have experienced this with your own relatives. Perhaps one of your parents got tired of asking you what you said, or didn’t want to be embarrassed by not comprehending and so they stopped talking so much. Problems with balance present similar difficulties. It may influence your ability to walk or drive, which can be embarrassing to admit to family and friends.
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 around other people. Unfortunately, this can be somewhat of a circle where one feeds into the other. That sense of isolation can set in quickly and it can result in a number of other, closely associated issues, including cognitive decline. For someone who deals with anxiety and hearing loss, fighting against that move toward isolation can be even more challenging.
Determining How to Correctly Treat Your Hearing Loss Issues
Finding the correct treatment is significant particularly given how much anxiety, hearing loss, tinnitus and isolation feed each other.
If hearing loss and tinnitus are symptoms you’re dealing with, obtaining proper treatment for them can also help with your other symptoms. And when it comes to anxiety and depression, connecting with others who can relate can be really helpful. At the very least, dealing with these symptoms can help with the sense of solitude that could make prolonged anxiety more severe. In order to figure out what treatments will be most effective for your situation, check with your doctor and your hearing specialist. Depending on the results of your hearing test, the best treatment for hearing loss or tinnitus may be hearing aids. And for anxiety, medication and other kinds of therapy could be required. Tinnitus has also been shown to be effectively treated by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We understand that your mental and physical health can be severely affected by anxiety.
We also know that hearing loss can result in isolation and mental decline. Coupled with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a challenging time. Fortunately, a positive difference can be achieved by getting the correct treatment for both conditions. The health impacts of anxiety don’t have to be permanent. The effect of anxiety on your body doesn’t have to last. The sooner you find treatment, the better.