Anxiety comes in two kinds. You can have common anxiety, that feeling you get when you’re dealing with an emergency situation. Some people experience anxiety even when there are no particular situations or concerns to link it to. Regardless of what’s happening in their lives or what’s on their mind, they regularly feel anxiety. It’s more of a generalized sensation that seems to be there all day. This second type is typically the type of anxiety that’s not so much a neuro-typical reaction and more of a mental health problem.
Both forms of anxiety can be very damaging to the physical body. Long periods of chronic anxiety can be particularly bad. When it’s anxious, your body produces a myriad of chemicals that heighten your alert status. For short durations, when you genuinely require them, these chemicals are a good thing but they can be damaging if they are present over longer time periods. Over the long run, anxiety that can’t be dealt with or brought under control will start to manifest in certain physical symptoms.
Anxiety Has Distinct Physical Symptoms
Symptoms of anxiety typically include:
- Fatigue
- Loss of interest and depression
- A feeling of being agitated or aggravated
- A feeling that something terrible is about to happen
- Nausea
- A racing heart or difficulty breathing often linked to panic attacks
- General pain or soreness in your body
But sometimes, anxiety is experienced in surprising ways. Anxiety can even impact vague body functions like your hearing. As an example, anxiety has been associated with:
- High Blood Pressure: And then there are some ways that anxiety impacts 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 many negative secondary effects on your body. It’s definitely not good. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be caused by high blood pressure.
- 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 can itself be caused by a lot of other factors). For some, this could even reveal itself as a feeling that the ears are blocked or clogged.
- Dizziness: Chronic anxiety can sometimes make you feel dizzy, which is a condition that may also stem from the ears. Do not forget, the sense of balance is governed by the ears (there are these three tubes inside of your inner ears which are regulating the sense of balance).
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Generally on a hearing blog such as this we would normally concentrate on, well, hearing. And your ability to hear. So let’s talk a little about how your hearing is impacted by anxiety.
The solitude is the first and foremost concern. People often pull away from social activities when they suffer from hearing loss, tinnitus or balance issues. You might have seen this in your own family members. Maybe a relative just withdrew from conversations because they were embarrassed by having to constantly repeat what they said. The same is true for balance issues. It may influence your ability to walk or drive, which can be humiliating to admit to friends and family.
There are also other reasons why anxiety and depression can result in social isolation. Normally, you aren’t going to be around people if you aren’t feeling like yourself. Sadly, one can wind up feeding the other and can become an unhealthy loop. That sense of solitude can set in quickly and it can result in a variety of other, closely related problems, such as decline of cognitive function. It can be even more difficult to overcome the effects of isolation if you have hearing loss and anxiety.
Determining How to Properly Manage Your Hearing Loss Troubles
Hearing Loss, Tinnitus, anxiety and isolation can all feed 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 help with your other symptoms. Interacting with other people has been shown to help relieve both depression and anxiety. Chronic anxiety is more serious when there is an overwhelming sense of separation and dealing with the symptoms can be helpful with that. Consult with your general practitioner and hearing specialist to examine your possibilities for treatment. Hearing aids could be the best choice as part of your treatment depending on what your hearing test reveals. And for anxiety, medication and other forms of therapy may be required. Tinnitus has also been shown to be successfully treated by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We recognize that your mental and physical health can be severely impacted by anxiety.
Isolation and cognitive decline have also been shown as a repercussion of hearing loss. When you add anxiety to the recipe, it makes for a pretty difficult situation. Fortunately, a positive difference can be accomplished by getting the correct treatment for both conditions. The health impacts of anxiety don’t have to be permanent. What anxiety does to your body does not have to last. The key is finding treatment as soon as possible.