There are two forms of anxiety. When you are coping with a crisis, that feeling that you have is known as common anxiety. Some individuals experience anxiety even when there aren’t any distinct situations or concerns to connect it to. No matter what’s happening around them or what’s on their mind, they frequently feel anxiety. It’s just present in the background throughout the day. This type of anxiety is usually more of a mental health concern than a neurological response.
Both types of anxiety can be very unfavorable to the physical body. Extended periods of persistent anxiety can be especially bad. Your alert status is heightened by all of the chemicals that are produced during times of anxiety. For short durations, when you really require them, these chemicals are good but they can be damaging if they are present over longer time periods. Over the long run, anxiety that cannot be managed or controlled will start to manifest in distinct physical symptoms.
Bodily Symptoms of Anxiety
Symptoms of anxiety often consist of:
- Depression and loss of interest in activities or daily life
- Fatigue
- Bodily discomfort
- Queasiness
- Feeling like something dreadful is about to happen
- A feeling of being agitated or irritated
- A pounding heart or shortness of breath typically linked to panic attacks
But sometimes, anxiety is experienced in surprising ways. In fact, there are some pretty interesting ways that anxiety could actually wind up impacting things as seemingly obscure as your hearing. For instance, anxiety has been associated with:
- 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 all kinds of negative secondary effects on you physically. It is, to make use of a colloquialism, bad news. High blood pressure has also been known to cause hearing loss, dizziness and tinnitus.
- Dizziness: Persistent anxiety can occasionally make you feel dizzy, which is a condition that may also stem from the ears. Remember, the sense of balance is governed by the ears (there are these three tubes in your inner ears which are controlling the sense of balance).
- Tinnitus: Are you aware that stress not only exacerbates the ringing in your ears but that it can also be responsible for the onset of that ringing. This is called tinnitus (which, itself can have many other causes too). For some, this might even manifest itself as a feeling that the ears are blocked or clogged.
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Since this is a hearing website, we typically tend to give attention to, well, the ears. And how well you hear. Keeping that in mind, you’ll forgive us if we spend a little bit of time talking about how hearing loss and anxiety can feed each other in some slightly disconcerting ways.
First and foremost, there’s the solitude. When a person suffers from tinnitus, hearing loss or even balance problems, they often distance themselves from social interactions. Perhaps you’ve seen this with someone you know. Perhaps a relative just stopped talking as much because they were embarrassed by having to constantly repeat themselves. The same is true for balance issues. It might influence your ability to walk or drive, which can be embarrassing to admit to family and friends.
There are also other ways depression and anxiety can result in social isolation. Usually, you’re not going to be around anyone if you aren’t feeling like yourself. Unfortunately, this can be something of a loop where one feeds the other. The negative effects of isolation can occur quickly and will trigger numerous other issues and can even result in cognitive decline. For somebody who suffers from anxiety and hearing loss, battling against that shift toward isolation can be even more challenging.
Determining How to Properly Treat Your Hearing Loss Issues
Getting the proper treatment is important especially given how much anxiety, hearing loss, tinnitus and isolation feed on each other.
All of the symptoms for these ailments can be helped by getting treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. Connecting with other people has been shown to help reduce both depression and anxiety. Certainly, managing these symptoms can help with the sense of isolation that might make chronic anxiety more extreme. So that you can determine what treatments will be most effective for your situation, talk to your doctor and your hearing specialist. Hearing aids could be the best solution as part of your treatment depending on the results of your hearing exam. And for anxiety, medication and other types of therapy may be necessary. Tinnitus has also been found to be effectively treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We understand that your mental and physical health can be seriously impacted by anxiety.
We also know that hearing loss can result in isolation and mental decline. When you add anxiety to the recipe, it makes for a pretty challenging situation. Fortunately, a positive difference can be accomplished by getting the right treatment for both conditions. Anxiety doesn’t have to have long lasting effects on your body and the impact of anxiety on your body can be counteracted. The key is getting treatment as soon as you can.