There are two types of anxiety. You can have common anxiety, that feeling you get when you’re coping with a crisis. And then you can have the type of anxiety that isn’t actually attached to any one worry or situation. Regardless of what’s going on around them or what they’re thinking about, they often feel anxiety. It’s more of a general feeling that seems to be there all day. This type of anxiety is usually more of a mental health issue than a neurological response.
Unfortunately, both types of anxiety are pretty terrible for the human body. It can be particularly damaging if you experience extended or chronic anxiety. When it feels anxiety, your body produces all kinds of chemicals that heighten your alert status. It’s good in the short term, but harmful over extended periods of time. Certain physical symptoms will start to manifest if anxiety can’t be treated and lasts for longer periods of time.
Anxiety Has Distinct Physical Symptoms
Some symptoms of anxiety are:
- Tiredness
- Melancholy and loss of interest in day to day activities
- Nausea
- Feeling like something horrible is about to happen
- Panic attacks, difficulty breathing and increased heart rate
- Overall aches or discomfort in your body
- Feeling agitated or irritated
But in some cases, anxiety manifests in surprising ways. Indeed, there are some rather interesting ways that anxiety might actually wind up impacting things as seemingly vague as your hearing. For example, anxiety has been associated with:
- Dizziness: Dizziness, which can also be caused by the ears, is commonly a symptom of prolonged anxiety. Remember, 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).
- Tinnitus: Are you aware that stress not only worsens tinnitus but that it can also be responsible for the onset of that ringing. This is known as tinnitus (which, itself can have numerous other causes too). For a few, this could even manifest itself as a feeling that the ears are blocked or clogged.
- High Blood Pressure: And a few of the effects of anxiety are not at all surprising. Elevated blood pressure is one of those. Known scientifically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have really adverse effects on the body. It’s definitely not good. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be brought about by high blood pressure.
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Because this is a hearing website, we usually tend to give attention to, well, hearing. 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 one another in some relatively disconcerting ways.
First of all, there’s the solitude. People often pull away from social activities when they have hearing loss, tinnitus or balance troubles. You may have experienced this with your own family. Maybe your mother or father got tired of asking you what you said, or didn’t want to deal with the embarrassment of not understanding and so they withdrew from conversations. The same goes for balance problems. It could influence your ability to walk or drive, which can be embarrassing to admit to friends and family.
There are also other ways depression and anxiety can result in social isolation. When you do not feel like yourself, you won’t want to be with other people. Unfortunately, this can be something of a loop where one feeds the other. That sense of isolation can set in quickly and it can result in a host of other, closely associated problems, like cognitive decline. It can be even more challenging to fight the effects of isolation if you have hearing loss and anxiety.
Figuring Out How to Correctly Treat Your Hearing Loss Issues
Getting the correct treatment is significant particularly given how much anxiety, hearing loss, tinnitus and isolation feed on each other.
All of the symptoms for these disorders can be assisted by getting treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. And when it comes to depression and anxiety, connecting with others who can relate can be very helpful. Prolonged anxiety is more severe when there is an overwhelming sense of solitude and treating the symptoms can be helpful with that. In order to determine what treatments are best for you, talk to your doctor and your hearing specialist. Depending on what your hearing test shows, the best treatment for hearing loss or tinnitus may be hearing aids. And for anxiety, medication and other types of therapy could be necessary. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been demonstrated to help manage tinnitus.
Here’s to Your Health
We know, then, that anxiety can have very real, very serious consequences on your physical health and your mental health.
Isolation and cognitive decline have also been recognized as a consequence of hearing loss. When you add anxiety to the recipe, it makes for a very difficult situation. Fortunately, a favorable difference can be achieved by getting the correct treatment for both conditions. Anxiety doesn’t need 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.