Anxiety comes in two forms. When you are coping with an emergency situation, that feeling that you have is known as common anxiety. Some people experience anxiety even when there aren’t any distinct situations or concerns to link it to. No matter what’s going on in their lives 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 type is generally 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. It can be especially damaging if you have sustained or chronic anxiety. Your alert status is heightened by all of the chemicals that are released when anxiety is experienced. It’s good in the short term, but damaging over extended periods of time. Over the long run, anxiety that can’t be dealt with or brought under control will begin to manifest in certain physical symptoms.
Bodily Symptoms of Anxiety
Some symptoms of anxiety are:
- General aches or soreness in your body
- Fear about impending crisis
- Depression and loss of interest in day to day activities
- Feeling as if you are coming out of your skin
- Queasiness
- A racing heart or difficulty breathing commonly connected to panic attacks
- Physical weakness
But persistent anxiety doesn’t always manifest in the ways that you would anticipate. In fact, there are some pretty interesting ways that anxiety could actually wind up impacting things as seemingly obscure as your hearing. For example, anxiety has been connected with:
- High Blood Pressure: And a few of the consequences of anxiety are not at all unexpected. In this case, we’re talking about elevated blood pressure. Known scientifically as hypertension, high blood pressure often has very negative effects on the body. It is, to make use of a colloquialism, bad news. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be brought about by high blood pressure.
- Dizziness: Dizziness, which can also be related to the ears, is commonly a symptom of prolonged anxiety. Keep in mind, the sense of balance is controlled by the ears (there are these three tubes inside of your inner ears which are controlling the sense of balance).
- Tinnitus: Did you realize that stress not only exacerbates tinnitus but that it can cause the development of that ringing. This is known as tinnitus (which, itself can have numerous other causes too). For some, this could even reveal itself as a feeling that the ears are blocked or clogged.
Anxiety And Hearing Loss
Because 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 spend a little bit of time talking about how hearing loss and anxiety can feed one another in some relatively disturbing ways.
First and foremost, there’s the solitude. People often withdraw from social experiences when they have hearing loss, tinnitus or balance troubles. Perhaps you’ve experienced this with someone you know. Maybe your mother or father got tired of asking you what you said, or didn’t want to deal with the embarrassment of not comprehending and so they stopped talking so much. The same holds true for balance issues. It could affect your ability to drive or even walk, which can be embarrassing to admit to family and friends.
There are also other ways anxiety and depression can lead to social isolation. Typically, you’re not going to be around people if you aren’t feeling like yourself. Unfortunately, this can be somewhat of a loop where one feeds into the other. The negative effects of isolation can happen rapidly and will trigger various other problems and can even result in mental decline. For someone who struggles with anxiety and hearing loss, fighting against that shift toward isolation can be even more challenging.
Figuring Out How to Effectively Manage Your Hearing Loss Troubles
Finding the proper treatment is important particularly given how much hearing loss, tinnitus, anxiety and isolation feed on each other.
All of the symptoms for these ailments can be assisted by obtaining treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. Interacting with other people has been shown to help relieve both depression and anxiety. Chronic anxiety is more serious when there is a strong sense of separation and dealing with the symptoms can be helpful with that. Consult with your general practitioner and hearing specialist to look at your possibilities for treatment. Hearing aids might be the best choice as part of your treatment depending on the results of your hearing exam. The most appropriate treatment for anxiety might involve therapy or medication. Tinnitus has also been shown to be successfully treated by 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 lead to isolation and mental decline. When you add anxiety to the recipe, it makes for a very difficult situation. Thankfully, treatments exist for both conditions, and obtaining that treatment can make a huge, positive difference. The health impacts of anxiety don’t need to be permanent. What anxiety does to your body does not have to be long lasting. The key is getting treatment as soon as possible.