There are two types of anxiety. You can have common anxiety, that feeling you get when you’re coping with an emergency situation. Some people feel anxiety even when there are no specific events or worries to link 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 second form is usually the type of anxiety that’s not so much a neuro-typical reaction and more of a mental health problem.
Both types of anxiety can be very detrimental to the physical body. It can be especially damaging if you have prolonged or chronic anxiety. When it’s anxious, your body releases all sorts of chemicals that heighten your alert status. For short periods, when you really require them, these chemicals are good but they can be damaging if they are produced over longer time periods. Over time, anxiety that can’t be managed or controlled will begin to manifest in distinct physical symptoms.
Anxiety Has Distinct Physical Symptoms
Some symptoms of anxiety are:
- General aches or discomfort in your body
- Loss of interest and depression
- A thumping heart or shortness of breath typically connected to panic attacks
- Exhaustion
- Feeling agitated or aggravated
- Nausea
- A feeling that something dreadful is about to happen
But sometimes, anxiety is experienced in unexpected ways. Anxiety can even impact obscure body functions including your hearing. For example, anxiety has been associated with:
- High Blood Pressure: And some of the effects of anxiety are not at all surprising. In this case, we’re talking about elevated blood pressure. Known scientifically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have very adverse effects on the body. It’s certainly not good. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be triggered by high blood pressure.
- Tinnitus: You probably know that stress can cause the ringing in your ears to get worse, but did you realize that there’s evidence that it can also cause the ringing in your ears to develop over time. This is called tinnitus (which, itself can have many other causes too). For a few, this might even reveal itself as a feeling that the ears are blocked or clogged.
- Dizziness: Dizziness, which can also be caused by the ears, is commonly a symptom of prolonged anxiety. Do not forget, the sense of balance is controlled by the ears (there are these three tubes in your inner ears that are controlling the sense of balance).
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Because this is a hearing website, we usually tend to concentrate on, well, hearing. And your ability to hear. Keeping that in mind, you’ll excuse us if we take a little time to talk about how anxiety and hearing loss can influence one another in some fairly disturbing ways.
The solitude is the primary concern. When a person suffers from hearing loss, tinnitus or even balance problems, they tend to distance themselves from social contact. You might 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 comprehending and so they withdrew from conversations. Problems with balance come with similar difficulties. It can be difficult to admit to your friends and family that you have a difficult time driving or even walking because you’re experiencing balance troubles.
Social isolation is also associated with anxiety and depression for other reasons. When you do not feel like yourself, you don’t want to be with other people. Sadly, one can end up feeding the other and can turn into an unhealthy loop. That feeling of isolation can develop quickly and it can lead to a number of other, closely related problems, such as decline of cognitive function. For someone who suffers from anxiety and hearing loss, battling against that move toward isolation can be even more challenging.
Discovering The Appropriate Treatment
Getting the correct treatment is important especially given how much hearing loss, tinnitus, anxiety 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. Interacting with others has been demonstrated to help alleviate both depression and anxiety. Certainly, managing these symptoms can help with the sense of isolation that might make persistent anxiety more extreme. So that you can decide what treatments are best for you, check with your doctor and your hearing specialist. Depending on the results of your hearing test, the right treatment for hearing loss or tinnitus could involve hearing aids. The most appropriate treatment for anxiety might include medication or therapy. Tinnitus has also been shown to be successfully treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We recognize 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. When you add anxiety to the recipe, you can have a pretty difficult situation. Fortunately, a favorable 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 be long lasting. The sooner you find treatment, the better.
