Anxiety comes in two kinds. There’s common anxiety, that feeling you get when you’re coping with a crisis. Some people feel anxiety even when there are no particular situations or concerns to attach it to. They feel the anxiety frequently, regardless of what you happen to be doing or thinking about. It’s more of a general sensation that seems to be there all day. This second type is typically the kind of anxiety that’s less of a neuro-typical reaction and more of a mental health concern.
Both kinds of anxiety can be very unfavorable to the physical body. It can be especially damaging if you experience sustained or chronic anxiety. Your alert status is raised by all of the chemicals that are secreted when anxiety is experienced. It’s good in the short term, but damaging over a long period of time. Certain physical symptoms will start to manifest if anxiety can’t be managed and lasts for longer periods of time.
Physical Symptoms of Anxiety
Some symptoms of anxiety are:
- General pain or discomfort in your body
- Fatigue
- Loss of interest and depression
- Feeling as if you are coming out of your skin
- Queasiness
- Paranoia about impending disaster
- Panic attacks, shortness of breath and increased heart rate
But sometimes, anxiety manifests in unexpected ways. In fact, there are some fairly interesting ways that anxiety could actually wind up affecting things as apparently vague as your hearing. For example, 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. Elevated blood pressure is one of those. Known medically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have very negative effects on the body. It is, to make use of a colloquialism, not so great. High blood pressure has also been recognized to lead to hearing loss, dizziness and tinnitus.
- Dizziness: Prolonged anxiety can sometimes make you feel dizzy, which is an issue that may also stem from the ears. After all, the ears are generally responsible for your sense of balance (there are these three tubes in your inner ears which are controlling the sense of balance).
- Tinnitus: You probably understand that stress can cause the ringing in your ears to get worse, but did you know that there’s evidence that it can also cause the ringing in your ears to develop over time. This is called tinnitus (which can itself be caused by a lot of other factors). For a few, this could even manifest itself as a feeling that the ears are blocked or clogged.
Anxiety And Hearing Loss
Since this is a hearing website, we usually tend to give attention to, well, hearing. And how well you hear. So let’s talk a little about how anxiety impacts your hearing.
The solitude is the first and foremost concern. People tend to pull away from social activities when they suffer from hearing loss, tinnitus or balance issues. Perhaps you’ve experienced this with somebody you know. Perhaps one of your parents got tired of asking you to repeat yourself, or didn’t want to be embarrassed by not comprehending and so they stopped talking so much. Problems with balance present similar difficulties. It might affect your ability to walk or drive, which can be humiliating to admit to family and friends.
Social isolation is also associated with depression and anxiety in other ways. When you do not feel yourself, you won’t want to be with other people. Unfortunately, this can be somewhat of a loop where one feeds into the other. That sense of isolation can set in quickly and it can lead to a host of other, closely associated issues, such as decline of cognitive function. It can be even more difficult to overcome the effects of isolation if you’re dealing with hearing loss and anxiety.
Choosing The Right Treatment
Finding the correct treatment is significant especially given how much anxiety, hearing loss, tinnitus and isolation feed on each other.
All of the symptoms for these ailments can be assisted by getting treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. Connecting with other people has been shown to help alleviate both depression and anxiety. Chronic anxiety is more serious when there is a strong sense of separation and managing the symptoms can be helpful with that. In order to figure out what treatments will be most effective for your situation, check with your doctor and your hearing specialist. 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 kinds of therapy might be required. Tinnitus has also been found to be successfully treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We understand 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. In conjunction with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a difficult time. Fortunately, a positive difference can be accomplished 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 sooner you find treatment, the better.