There are two forms of anxiety. When you are involved with a crisis, that feeling that you get is known as common anxiety. Some individuals feel anxiety even when there are no specific situations or concerns to link it to. No matter what’s happening around them or what’s on their mind, they frequently feel anxiety. It’s more of a generalized sensation that seems to pervade the day. This second type is generally the kind of anxiety that’s less of a neuro-typical reaction and more of a mental health concern.
Regrettably, both kinds of anxiety are harmful for the human body. Extended periods of chronic anxiety can be particularly negative. When it’s anxious, your body secretes a myriad of chemicals that heighten your alert status. It’s a good thing in the short term, but harmful over a long period of time. Specific physical symptoms will begin to manifest if anxiety can’t be managed and lasts for longer periods of time.
Anxiety Has Distinct Bodily Symptoms
Symptoms of anxiety often consist of:
- Bodily pain
- Feeling like something terrible is about to occur
- Feeling like you are coming out of your skin
- Queasiness
- Fatigue
- A thumping heart or difficulty breathing often connected to panic attacks
- Depression and loss of interest in activities or daily life
But chronic anxiety doesn’t necessarily appear in the ways that you might predict. Anxiety can even impact obscure body functions like your hearing. As an example, anxiety has been linked to:
- High Blood Pressure: And then there are some ways that anxiety influences your body in precisely the way you’d expect it to. 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. High blood pressure has also been recognized to lead to hearing loss, dizziness and tinnitus.
- Tinnitus: Are you aware that stress not only worsens the ringing in your ears but that it can cause the development of that ringing. This is called tinnitus (which, itself can have a variety of other causes as well). For a few, this could even manifest itself as a feeling of blockage or clogging of the ears.
- Dizziness: Chronic anxiety can occasionally cause dizziness, which is a condition that may also be related to the ears. After all, the ears are generally responsible for your sense of balance (there are these three tubes inside of your inner ears that are controlling the sense of balance).
Anxiety And Hearing Loss
Generally on a hearing blog such as this we would normally concentrate on, well, hearing. And your ability to hear. So let’s talk a little about how your hearing is impacted by anxiety.
The solitude is the first and foremost issue. When someone suffers from hearing loss, tinnitus or even balance problems, they often pull away from social contact. You might have experienced this with your own relatives. Perhaps your mother or father got tired of asking you to repeat yourself, or didn’t want to deal with the embarrassment of not comprehending and so they stopped talking so much. Problems with balance present similar troubles. It might influence your ability to walk or drive, which can be embarrassing to admit to friends and family.
There are also other reasons why anxiety and depression can result in social isolation. When you don’t feel yourself, you won’t want to be around other people. Unfortunately, this can be somewhat of a circle where one feeds the other. The negative effects of isolation can happen rapidly and will trigger numerous other problems and can even result in cognitive decline. It can be even harder to fight the effects of isolation if you have hearing loss and anxiety.
Figuring Out How to Properly Treat Your Hearing Loss Issues
Getting the proper treatment is significant especially given how much hearing loss, tinnitus, anxiety and isolation feed on each other.
All of the symptoms for these conditions can be assisted by getting treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. And when it comes to anxiety and depression, interacting with others who can relate can be extremely helpful. Chronic anxiety is more severe when there is a strong sense of solitude and managing the symptoms can help with that. So that you can decide what treatments are best for you, talk to your doctor and your hearing specialist. Depending on the results of your hearing test, the best treatment for hearing loss or tinnitus might be hearing aids. And for anxiety, medication and other types of therapy may be required. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been proven to help manage tinnitus.
Here’s to Your Health
We understand, then, that anxiety can have very real, very severe repercussions for your physical health in addition to your mental health.
We also realize that hearing loss can lead to isolation and mental decline. Coupled with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a difficult time. Thankfully, we have treatments for both conditions, and getting that treatment can make a big, positive effect. Anxiety doesn’t need to have permanent effects on your body and the impact of anxiety on your body can be reversed. The key is finding treatment as soon as you can.