Anxiety comes in two kinds. When you are dealing with a crisis, that feeling that you get is known as common anxiety. And then you can have the kind of anxiety that isn’t really linked to any one event or concern. No matter what’s happening in their lives or what they’re thinking about, they frequently feel anxiety. It’s more of a generalized sensation that seems to pervade the day. This kind of anxiety is normally more of a mental health problem than a neurological response.
Unfortunately, both types of anxiety are harmful for the human body. It can be particularly damaging if you have prolonged or chronic anxiety. When it feels anxiety, your body produces all kinds of chemicals that raise your alert status. For short periods, when you really require them, these chemicals are good but they can be harmful if they are produced over longer time periods. Specific physical symptoms will begin 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:
- Nausea
- Depression and loss of interest in activities or daily life
- Feeling agitated or irritated
- Fear about approaching crisis
- Exhaustion
- Overall aches or discomfort in your body
- Panic attacks, difficulty breathing and increased heart rate
But in some cases, anxiety is experienced in unexpected ways. Anxiety can even impact vague body functions such as your hearing. As an example, anxiety has been connected with:
- Tinnitus: You probably understand that stress can make the ringing your ears worse, but did you know that there is evidence that it can also cause the ringing in your ears to progress over time. This is called tinnitus (which, itself can have any number of other causes as well). For a few, this may even reveal itself as a feeling that the ears are blocked or clogged.
- Dizziness: Persistent anxiety can occasionally make you feel dizzy, which is a condition that could also stem from the ears. After all, the ears are typically responsible for your sense of balance (there are these three tubes in your inner ears which are regulating the sense of balance).
- High Blood Pressure: And then there are a few ways that anxiety impacts your body in exactly the way you’d expect it to. In this case, we’re talking about elevated blood pressure. Known medically as hypertension, high blood pressure often has really 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, tinnitus and dizziness.
Hearing Loss And Anxiety
Since this is a hearing website, we typically tend to concentrate on, well, hearing. And how well you hear. Keeping that in mind, you’ll excuse us if we spend a little bit of time talking about how anxiety and hearing loss can influence one another in some slightly disconcerting ways.
The solitude is the first and foremost concern. When someone has hearing loss, tinnitus or even balance issues, they tend to withdraw from social interactions. You might have seen this in your own relatives. Perhaps one of your parents 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. The same goes for balance issues. It might influence your ability to drive or even walk, which can be embarrassing to admit to friends and family.
Social isolation is also linked to anxiety and depression in other ways. When you do not feel yourself, you don’t want to be with others. Sadly, one can end up feeding the other and can become an unhealthy loop. The negative effects of isolation can occur quickly and will trigger numerous other issues and can even result in mental decline. It can be even more challenging to combat the effects of isolation if you’re dealing with hearing loss and anxiety.
Determining How to Effectively Treat Your Hearing Loss Issues
Getting the proper treatment is significant especially given how much anxiety, hearing loss, tinnitus and isolation feed each other.
All of the symptoms for these disorders can be helped 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 extremely helpful. Chronic anxiety is more severe when there is a strong sense of solitude and treating the symptoms can help with that. Check with your general practitioner and hearing specialist to examine your options for treatment. Hearing aids might be the best option as part of your treatment depending on what your hearing test reveals. The most appropriate treatment for anxiety may include medication or therapy. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been proven to help deal with tinnitus.
Here’s to Your Health
We recognize, then, that anxiety can have very real, very severe repercussions for your physical health in addition to your mental health.
We also know that hearing loss can result in isolation and cognitive decline. In conjunction with anxiety, that’s a recipe for, well, a difficult time. Fortunately, a positive difference can be achieved by getting the correct treatment for both conditions. Anxiety doesn’t have to have long lasting effects on your body and the impact of anxiety on your body can be reversed. The key is getting treatment as soon as possible.