Anxiety comes in two varieties. When you are involved with an emergency situation, that feeling that you get is known as common anxiety. Some individuals experience anxiety even when there aren’t any particular events or worries to link it to. No matter what’s going on around them or what they’re thinking about, they frequently feel anxiety. It’s just present in the background throughout the day. This kind of anxiety is normally more of a mental health problem than a neurological response.
Both kinds of anxiety can be very damaging to the physical body. Long periods of persistent anxiety can be especially bad. When it feels anxiety, your body secretes all kinds of chemicals that raise your alert status. It’s good in the short term, but harmful over a long period of time. Certain physical symptoms will start to manifest if anxiety can’t be treated and remains for longer periods of time.
Physical Symptoms of Anxiety
Some symptoms of anxiety are:
- Feeling agitated or aggravated
- A thumping heart or shortness of breath often associated with panic attacks
- Nausea
- Feeling like something horrible is about to happen
- Melancholy and loss of interest in day to day activities
- General pain or discomfort in your body
- Physical weakness
But chronic anxiety doesn’t always appear in the ways that you might anticipate. Anxiety can even impact vague body functions like 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. Elevated blood pressure is one of those. Known medically as hypertension, high blood pressure can have really negative effects on the body. It is, to make use of a colloquialism, not so great. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be caused by high blood pressure.
- Dizziness: Dizziness, which can also be caused by the ears, is often a symptom of prolonged anxiety. After all, the ears are generally responsible for your sense of balance (there are these three tubes in your inner ears which are regulating 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 progress over time. This is called tinnitus (which, itself can have numerous other causes as well). In some situations, the ears can feel blocked or clogged (it’s staggering what anxiety can do).
Anxiety And Hearing Loss
Because this is a hearing website, we typically tend to focus on, well, the ears. And your ability to hear. So let’s talk a little about how anxiety impacts your hearing.
To start with, there’s the solitude. When a person suffers from tinnitus, hearing loss or even balance problems, they tend to distance themselves from social interactions. You may have seen this in your own relatives. Maybe one of your parents got tired of asking you what you said, or didn’t want to be embarrassed by not understanding and so they withdrew from conversations. The same holds true for balance issues. It may affect your ability to walk or drive, which can be humiliating to admit to friends and family.
Social isolation is also associated with depression and anxiety in other ways. Typically, you’re not going to be around anyone if you’re not feeling like yourself. Sadly, one can wind up feeding the other and can become an unhealthy loop. The negative impact of isolation can occur rapidly and will trigger various other issues 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 Effectively Treat Your Hearing Loss Issues
Hearing Loss, Tinnitus, anxiety and isolation can all feed each other. That’s why finding the best treatment is so crucial.
All of the symptoms for these ailments can be assisted by obtaining treatment for your tinnitus and hearing loss. Connecting with others has been shown to help relieve both anxiety and depression. Prolonged anxiety is more serious when there is an overwhelming sense of separation and managing the symptoms can help with that. Consult your general practitioner and hearing specialist to look at your options for treatment. Hearing aids might be the best option as part of your treatment depending on the results of your hearing exam. The most appropriate treatment for anxiety may include therapy or medication. Tinnitus has also been shown to be successfully treated by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Here’s to Your Health
We recognize, then, that anxiety can have very real, very serious consequences on your physical health and your mental health.
Isolation and cognitive decline have also been shown as a repercussion of hearing loss. 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. The health affects of anxiety don’t have to be permanent. The effect of anxiety on your body does not need to be long lasting. The sooner you get treatment, the better.