Anxiety And Your Hearing

There are two kinds of anxiety. When you are dealing with an emergency situation, that feeling that you get is known as common anxiety. Some individuals experience anxiety even when there are no specific situations or concerns to connect it to. No matter what's going on in their lives or what they're thinking about, they often feel anxiety. It's just there in the background throughout the day. This type of anxiety is usually more of a mental health problem than a neurological reaction.

Unfortunately, both types of anxiety are harmful for the human body. It can be particularly harmful if you experience sustained or chronic anxiety. When it feels anxiety, your body secretes all sorts of chemicals that heighten your alert status. For short periods, when you genuinely require them, these chemicals are good but they can be damaging if they are present over longer time periods. Specific physical symptoms will begin to manifest if anxiety can't be managed and lasts for longer periods of time.

Anxiety Has Distinct Physical Symptoms

Symptoms of anxiety typically include:

• Panic attacks, shortness of breath and raised heart rate
• Bodily discomfort
• A feeling of being agitated or irritated
• Nausea
• Depression and loss of interest in day to day activities
• Paranoia about impending disaster
• Tiredness

But sometimes, anxiety is experienced in surprising ways. Anxiety can even impact obscure body functions like your hearing. For instance, anxiety has been connected with:

• Tinnitus: Are you aware that stress not only worsens tinnitus but that it can also be responsible for the onset of that ringing. This is known as tinnitus (which can itself be caused by many other factors). In certain situations, the ears can feel clogged or blocked (it's staggering what anxiety can do).
• Dizziness: Chronic anxiety can sometimes cause dizziness, which is an issue that may also be related to the ears. Keep in mind, your sense of balance is governed by the ears (there are these three tubes inside of your inner ears which are regulating the sense of balance).
• High Blood Pressure: And then there are a few ways that anxiety affects your body in exactly the way you’d expect it to. Elevated blood pressure is one of those. Known scientifically as hypertension, high blood pressure often has extremely adverse effects on the body. It is, to make use of a colloquialism, not so great. Dizziness, hearing loss and tinnitus can also be triggered by high blood pressure.

Hearing Loss And Anxiety

Since this is a hearing website, we typically tend to concentrate on, well, the ears. And how well you hear. With that in mind, you’ll excuse us if we spend a little bit of time talking about how hearing loss and anxiety can feed each other in some relatively disconcerting ways.

The solitude is the primary issue. When someone suffers from tinnitus, hearing loss or even balance problems, they often pull away from social interactions. Perhaps you've seen this with someone you know. Maybe a relative just stopped talking as much because they were embarrassed by having to constantly repeat themselves. The same holds true for balance problems. It might affect your ability to walk or drive, which can be humiliating to admit to friends and family.

Social isolation is also linked to depression and anxiety for other reasons. Normally, you're not going to be around anyone if you aren't feeling like yourself. Unfortunately, this can be somewhat of a loop where one feeds into the other. The negative effects of isolation can happen rapidly and will result in various other issues and can even result in mental decline. It can be even harder to combat the effects of isolation if you're dealing with hearing loss and anxiety.

Choosing The Appropriate Treatment

Getting the proper treatment is significant especially given how much hearing loss, tinnitus, anxiety and isolation feed on each other.

If tinnitus and hearing loss are symptoms you're struggling with, getting correct treatment for them can also assist with your other symptoms. Interacting with others has been shown to help relieve both anxiety and depression. Chronic anxiety is more serious when there is a strong sense of isolation and treating the symptoms can help with that. In order to determine what treatments will be most effective for your situation, check with 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 kinds of therapy might be necessary. Tinnitus has also been shown to be successfully treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Here’s to Your Health

We know, then, that anxiety can have very real, very severe repercussions on your physical health in addition to your mental health.

We also know that hearing loss can lead to isolation and cognitive decline. When you add anxiety to the recipe, it makes for a very difficult situation. Luckily, we have treatments for both conditions, and obtaining 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 counteracted. The sooner you find treatment, the better.