Heightened levels of stress can negatively affect various aspects of your health, especially if you’re chronically stressed. One such aspect is your hearing health. Let’s explore this connection more in-depth.
What Is Stress?
Known as the “fight or flight” response, stress is a natural bodily reaction to emotional or physical demands in your environment, in which your body floods with adrenaline to meet those demands. Adrenaline will impact your heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, muscular strength and endurance and pain sensitivity, the purpose of these functions being to give you a burst of strength and speed to either “fight or fly” in response to a perceived threat.
That said, prolonged exposure to stress can wreak havoc on your health in a myriad of ways. It can lead to, among other things, high blood pressure, a weakened immune system, insomnia, panic attacks, migraines, anxiety, heart disease and, as we’ll discuss below, hearing loss and tinnitus.
How Does Stress Impact Hearing Health?
In your inner ear is an organ called the cochlea. The cochlea encodes sound waves into electrical signals, which it transmits to the brain to be interpreted as sound. The way it encodes these sound waves is through the rippling movements of tiny hair-like sensory cells that line the inside of the cochlea. In essence, these hair cells are absolutely critical to our ability to hear sounds.
These hair cells also rely on a healthy supply of oxygenated blood to function. The stress response increases blood pressure and diverts that blood to your muscles. While this gives you a temporary burst of strength, it also puts tremendous strain on the delicate hair cells. They might become damaged or wither away as a result, and unlike other sensory cells in your body, damaged cochlear hair cells will not repair themselves or grow back.
What Happens If Hair Cells Die?
When cochlear hair cells die, they can no longer collect, encode, and transmit sound information to the brain, so the information never reaches the brain at all. Your brain may react in one of two ways (or a combination of both):
- Hearing loss. If the sound information never reaches your brain, you do not hear it. This is how hearing loss occurs. When hearing loss results from damage to the cochlea, it’s called sensorineural hearing loss.
- Tinnitus. If your brain notices that it’s not receiving sound information but knows it should be, it may generate phantom sounds to fill in the blanks. This phantom sound is called tinnitus, and it can sound like a ringing, buzzing, humming or any number of sounds.
More About Stress and Tinnitus
There is a well-documented connection between stress and tinnitus. Stress activates various neural and hormonal pathways in addition to circulatory pathways, and this is tied to tinnitus because tinnitus is so neural in nature. Additionally, the heightened sense of awareness that comes with the stress response may also cause you to perceive tinnitus more prominently than you do normally, causing a positive feedback cycle where tinnitus and stress make each other worse.
Another connection between stress and tinnitus is in your jaw. Stress-induced muscle tension around the jaw puts immense pressure on your temporomandibular (TM) joint, a hinge joint that connects the jawbone to the skull. The TM joint sits right next to the ear, and they share a number of nerve connections. Tightness, strain and inflammation in the TM joint can directly impact the ear.
To learn more or to schedule an appointment with our hearing loss and tinnitus experts, contact Torrance Audiology today.
