Hearing is tightly connected with our overall health...
…but the full extent of this two-way relationship is not widely appreciated. That’s because hearing is part of a complex network of different interactions between our body, mind, emotions and the environment. This makes it very difficult to work out where one aspect of our wellbeing begins and another one ends.
We could summarise the relationship between hearing and our health like this:
It’s a continuous circle...
in which hearing depends on our physical wellbeing, our physical wellbeing is influenced by our emotional and psychological wellbeing, and our emotional and psychological wellbeing is affected by our hearing.
This section explores these fascinating connections more deeply and why it makes good sense to keep our hearing performing at its optimum.
How Physical Wellbeing Affects Our Hearing
We normally think of ears as the flappy bits of cartilage that stick out from the side of our head. In reality, our ears are ‘precision-engineered’ machines, most of it hidden deep inside our skull where they are protected by the hardest bone in the human body, the petrous (‘stone-like’) part of the temporal bone.
From there our ears capture infinitesimal vibrations in the air, some smaller than a hydrogen of atom. They split all these vibrations out into individual components ready for the brain to make sense of all these vibrations. We call this ‘making sense’ sound.
Like any ‘precision-engineered’ machine, ears can only function at their best if everything is performing as well as possible. That means our ears need:
Anything that affects one of more of these aspects of our health can therefore potentially affect our hearing too.
Let’s take a closer look at these three areas of our physical health in relation to our hearing.
1. Blood and oxygen reaching the ear
The inner ear (or “cochlea”) is the invisible part of our ear, deeply embedded within the skull. It’s the bit of the ear in the diagram below shaped like the purple snail shell. In fact, “cochlea” literally means ‘snail’ in Greek. Our cochlea sends sound up to the brain as nerve signals.
The cochlea needs a rich and continuous supply of blood and oxygen to do its job properly. That means that anything which affects our body’s blood supply (such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes or B12 deficiency) OR our oxygen supply (such as sleep apnoea or C.O.P.D.) can potentially compromise our hearing too, especially if the underlying health condition is left untreated for a long time.
This is why a healthy diet and regular exercise is just as important for our hearing as it is for other aspects of our health.
2. Energy production (metabolism)
Our ears are on duty 24/7. They never sleep, and they never take a holiday because our hearing must always be ready for any and every eventuality in the environment, no matter how quickly the situation changes. They’re like information gathering intelligence officers, feeding every sound up to the brain in case it’s relevant.
This means our ears need a constant supply of energy. Anything that compromises how much energy our body can produce when we need it will affect both our hearing and our listening ability.
This may be the reason why insulin resistance and diabetes are known risk factors for reduced hearing. It’s the ears’ equivalent of trying to climb up a hill when we’ve ‘run out of steam’.
But it’s not just our ears that need a good supply of energy.
When the brain can’t get enough energy, it becomes harder for us to concentrate. This makes listening more tiring, and individual voices harder to tune into. We find this especially true in more challenging environments, such as the background noise of restaurants and car journeys.
The flip-side of this is that when we hear better, we actually reduce our brain’s energy consumption because the brain is not spending as much energy trying to ‘figure things out’.
3. Chemical Balance
Chemicals are the body’s building blocks. We’re most familiar with these chemicals through things like vitamins, proteins and supplements.
If we have too much of one chemical, or not enough of another, the body won’t have the right balance of ingredients to keep it healthy. The body constantly analyses what we currently need more or less of, altering itself to do the best job it can with the ingredients it has to work with.
It’s a bit like hosting a dinner party but realising we’re out of eggs. We need them for our recipe, so what do we do? We have to adapt to work with what we’ve got… and hope it still tastes OK.
Some of the chemicals the body needs may have familiar names, like calcium, iron, magnesium and vitamins. We get these from our diet and supplements. But other chemicals that our ears rely on may be less well-known, such as vasopressin, pepsin and BDNF. Yet they all directly or indirectly impact on our hearing.
Take pepsin, for example. It’s a chemical that’s normally found in our stomachs. It helps us to digest our food. But if we have acid reflux, this chemical can get pushed up into the back of our throats, triggering inflammation near the eustachian tube (see diagram above, shown as a red tube pointing downwards) that connects our ears to our throat and nose. Indeed, Pepsin has even been found in some types of ear infections, which suggests that treating the underlying stomach problem might reduce the ear problem too.
Conclusion
These examples represent just a tiny fraction of how our overall physical health can impact our hearing, and we’re learning more about those ‘hidden connections’ all the time.
The moral of the story is that looking after our physical health—through healthy eating, regular exercise, good sleep, good hygiene and avoiding toxins—all contribute to keeping our hearing healthy too.
Next, we’ll look at how hearing can affect our overall wellbeing.
