What is vertigo?
As described on the NHS website, vertigo feels like you or everything around you is spinning – enough to affect your balance. It’s more than just feeling dizzy. A vertigo attack can last from a few seconds to hours. If you have severe vertigo, it can last for many days or months.
Vertigo is basically the bodies loss of its spatial space, this is our bodies sense of where we are in relation to everything else. Our spatial sense works through our eyes and ears – it’s the check and balance of spatial awareness to get the brain to tell the right muscles to work to keep the body moving and upright. The eyes seek out the horizon as they try to get a sense of evenness/levelness as a reference point. Vertigo is like a safety mode, it creates dizziness to make you stop, whilst it tries to get balanced.
What causes vertigo?
Inside our ears you will find crystals that are made from calcium carbonate. When our head is misaligned the crystals in our ears, can get pushed onto one side of the ear canals. If your head position is forward and down, the inner ears may read this as you are going down hill.
If your head is tilted to the right the crystals will get sloshed over to the right the inner ear is going to send signals to say we are falling to the right and that we need to adjust for that.
Anytime the head position is compromised so too is the inner ear. It becomes a battle between what the eyes are seeing and what the inner ear is telling it. If they are both saying different things, the eyes are always going to override it until there is some fatigued in the muscles, itgoes into survival mode and that is when the vertigo kicks in. It’s as if the body is saying we are going to stop you in your tracks so we can try and get your ears and eyes to match back up.
What to avoid if you have vertigo
If you experience vertigo symptoms on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to start recording what you were doing before the symptoms arrived, this could be lying down on your back without a pillow or lying on your stomach. If for example lying down without a pillow causes symptoms this could be due to a change in head position especially if your head is usually in a head forward position when upright. When following the exercises in the video below, be mindful that it can sometimes take a moment or two for the eyes and ears to adjust, if the dizziness is worse or you know being in that position makes your symptoms worse, just move onto the next exercise.
What to do if you have vertigo
As mentioned above our head position can set off/affect vertigo symptoms, whilst its worth looking at your head position to see if it’s in a head forward, tilting or rotating to the side, you will also need to take a look at what position the rest of the body is in. If your pelvis position is not right this needs to be fixed before the head can move back, the Egoscue method is a full body approach, as the body is a unit!
Your head position usually follows what your hips/pelvis are or are not doing. As an example, when your hips start to bail forward the rest of the body adjusts to this and starts to compensate for this, the shoulders start to round, head will go forward. The body is going to do everything it can to resist the pull of gravity to stop you from toppling over, the muscles are going to be working overtime to try and keep the body upright!
The exercises suggested in the video above won’t help everyone but give them a go and see what helps and what doesn’t.
Source – https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vertigo/