October 11, 2018 - Vertigo
Hey folks, this is Dr. Sam and this is part three of my conversation of vertigo. I’m here in the Santa Fe National Forest taking a great hike. So I thought I would take a minute and we’ll finish up our conversation on this very serious condition.
When I work with vertigo the first thing that I talk about with people is their relationship to gravity – their sense of belonging to the earth. There are three things to consider in terms of our sense of gravity:
- Our ears, which we call our vestibular system. In the vestibular system – this is the inner ear – we have tiny bones that are like stones. The vestibular system is essentially our GPS system in terms of our balance mechanism.
- The second part of our gravity experience is our eyes. And what’s interesting is that for most of us today we have become over overfocused with our eyes, which means we’re tunneling our vision and we’re excluding our peripheral vision. I would blame this partially on digital device use, but by and large, our lifestyles are causing us to become more and more myopic. Unfortunately, when we do that, we suppress our vestibular function. And this is one of the causes of vertigo because we try to do all our balancing through our eyes and vision. One of the ways to expand our vestibular system is to expand dilate into our peripheral vision. So the more peripheral vision we engage, the more we engage our vestibular system.
- The third piece of the puzzle is our feet. And it’s very important that we sense and feel the bottom of our feet when we’re walking. What I’ve noticed with people is that because of our over-focalization, we are not aware of our feet when we’re walking. So small things that bring awareness to this connection, like putting a little lavender oil or Mexican lime oil on your feet and massaging them on a daily basis, can wake up the bottom of the feet and connect this relationship with your vestibular and visual system. This is really really important now in terms of our visual system.
Another skill that we need to have to avoid Vertigo is visual coordination. If you’ve had a trauma, for example, a lot of times one of your eyes will start wandering out or wandering in or you can even have a vertical split in your eyes which creates double vision. This can lead to a condition called convergence insufficiency which affects roughly 5 percent of the U.S. population suffers from. This is basically a problem of not being able to use both eyes together.
Another thing that happens in vertigo, and this is often triggered by trauma – especially a head trauma, is a midline shift in our vision. So if you think about your eyes in the middle of your face, when you’ve had some kind of trauma the middle of your vision can shift to your right or your left. And if this happens, it creates an imbalance in your GPS system and makes it difficult for your eyes to be able to steer your body through space.
Lastly, vertigo can be affected by something called visual neglect. This happens a lot if you’ve had a stroke, or lost part of your peripheral vision, so your visual field creates an imbalance in the peripheral vision. This imbalance throws off your GPS system in your eyes as well.
So to conclude, it’s important to think about the three components of vertigo and balancing – 1) the vestibular system and inner ear 2) feeling your feet and 3) slow down your vision and dilate into your peripheral vision to relax your nervous system. These are some of the beginning ways that you can neutralize some vertigo systems. Now, you can work on all of these through eye exercises. These eye exercises take time, think of it as a form of physical therapy, but over time it can help address the underlying causes of vertigo.
Thank you so much for tuning in. And until next time take good care.
Recommended: Eye Exercise Protocol for Vertigo