May 21, 2021 - EyeClarity Podcast
Do you ever suffer dizziness, double vision, sea sickness, or balance issues? In this episode, I discuss the relationship between the vestibular system and the visual system. They are so intertwined! If you want to learn more how the the brain, the eyes, and the vestibular system play together, please enjoy this presentation.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
vestibular system, eyes, vestibular, brain, cerebellum, important, peripheral vision, called, astigmatism, seconds, stigmatism, head, inner ear, movements, boost, underactive, balance, create, part, week
00:05
Good evening. Good. Good afternoon. Good morning, wherever you are. I’d like to welcome you to week number three. And it’s great to be here. I hope that you find tonight’s class. Well, let’s just say informative, exciting, and eye opening. So, adventures in Gravity, this is a very important topic. And I want to spend some time discussing the connection between our inner ear and our eye, the ear eye connection or better known as the vestibular visual connection. So, the vestibular system is part of our, our ear auditory anatomy, and specifically, we’re talking about the inner ear, the inner ear is critically important in our ability to orient in the world. And it is very connected to our eyes. And a lot of the situations that you have going on, could be at some level connected to the vestibular issues that we all go through. So, in this first slide, I define the vestibular system as the inner ear, and it’s made up of the like little stones or bones. In the inner ear, we have the labyrinth, and we have the ear receptors. And it’s these ear receptors that send information via the auditory nerve to a part of the brain called the cerebellum. And the cerebellum is also known as the little brain. And the cerebellum is responsible for our coordination, our precision and timing of movements, as well as motor learning. And if you watch the video that I sent you, on week three, there’s a bilateral integration, where you’re moving your arms and your legs and your head in your eyes. That is activating the connection between your vestibular system and your cerebellum. Now, part of the receptors that send information from the auditory nerve also go to another part of the brain called the survival brain now the survival brain. We touched into that in week one with the Moro reflex, the starfish, the morrow is part of our startle response. And the brainstem is the part of our brain that helps us navigate the fight flight freeze response. And you may recall that in the hierarchy of brain function, we start off operating from our reptilian brain, the survival brain, then we move to the cerebellum. And then finally, we move to the frontal brain called the cerebral cortex. So if we move on the receptors in these two brain centers, meaning the cerebellum and the brainstem actually then send information both to the eye muscles and to our cerebral cortex, now the function of the cerebral cortex. It’s been known as our higher brain center, and it’s designed for things like perception, sensation, memory, associations, thought, and voluntary physical action. Some have coined it the executive brain function, but you can see how involved the vestibular system is
04:45
in our overall brain health. Now the vestibular system is a sensory system that is responsible for providing our brain with information about Motion, head position, spatial orientation, that’s our depth perception. It’s also involved in other motor functions that help us stabilize our head and body during movement. It’s also important in our balance and our posture. That’s the vestibular system is essential for our normal movement in equilibrium. And just a side note here, because some of you have asked questions about a stigmatism that a lot of times a stigmatism occurs when there is an irregularity in our posture, or head position, so let’s say we, we might tilt our head to one side or the other, or we have a tight set of neck muscles. This can be the start of astigmatism, that will show up in the eye. And of course, then the eye doctor is correcting you for the astigmatism. So, it’s embedding that that postural dysfunction that we started moving into. So that’s creating that irregular blur, where the muscles in the eye are not working equally and one set of muscles may be working more than another and this creates the cylinder, the axis of astigmatism in our visual field. So, this, again, is another validation on how a stigmatism many times starts in the body. And the eye doctor is just embedding it in the eye by measuring it in giving you a lens. But the vestibular system is very connected to us to our overall eye prescription. I’ll get to that in a minute. There’s a test that practitioners use, I’ve used it quite a bit. It’s called the vestibular ocular reflex test. And this test measures the hookup between the eyes and the inner ear. And it’s done by spinning three times in each direction, with eyes open, and then with eyes closed, and then having the practitioner shine a small pen light into the eyes. To see oscillating movements, we call this nystagmus movements. And the nystagmus movements should last between 10 to 15 seconds. If they last less than 10 seconds. This suggests an underactive vestibular system. If more than 15 seconds, then this is an overactive vestibular system. Now, what I have found in testing 10,000 20,000 patients is that most people are in an underactive vestibular system, kind of a situation. I would call it vestibular insufficiency. And the only times I really see an overactive vestibular system if somebody has just had a trauma. So, let’s bring in some of the issues that you may be dealing with. Let’s start first with myopia. myopia. Wearing progressive lenses being overcorrected. Whether you’re near sighted or farsighted, teaches our eyes and brain to suppress our peripheral vision. This may be the most important piece of information I give you tonight. And that is that our peripheral vision is one of the keys that develops an underactive vestibular system. And you know how you can measure your vestibular system is to balance with eyes open on each foot and see how long you do that you should be able to do that for maybe about 30 seconds, maybe a minute, and then do the same balance with your eyes closed. And invariably, you’ll probably fall over within five to 10 seconds. So that tells you the vestibular system, which takes over when your eyes are closed, is under acting. And through all our screen time and other things, we develop a suppression in our peripheral vision. And this begins to shut down our vestibular function.
09:33
And therefore, things like the exercise glasses, you know where you’re wearing the opposite prescription, and it makes things blurry, and you might feel disoriented or uncomfortable. Actually, what that’s doing is its expanding your peripheral vision. So, it turns on the vestibular system. So blurry is your ally in turning on the vestibular system wearing the eyepatch, playing with each eye is another way to start turning on the vestibular system. Because you see what happens is, is when your vestibular system is under acting, your eyeballs, take over the whole show, and they’re overacting. Unfortunately, when they’re overacting, they begin to deteriorate from all the stress that we put into our eyes to try to orient balance, have equilibrium, and so on and so forth. So, I just said about balanced with eyes closed. This is a way to start to turn the vestibular system back on. And the way you do it, is you practice balancing on one foot with the eyes closed for 30 seconds, so eventually feels effortless. So, you stand on your right foot, then you stand on your left foot. And your focus needs to be internally at about your belly button. In fact, you can put your hands on your belly button. And this can give you the anchor that you need to be able to develop a healthy vestibular system. And I’m willing to bet that most of you when you try to balance on each foot with eyes closed, you’re unable to do it for 30 seconds, which says that your vestibular system is under acting, and your visual system is doing all the work. Alright, so what are some of the remedies that you can do to start boosting your vestibular function, obviously the exercises that I’ve showed you, but the diet is so important, you know, manures disease, I don’t know if anybody has manures disease. But if you suffer dizziness, vertigo, disorientation, I find improving the diet is one of the best ways to start to reduce these kinds of symptoms. So, we’re talking omega three fatty acids, foods that contain riboflavin have been found to boost vestibular health. These would be foods like spinach, chard, mushrooms, boost your magnesium levels, you know, 75% of the culture due to soil depletion is not getting magnesium. Take your magnesium in the evening. And it’ll help you sleep. And it’ll boost many, many functions on a cellular level, but most people are deficient in magnesium. Vitamin d3 is so important on so many levels, you know, it’s a pro hormone that really is helpful for your immune system. And if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, most likely, in the in the wintertime, you’re not getting enough vitamin d3 anyway. And it’s so important for your immune health. But it’s also very important for your vestibular health. And then there’s certain foods like asparagus, red beets, squash, carrots, you know, the rainbow diet, make sure you’re getting plenty of those based on what you know what you can get locally. And finally boost your microbiome. You know, if you’re suffering low to moderate grade inflammation, it’s going to affect the inflammatory response in the nerves. And this is also going to create static between the vestibular system and the brain. So, Feldenkrais exercises have also been helpful for reducing vestibular dysfunction.
14:19
Obviously, the functional vision exercises that I’m showing you that we’re going to do tonight and you’re going to do this week can be helpful. aroma therapy. So next week, we’re going to be spending doing a deep dive on aroma therapy. And there’s certain essential oils that are very supportive in improving vestibular function. Your color therapy, especially the green, blue, green, blue, and violet, I would do two to five minutes of each of those colors every day, maybe twice today. This is very calming for your nervous system for your brain. It opens your peripheral vision. So, it’s it’s an effective therapy that can support vestibular health. And then again, as I repeat reducing inflammation, toxicity, learning to self-regulate balanced the autonomic nervous system. These are important because your stress level is going to make the vestibular system work in a more dysfunctional way. Okay, so I got a ton of questions on different, you know, syndromes and maladies. So, I think I want to review a couple of slides before I get to your Q&A. Why are our eyes letting us down? Well, in this slide, as you can see, the eye is made up of an incredible concentration of micro capillary blood vessels. And as we age, we lose our circulation ability. And again, it can be due to a variety of different things, visual stress, trauma, toxicities, systemic imbalances, endocrine imbalances, whatever it is, we are creating a starvation and a lack of nourishment on a cellular level in the eyes. So eventually, this is going to lead to oxidative stress, which then is going to create pathologies in the eyes, dry eye, cataracts, macular degeneration, or just an overall deterioration every year when you go to your eye doctor. So, what we’re trying to create in this class, is eye tissue regeneration.
17:00
Thank you for listening. I hope you learned something from the eye clarity podcast show today. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to subscribe on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review. see you here next time.
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