In recent posts we’ve been discussing how to recover from a balance injury by using vision and visual tricks. This gives you a boost on your path to recovery, but vision alone is not enough. Your balance reflexes control the movement and position of your arms and legs, and feedback from your limbs is important, especially in low light conditions. Let’s explore how this helps you recover.
We can start with an exercise. Close your eyes and then try to sense where your right hand is. You can easily feel whether it is open or closed in a fist, resting on another limb or on a surface. Now raise it above your shoulder and note how you can tell how high it is. Without opening your eyes, you can easily move it back to where it started. This ability to tell where your limbs are in space is called proprioception. It depends on sensors in your limbs, within the joints, tendons, and muscles, that constantly send information to your brain about where the limb is in space and how it relates to the position of the rest of your body.
When you have a vestibular loss, the inner ears send incorrect information to your limbs. You can feel as if you are being pulled to one side, and the brain then sends reflex responses to your limbs to make them resist this fake fall. Unfortunately, since your body is not actually being pulled to the side, resisting this can make you fall to the opposite side. Seeing the world helps you know when your head and body are upright, so you can avoid this inappropriate tilting. However, when you close your eyes or are in darkness you may start to tip, and if your injury is new, you can fall completely over.
To overcome this imbalance, you can harness the power of proprioception. Proprioception is not impaired when you have a balance injury, so even with your eyes closed you will still feel where your limbs are in space. After a vestibular injury, practice closing your eyes and letting the limbs and back tell you when you are perfectly upright. Your injury can give you a tilting or spinning feeling in your head, but your limbs can still feel when they are upright and stable. Sitting in front of a mirror, use your eyes to help you reach a perfectly upright posture. Then close your eyes and concentrate on your neck and limbs to resist the spinning feeling and keep upright. Open your eyes as needed to give feedback—if you find your head or body tilted, correct your posture, and then close the eyes and try to maintain it. As you try to override the false sensation of tilt or spinning coming from your ear injury, you will learn to boost proprioception. This will gradually become a habit and will help you overcome the tendency to drift or fall when you are in the dark.
In our next post, we’ll discuss how the sense of touch also helps recovery.
Ending Vertigo Today 