Vestibular injuries result in dizziness and imbalance with a risk of falls. In our previous posts we’ve talked about how vision, visual tricks, and proprioception (position sensing) can help you recover. When you feel off balance, you will tend to counter-surf, touch walls and doorways, and may even use a cane or walker to stay upright. This is the power of touch—it greatly helps restore balance. How does this work?
When you have an inner ear injury, you will often feel tilting or spinning feelings, but your sense of touch is not at all affected. This means you can harness this touch sense to restore your balance. For example, if your injury makes you drift to the right, you might smack the edge of doorways on the right as you try to pass through. Your right hand can push you away from the doorway as you go through, preventing a bump. This work-around can be trained to help you overcome your imbalance.
Your skin contains pressure sensors all over your body, so you can easily tell when you are leaning against a wall or pressing on a counter, for example. Try standing in front of a wall and pressing your hands against it lightly. Now lean toward the wall. Notice that the pressure sensation increases in your hands. Straighten up and the pressure also decreases. These changes tell you when your body is leaning forward or is upright. You can repeat this by touching a wall off to your side with one hand. Leaning toward the wall and then straightening gives you feedback in the form of pressure on your hand.
If your injury makes you drift to one side, you can learn to re-align by using light touch. Stand next to a long hallway wall on the side you tend to drift toward. Let’s use the left wall as an example. Place your left hand on the wall and walk, trying to keep the pressure on your hand exactly the same as you walk. If you feel yourself drifting toward the wall, push away and then again try to re-establish the same pressure. Once you get to the end of the wall, reverse direction by walking backward, again using the pressure on your hand as a target.
As you practice this, over and over, you will get better at keeping steady pressure on the hand. At that point you can strive for a lighter pressure, just gently touching the wall. Once this is easy, try just running your index finger along the wall, at first with heavier pressure, and then with lighter pressure. With time you will be able to walk stably by just tapping the finger along the wall.
Once you have learned to use touch in this way, you will be much more stable. You can make the exercise harder by walking with your eyes closed or with the lights off. The goal is to be able to walk with stability in any conditions, and can usually be achieved in a few weeks of practice.
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