While common, dizziness isn’t normal.
Do you feel dizzy when you go from laying to sitting?
Or when going from sitting to standing?
It happens frequently, but don’t confuse commonality with being benign. Your body is trying to tell you something. Are you listening?
Dizziness and Falls
Falls and injuries from falls are at an all-time high. The number one fear in most older adults is the fear of falling. Most often a fall doesn’t just happen out of the blue. Most falls occur from a lose of balance. When you are dizzy, that definitely counts as a lose of balance.
Most medical professionals will first say it’s probably not a big deal to get a little dizzy when changing levels. Next they’ll look at your hydration or medications as this can affect balance. If they try to offer more advice it’s usually something like get up slowly. Thanks doc.
The truth is dizziness is your body’s, specifically your brain’s, way of trying to tell you something is off. Your brain controls everything in your body. When it comes to balance the balance center of your body is in your brain and inner ear or your vestibular system. This vestibular system is responsible for telling your brain where your head is in space.
Whenever you move your head your vestibular system is working. However, if your inner ear isn’t running smoothly on all cylinders there will be problems. When you change directions from laying to sitting or standing your head has moved and needs to tell the brain where it is in space.
2 Common Types of Dizziness
One SUPER common cause of dizziness is that your inner ear is weak and not sending those signals to the brain quickly enough. (Side note, because the inner ear is responsible for balance it also deals with blood pressure which is what medical professionals call this type of dizziness-orthostatic hypotension.) If those signals don’t go fast enough your blood pressure will still be low because it hasn’t been told to change (via nerves from your brain) based on your body position.
If you have severe dizziness, get checked by a medical professional because it can be something serious, and I’m not here to diagnose anything.
Another common type of dizziness is vertigo or benign proximal positional vertigo (BPPV). If you have BPPV symptoms, simple head movements called the Epley Maneuver can alleviate those systems. Often a quick little inner ear adjustment fixes things to the way you were before.
Why?
Because the inner ear (vestibular system) is responsible for your balance and keeping you not-dizzy. Vertigo or lesser forms of it is a manifestation from your body to you that something isn’t right.
Conclusion
If you are getting dizzy more often, especially from changing levels of laying to sitting to standing you are at greater risk of falling. By identifying which part of your vestibular system isn’t working as well as the others you can improve your balance and decrease your dizziness.
Did you know that you can strengthen your vestibular system (inner ear)? It’s true. Yet most people don’t know how or why or what to do to do it.