It’s been 13 months and I have PPPD, but should I continue to do vestibular exercises? I don’t feel they’re helping and they may be even making it worse.
So PPPD is not a condition that generally thrives on or needs vestibular exercises. Most people with PPPD have incredible balance and normal balance function and the vestibular exercises can certainly be aggravating and not needed — not necessary. By all means, try them. But, if you’re not feeling benefit probably within about six weeks, I would happily encourage my clients to let that go.
But where PPPD can benefit from is quiet stillness and also the mental, emotional, spiritual exercises that are offered and the tools and supports that are offered in the Rock Steady program. So it’s not about repeating mechanical, physical, vestibular exercises anymore. It’s about teaching the brain how to find safety and how to self-regulate, how to co-regulate and how to repair any broken trust within the body. Because to a certain extent, the fight, flight, freeze nervous system dysregulation is happening when we feel the symptoms within our body. So the trigger can be coming from within us. So we have to repair that relationship within ourselves. So the mental, emotional, spiritual aspects will probably need a lot more attention and the vestibular exercises may be less so.
Hi, Joey, I’d love to know your opinion on diets, such as the Medical Medium’s, that claim to have healing effects on your body.
My response to this is you know your body better than anybody so I would be very hesitant to take any recommendations from anybody other than your body.
Deeply listen to your body’s intuitive call when it comes to food, maybe slow down and see if you can get an instinctive feel for what your body is wanting. What I would listen to, however, is general nourishment advice. I think it’s really helpful to try and eat a broad range of fresh fruit and vegetables of all different colors and textures. And I just like the idea of variety in general. So if you look for advice on nourishing your body and nourishing you as a whole person, I think that’s possibly got some weight to it and some value. And sure, research nourishing recipes. And notice I’m not saying healthy, because I think healthy is a very loaded word. It’s about nourishment, what nutrients and what nutritional value are you really putting into your body because your body does need nourishment.
So yeah, think about how you’re nourishing your body. And if you’ve got questions about nourishing the whole person, it’s got nothing to do with your tinnitus or vertigo or any diagnosis for that matter. It’s really about nourishing you and then intuitively listening to your body.
Any specific advice for runners in terms of head movements and also dizziness that sometimes comes at the end of a run?
So my first response to this question is it’s not really about running or any activity. Every single person will feel what they feel in any given moment and they’ll have to find a way to acknowledge and meet that and be with that and be real about it. Because if we’re falling into this trap of dismissing and pushing through and minimizing, we’re really just not attending to the body. We’re not being responsive and we’re not taking care of ourselves to the level that the body’s asking for. The body’s bringing these sensations up and it’s saying, “Hey, tune in. Attune to me. Listen to me. I need help regulating. I need your help.” So it doesn’t really matter whether you are running a flight of stairs, running a marathon, or even if you are practicing piano and you’re a concert pianist and you’re starting to get symptoms because you’re doing really long practice sessions and the body’s beginning to disregulate.
So it’s not about what you’re doing. I think it’s more about what you’re sensing and feeling and how you’re responding to that, how you’re supporting it. So my advice with regards to head movements and dizziness would be something along the lines of keep your head movements as natural as possible. Anytime we’re rigid or stiff, it just leads to so many other problems, aside from maladaptive dizziness strategies and potentially creating more of a vicious cycle, it can also lead to postural issues, neck, headache, migraine, you name it. So keeping your head movements and your shoulder movements and your neck positions as loose and relaxed and natural as possible.
And what I would say is when you’re out and about, look at what you want to look at, stabilize your vision, find things that please you. So because we’ve got this example of running, if we’re out on a run, rather than being freaked out and worried about dizziness, actually look for things on your run that bring you pleasure. Find ways to relax into the run, to soften your footfall, and to let your eyes naturally move. If you see a bird or you see a car or you see someone with a really nice jacket you like, allow yourself to have that natural flow and playfulness in your posture. So that would be number one is keep your head and neck movements as natural as possible and follow pleasure. Allow your gaze to go where it wants to go for the sake of it.
And the second piece would be anytime that you’re feeling dizziness, whether it’s after a run or after a piano practice or after love making, after a good giggle, it could just be that the nervous system has dysregulated a little bit, or it could be that there is a bit of a cluster and the resources within the brain and the body are very busy, you can think of it as traffic jams, and so there is a bit of temporary dizziness as the body is recalibrating and finding its equilibrium. It’s nothing to worry about. You don’t need to change it. You don’t need to rush it. I would probably move you in the direction of the module three home exercises. And that gives you some good tips and tools on how to be off balanced, be imbalanced, and re-find that steadiness and how to do that in a really structured, gentle, safe way, and make a practice of learning how to lean in toward dizziness and imbalance, but then also how to recenter and re-find balance.
Joey, can you get PPPD and vertigo when you have broken sleep?
My simple answer would be: yes. I don’t know if it’s a direct causal link, but certainly fatigue and being tired does lead to more active symptoms and it does disregulate the nervous system a bit when it’s commonly occurring. So I guess my response is: it doesn’t really matter what came first or what’s happening, I think, it’s just really healthy to perhaps invest some time and energy into nourishing and nurturing your sleeping patterns because the more rested we are, the more the nervous system can self-regulate and we can co-regulate with our loved ones, and we can begin to use neuroplasticity to build those new maps of finding steadiness.
So my two recommendations, if you’d like them, would be to be really graceful and gentle with yourself with regards to tiredness and fatigue. There is no shame. It’s not your fault. Lots of us lose sleep from time to time. And sometimes we cannot change or avoid that, especially if it’s with mothering young children, for example. So it’s okay to be tired, be really gentle and be aware of any shame spirals that are coming in to sort of aggravate an already tender time.
And secondly, if you’re in the rock steady program, try the sleep skills, try some of those body scanning tools that are aimed to replace sleep. So if we can’t force sleep and we can’t magically make sleep happen, what can we do as a sleep replacement and begin to use some of those tools and incorporate them, live by them and see if you can help reintroduce sleep, which is what I’m seeing in so many of my rock steady clients is they’re getting back a good night’s sleep and it’s no longer a problem anymore. So I think nurturing the tiredness and having skills and tools to replace sleep, and just trust that when you are ready, your body will bring back that beautiful sleeping pattern.
Our vertigo is linked to the inner ear signals, that are responding to different rotations and tilts and accelerations, and helping us to remain stable and make use of our balance. They are in direct communication with our eyes and there is a very quick neural arch — neural reflexes, from the inner ears to the eyes. They’re some of the most primitive and fastest reflexes in the body. So, the eyes and the ears are talking with each other and they’re talking very quickly. For some people, especially when they’re tired, when they’re exhausted, when they’re overwhelmed, when there’s a lot of emotional processing that perhaps has backlogged and needs sorting out, needs feeling through in those times, high stress, high trauma, etc., the vertigo and eye conflict eye movements can be exacerbated. So, we can feel like computer screens, busy situations, perhaps at a train station with lots of moving vehicles, crowded places, supermarkets with lots of colors aggravate us and our symptoms.
Eye movements and the sensation of vertigo do go hand in hand but it’s also part of your healing. Following the Rock Steady process and the Rock Steady pathway for healing eye related vertigo, you’ll find it’s all reversible. A lot of it comes down to pausing and listening to the body, learning how to best support our body, support your nervous system, understand your nervous system, and self-regulate so that you can then rebuild new normal pathways that have stable vision and a sense of steadiness in terms of our balance organs. So, the healing will be the Rock Steady path of using neuroplasticity to build new neural maps that function with healthy eye movements.
This is one of those questions which is akin to how long is a piece of string. I would say the earlier you get onto using Rock Steady style principles for healing and listening to your body and honoring where your body is at, the better. The symptoms your body is giving you is your body’s way of talking to you.
The sooner you move into that responsive, healing, neuroplasticity-based approach to life, the quicker things will resolve. That’s what I’m seeing. People who ignore their symptoms and develop hatred and fear and blame and rejection towards what they’re sensing and feeling in their body, their symptoms tend to get stuck and last longer, so there’s a longer recovery time if they recover at all.
So, if you’re feeling worried about your dizziness following a COVID vaccine and it’s just going on too long and it’s starting to become a bigger deal for you, early intervention is recommended.
Try the Rock Steady program and implement daily strategies that can reverse that panic and that catastrophe cycle, so that you can build a new normal. You can harness neuroplasticity, and you can really craft the kind of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual structures that you want to build on, using neuroplasticity. Whatever we want to feel, we build by feeling it more often, and that comes back to having a really clear intention and a clear strategy for how you’re going to resolve your dizziness.
