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.
Look, everybody is so different. My instinct is to say no, but, I mean, maybe it’s possible for somebody out there. I think the better thing to do here would be to pause and ask your body, “Body, is caffeine serving me? How much caffeine is healthy for me?” For some people, having a cup of coffee a day is absolutely no problem, and for somebody else, they might have a severe reaction to caffeine where the body genuinely overreacts, and perhaps dizziness is one of the side effects of caffeine.
So, I think the question is not about caffeine, it’s about you and your body and learning to listen to the information your body’s giving you, because the symptoms you experience are your body’s way of saying, “Hey, listen to me. Something doesn’t feel right. I’m feeling dizzy, I’m feeling off.” So then we have to troubleshoot, and this is basis of the Rock Steady path. This is the Rock Steady process.
How can I pause? How can I take note? How can I be kind and listen to the information my body’s giving me rather than shame my body or ignore my symptoms and try and get rid of them? How can I use those dizzy symptoms as valuable information to figure out how I return to balance and how I really become that new normal and that better version of myself? These are all important questions to ask, to begin healing with neuroplasticity.
Well, yes. Anything we do rewires the brain, but the real question is: is it rewiring it in a way we want it? Because remember, neuroplasticity and rewiring and reshaping and remapping of our brain networks and our body neurological networks can happen in ways we don’t like. We can rewire ourselves to become more anxious or more depressed, or more stuck or to be in more pain.
So exercise can rewire our body and brain for the better or for the worse. I think it’s not about whether or not exercise is rewiring our brains. It’s about things like:
Is this helpful for me?
Is this workable for me?
What is my intention?
What is my emotional state?
And to get really clear physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually on which neural networks we want to build and support, and how you’re going to do that. That is the basis of the Rock Steady program for healing using neuroplasticity and a holistic intentional approach.
I want to say yes and I want to say no. Exercise is all about how we’re doing it and why we’re doing it, and most importantly, what’s the intention behind the exercise. Neuroplasticity is really about novel stimuli, and it has to do with how we’re feeling while we’re doing things. Neuroplasticity is about all of our neural networks, including our emotional networks and our thought and mental pathways. It’s not just physically building a muscle.
So, doing lots of repeating of the same exercise every day with the same mindset and with the same emotional landscape will not create neuroplastic change. You’ll just be waking up doing the same thing you do every day and feeling the same thing you feel every day.
The Rock Steady process guides you to stop and think about “what’s really important to me”. This will be different for every person. “Where am I at physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and how can I be very intentional and very clear about what I want to feel and how I bring that into whatever choice I’m making and whatever exercise I’m doing?” This includes regular and incidental exercise, such as cleaning the house or dropping the kids off at school.
So, it’ll be much more effective to have intentional living with this incidental movement where you have crafted a rock steady way of life. That would be much more effective from a neuroplasticity point of view than going on exactly the same run or exactly the same bike ride or exactly the same yoga class with the same mindset and nothing changing at that deeper neuroplasticity level. Exercise can actually be an inhibitor if we’re not using it with that rock steady mindset that supports neuroplasticity growth and development.
Visual Snow Syndrome is referring to dots or speckles in your field of vision. They can be white, or black or they can be a transparent kind of snow, so I guess it’s well named. These are speckly dots moving in the visual field. It’s a neurological condition, which means the neural pathways and the neural messages around the brain regions for interpreting visual messages have received error signals, and we don’t know why it’s there. We don’t necessarily have all the medical understanding of this condition, but it’s very common in my clients with vertigo, and especially with those with vestibular migraine symptoms.
I myself have had plenty of the strange spotting in my visual field. It tends to come and go, and of course, it’s worse when I’m stressed and when I’m tired.
If this is something that you feel like you want to reverse and you want to heal with neuroplasticity, follow the Rock Steady process and path to learn how to resolve any nervous system issues and help the brain and the body to reestablish a new normal. You can grow and utilize really healthy neural pathways, moving around the brain, around the eyes, around the ears and the spinal column, because visual blur and visual snow can be a part of vertigo error pathways. So, while no one can predict your future, I think it’s really worth employing neuroplasticity skills to improve whatever visual residual function you have. If you have normal eye function and you have a healthy brain, there’s no reason not to try to completely resolve that visual snow syndrome using the healthy pathways that already exist.
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