Living with chronic vertigo or dizziness can be completely debilitating and confusing. We can feel not quite right and it can feel like our life is upside down, which has the emotional impact of feeling isolated, anxious, and depressed. In worst case scenarios, it can lead to unemployment, relationship breakdowns or even suicidal thoughts. As such, “Can we get rid of vertigo at home?” and “Can we cure vertigo at home?” are really important questions. And the answer is yes, absolutely!
The question is, how do you get rid of vertigo at home? It’s a process of understanding your body. The reason a medical doctor or health professional, psychologist, etc., can’t remove your vertigo for you is because it’s probably not a simple linear quick fix. There’s probably not some physical solution where they can say, “Take this vitamin, take this drug, do this exercise, and you’ll be fine.” For people who want to get rid of or cure vertigo at home, that suggests to me that it’s chronic, it’s debilitating, it’s upsetting, it’s non-linear, and it’s multi-layered.
So what do I mean by that? It’s probably not just some kind of physical upset in the ears and the eyes and the body or the brain. There’s probably something more than an anatomical issue, and that means there will be mental, emotional, and spiritual features involved. The first step to cure vertigo at home is by starting to understand: How am I talking to myself? What is my inner dialogue? Do I trust my body to heal? Am I very worried about it? Are there fear cycles and anxiety cycles that are being retriggered in my body and/or in my mind?
You might think, “Oh, my thoughts have nothing to do with my vertigo!” Actually, they do, because our thoughts impact our emotional system and our limbic brain. Our vestibular information from the ears is traveling through that emotional system and being processed based upon how we relate to our symptoms, which comes back to that dialogue.
If we take a “no big deal” approach and emotionally we’re neutral about our dizziness and vertigo, the emotional response is really low and the chemicals released in the emotional brain are kind and calm and neutral or compassionate. However, if we hate our vertigo and we want to get rid of it and we tell ourselves it’s life-threatening and we can’t survive this, then the chemical release in the emotional brain is much more of the corticosteroids—stress hormones that make he neurotransmitters inhibit any of the recovery process we need to rebuild new normal, steady, balanced pathways. So basically, the route to heal at home and how to cure vertigo at home is to reset the neural messages traveling from the ears, eyes, body, and brain. We need to re-pattern and remap so that all of those messages are steady, peaceful, calm, balanced so you can think clearly again.
I’ve already touched upon the kind of mental and emotional aspects and how that’s feeding into the physical chemistry of the body. And if we’re chronically anxious or stressed, we can’t use those neuroplasticity skills. So we remain locked in chronic symptoms. So again, how do I get rid of it at home? How do I cure vertigo at home? It’s self-study and it’s understanding yourself. I’ve actually written an entire book on this. And if this is one of the dilemmas and problems you’re living with, this Rock Steady book and the Rock Steady process, which is also an online program will give you structure and tools to look at getting to know your mental landscape, getting to befriend and self-regulate your emotional landscape. Finally, and most importantly, looking at your spirituality and your belief system, not religious. What I mean by spirituality is, do you trust your body? Or do you actually feel like you need something or someone out there to fix you, which is seeking that external fix or cure, that device or that drug or that person to solve your problems? That is a barrier to healing.
If you really want to heal vertigo at home, if you really want to kill a vertigo at home, actually, you have to become the expert in your healing. And the Rock Steady book and the Rock Steady process will give you the skills and tools to become that expert because no two people heal in the same way. I used to have vestibular migraines and had recurrent BPPV positional vertigo, and I’ve resolved both. I don’t get them anymore at all. And I did that by understanding my body and learning how to support my body, reassure myself and so that any of the chronic loops that were actually aggravating the dizziness and preventing me from healing.
