You might take for granted being able to get out of bed in the morning and walk to the bathroom, or step across a driveway onto a lawn. However, if you have impaired balance, these activities can be exhausting and even dangerous.
In fact, balance issues can seriously impact your quality of life, disrupt daily activities, and put you at risk of injury and falls.
Up to one in five people in the UK will experience problems with their balance.
In support of Balance Awareness Week, read on to discover some causes of balance issues and some natural ways to support your body’s balance system.
It’s all down to your vestibular system. Located in your inner ear, it uses special fluid and tiny hairs to detect gravity and linear movement. These are translated into messages sent to your brain. The clever system senses the location of your head to enable you to sustain your sense of balance. It allows you to observe the world while moving around, maintain your direction and speed of movement, make postural adjustments, and remain stable while carrying out various activities.
Your brain also uses sensory input from your eyes, relaying information about where you are oriented relative to objects or other people. At the same time, your sense of touch, along with your muscles and joints, send information about how you are moving. For example, knowing where your feet are located and what type of terrain you’re walking on all help you maintain balance.
All this information is integrated by your brain. It then transmits messages to your muscles, allowing you to keep your balance and move in a co-ordinated way.
Many factors can affect this complex system. For example, the vestibular system could send inaccurate movement information to your brain. This would create a mismatch between sensory information from elsewhere in your body. This leads to the disorienting feeling of losing your balance. Most people are probably familiar with feeling dizzy, a sense of being off balance, lightheaded, and woozy.
More than dizziness, this is a sensation of movement while motionless. For example, you might feel a spinning or swaying sensation. Many people affected by vertigo experience a distorted sensation of motion when they move their head or change posture. It can be caused by calcium crystals forming within the semicircular canals of the ear. It’s particularly common in the elderly. It’s not a condition in itself, but a symptom of underlying health issues.
This condition is caused by a bacterial or viral infection affecting the labyrinth, a network of fluid-filled channels in your inner ear. It results in vertigo and balance issues, accompanied by nausea, vomiting, hearing loss, and tinnitus. It often has a sudden onset but usually resolves itself over time.
The symptoms of Ménière’s include vertigo accompanied by hearing loss, nausea, and tinnitus. It’s caused by an increase in the volume of fluid in the inner ear. It most commonly affects people between the ages of 30 and 60 and can come on suddenly, with some people experiencing episodic attacks.
Balance issues can also be caused by cardiovascular problems such as arrhythmia, circulatory issues, autoimmune disease, poor blood pressure control, or migraine. Other causes include inflammation of the vestibular nerve, stroke, trauma to the neck or spine, dehydration, visual disturbances, poor blood sugar control, or thyroid disease.
Low levels of vitamin D have been found in research to be related to vertigo 4. Since the major source of vitamin D is sunshine, it makes sense to check your levels and supplement if they’re low.
Because balance issues have a variety of potential causes, a personalised, whole-body approach will be most effective at relieving your symptoms. We test, we don’t guess, to find the root causes of your ill-health. Then, we’ll provide you with a programme of dietary, supplement, and lifestyle recommendations to help you towards better balance both now and in the future.
Do you need help with your balance. Having a functional medicine practitioner review your lifestyle could be the answer. Speak to one of our practitioners by booking a FREE discovery call to see if Functional Medicine is for you.
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