How Does My Posture and Neck Strength Impact my Dizziness?
It is extremely common for people experiencing dizziness to also have neck pain or stiffness in their neck. This most commonly happens via one of two mechanisms.
The first being that you may have an underlying cause of dizziness (such as an injury to your vestibular system), which leaves you feeling off-balanced and unstable. Our bodies do not like feeling like this, so in an attempt to try to compensate, the muscles in your neck contract as a protective mechanism to try to increase stability. Similar to if you were driving on a bumpy road and your muscles tensed up as a reaction to try to decrease the amount of movement through your body. Over time, this increase in muscle activation in your neck can increase tension and lead to stiffness and pain.
Alternatively, if you are someone who is already experiencing neck pain and/or stiffness due to things like poor posture, previous neck injuries, whiplash injuries, and/or weakness in your neck muscles, this can actually cause feelings of dizziness. This is something called cervicogenic dizziness, which simply means that the dizziness is being caused by your neck. Cervicogenic dizziness occurs because the pain and tension in your neck can slightly alter the ability of the sensory nerves in your neck to function properly. For example, if you were to try to turn your head to look at something, you may end up turning slightly too far, or not quite far enough, due to unclear feedback from your sensory nerves in your neck. This can confuse your visual system, thus sending mismatched information to our brain. This leads to feelings of unsteadiness, difficulty focusing on things, feeling off-balance, etc.
In both situations, you may find yourself feeling like there is a cycle of your neck pain flaring up, your dizziness getting worse, and then your neck pain getting worse again, and so on. In order to stop this cycle, we need to treat both your neck pain, stiffness, and strength, but also the root cause of your dizziness. These are all things that can be treated with one of our vestibular physiotherapists. If you have neck pain and feelings of dizziness and are wondering if they might be related, book an appointment with one of our vestibular physiotherapists!