Understanding how your body balances itself will help you move more efficiently, recover from injury more completely, and limit the fear of falling as you get older.  As with many processes in your body, your nervous system manages your balance subconsciously, but if you are able to tune into what is going on, you can help it be that much better.  Your brain collects the sensory information from your eyes, your inner ears, and all the tendons, muscles and ligaments around your joints to help you perceive where you are in space and move around in a coordinated manner.  Having feedback from three different systems creates some redundancy in our capacity to balance, but it also makes it a complex processing task for our brains.  Our eyes tend to degenerate, our ears can get infected, and our muscles can get weak and damaged, so the strategy our brains use to balance continues to adapt over our lifetime, for better or for worse.  As humans, we also train to master very specialized skills like figure skating, gymnastics and baseball that can refine the control of our bodies through repetition and practice.  Our balance is a reflection of the plastic nature of our nervous systems.

Our binocular vision provides us with a three-dimensional (3D) picture of the world and a sense of depth perception to judge how far things are away and how they may be moving in relation to us.  Our inner ears are comprised of three fluid filled, semi-circular canals oriented in different planes that allow the movement of tiny sand-like particles within them as we move our heads forward-back, side-to-side, or rotationally.  Consistent signals from the left ear and the right ear help our brains confirm how we relate to the 3D picture our eyes offer of our surroundings.  Finally, the stretch receptors in all of our tendons, muscles and ligaments help give our nervous system feedback to muscularly control our centres of gravity in relation to our bases of support, allowing us to precisely move around our environments.

The most subtle, but also the most common cause of people’s poor balance is the disconnect many of us have between our feet and the rest of our bodies.  We wrap our children’s feet in shoes before they can even walk and pave over most of the world, resulting in us developing a relatively poor connection to the ground over time and a limited sense of proprioceptive feedback from our lower bodies.  Weak feet and less than optimal postural strategies to stack our skeletons, tend to make the task of balancing quite difficult for many people.  A variety of movement experiences tends to give athletes better balance because their nervous systems have had more opportunities to learn, but they also tend to experience more injuries and muscle imbalances that can negatively affect their control of their bodies.

As we age, our muscles, tendons and ligaments stiffen up and our brains’ processing speeds tend to slow down, both of which have negative impacts on our balance.  As our joints degenerate, we usually shift to becoming more reliant on our vision to help us balance; we will visually fixate on a point in space as our main frame of reference, more than we will feel the muscles in our legs and core to help keep us balanced.  A combination of deconditioning and learned disuse causes our central nervous systems to slowly prioritize our eyes over our muscles as they make sense of all the sensory information they receive.  Balance starts to become a functional challenge for seniors when they start to lose the quality of their vision and the mobility of their neck, on top of having feet that don’t work very well.  

Dizziness and vertigo are both symptoms that can cause significant balance challenges for people, but are more a processing issue than a mechanical fault of any of the physical structures in the body.  Dizziness is a vague sensation of being off balance or lightheaded that can be generated by stress, concussions, blood pressure, and or neurological disorders.  Vertigo is more disorienting, in that your brain can get conflicting information from your inner ears and/or upper neck that creates the perception that the world is spinning around you.          

It is almost impossible to balance when your brain perceives that the room is moving and can’t provide you with a stable form of consciousness to make sense of the world around you.  Thankfully, vertigo tends to only be experienced in short bouts, but if you experience it, it will give you a new appreciation for what your normal state of being feels like.  The world around you is not a fixed entity as much as it is a collection of your perceptions, which can be hard to understand unless you have experienced some level of altered states.  Your balance is part of your conscious experience and the more you appreciate the parts of you that function to provide your experience, the more comfortable and enjoyable your experience of life will be as your body degenerates over time. 

You can learn more about how balance relates to the experience of being you in my new book Why We Hurt: Understanding How To Be Comfortable In Your Own Body