What is Visually Induced Dizziness or Visual Vertigo?
Who doesn’t dread going to a crowded supermarket, airport or shopping mall? They’re noisy, cluttered, and an overall hassle. But for some people, it’s more than just an inconvenience. It’s an over-stimulating nightmare.
Those with Visually-Induced Dizziness know this all too well. Visually-Induced Dizziness (VID) is exactly as it sounds: dizzy symptoms spurred on by visual stimulus.
Busy environments, flashing lights and crowds of people are the places that VID patients are quick to avoid.
What is Visually-Induced Dizziness?
To make this perfectly clear, VID is not a condition. Rather, it’s a group of symptoms that are triggered by busy environments and excessive visual stimulus.
Therefore, VID can be a symptom resulting from other vestibular (balance) disorders such as vestibular migraine, vestibular neuritis, persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD), Meniere’s Disease, and benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV). It can also result from head injury and whiplash if the vestibular system is impacted in these incidents.
VID also goes by the name visual vertigo, space and motion discomfort, supermarket syndrome, or visual vestibular mismatch.
Symptoms of VID include, but aren’t limited to:
- Disorientation
- Brain fog
- Dizziness
- Unsteadiness
- Postural instability
- Light-headedness
- General discomfort
- Nausea & vomiting
- Salivation (mouth watering)
- Turning pale
- Sweating
- Excessive fatigue
- Agoraphobia
- Anxiety
The most commonly reported triggers of VID include:
- Supermarket
- Driving or riding in a car
- Public transit — Airplanes, trains, buses, boats
- Scrolling on a phone or laptop
- “Busy” fabric patterns or abstract images
- Seeing movement over large areas — movies, clouds, crowds, etc.
There are a lot of different theories about how visually induced dizziness occurs. Most scientists believe a mismatch happens in the brain’s different parts of the balance system, similar to what happens during motion sickness. Others think it can happen when a vestibular weakness allows the brain to become over reliant on the visual input for balance causing the visual dependency.
There are numerous systems that create our balance — vision being just one of them. So, when the brain relies too heavily on visual cues, those environments with busy visuals (supermarkets, movies, etc.) can lead the vestibular system to believe that there is more movement taking place than there actually is. Thus, the dizziness ensues.
Avoidance Behaviors
One of the major problems with VID is that patients very easily realize that the culprit of their symptoms are these visually-busy environments, which leads them to avoid them at all costs. In the short-term, this helps patients avoid their condition. But in the long-term, it weakens their brain and body’s ability to adapt and strengthen against these triggers.
It’s like having a weaker left arm and never working it out at the gym because it’s weak. Avoidance is a dangerous cycle that perpetuates the problem.
This brings us to how VID is treated.
Treating Visually-Induced Dizziness
Ultimately, treating VID comes down to diagnosing the root cause, which can be a vestibular disorder.
Diagnosis always starts with an in-depth conversation to really understand the patient’s situation. From there, we’ll run them through specific tests that pin down exactly what’s potentially wrong with the vestibular system causing this discomfort.
Treatment then starts with that underlying cause. For instance, treating a patient’s vestibular migraine might resolve the VID symptoms as well.
If not, treating VID is then largely focused on vestibular rehabilitation, optokinetic exercises, and slowly reintroducing patients into those environments through virtual reality (VR) that cause their VID to flare up.
Vestibular Rehabilitation Therapy includes visual and optokinetic desensitization, sensory reweighting, gaze stabilization, and habituation therapy. Learn more about VRT here.
Optokinetic exercises consist of videos that are designed to make patients feel dizzy, but with the goal of building the brain’s ability to make sense of these visual signals. Always, ALWAYS, patients should work with their vestibular specialist to work through optokinetic exercises as there is a method to gradually progressing through this stimulation.
Lastly, is to focus on reversing those avoidance behaviors. To do this, we use virtual reality goggles to reintroduce VID patients into those environments they fear most. Like the optokinetic exercises, the goal here is to gradually build a person’s internal processes for dealing with these environments. Until one day, they are no longer affected.
Putting patients into uncomfortable visual situations is a major part of treating VID. Thus, the treatment process often comes with heightened anxiety and discomfort. That’s why there’s often a need for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help patients mentally and emotionally deal with this treatment process.
What Now?
Given it’s obvious for patients to recognize that busy visuals cause them to be dizzy, Visually-Induced Dizziness is one of the more common self-diagnosed dizzy symptoms out there. But we cannot emphasize how important it is to see a vestibular specialist in order to find the root cause.
If you or someone you know experiences dizziness or disorientation in visually-busy environments, please give us a call at (310) 954–2207 or schedule an appointment with one of our balance specialists.
The Dizzy & Vertigo Institute specializes in bringing dizzy patients back to an asymptomatic life. We’re located in Los Angeles, California and have options for you if you live in another state.
We look forward to hearing from you!
