Vestibular disorders can cause symptoms like dizziness, vertigo (a spinning feeling), and trouble balancing. Other symptoms might include feeling sick to your stomach (nausea), ringing in the ears (tinnitus), hearing problems, and having difficulty thinking clearly (brain fog). This article can help you talk about these symptoms with your doctor.
The vestibular system, which is located in the inner ear and brain, helps us maintain balance and coordinate our eye movements. If this system gets damaged from illness, aging, or injury, it can lead to various symptoms, including:
- Dizziness: Feeling lightheaded, faint, or disoriented.
- Imbalance: Feeling unbalanced or like you’re about to tip over or fall.
- Vertigo: A spinning sensation, making you feel like you or your surroundings are moving.
- Brain Fog: Difficulty thinking, concentrating, or remembering basic things.
- Tinnitus: The sense that you can hear a noise, such as ringing or buzzing, when there is no external sound.
- Hearing Loss: Trouble hearing external sounds.
- Nausea: Feeling sick to your stomach.
- Vision challenges: difficulty focusing, especially when moving your head.
- Emotional Changes: Anxiety or depression due to unpredictable symptoms and other stressors.
- Motion Sickness: Feeling sick to your stomach when you are in a moving vehicle, such as a car, boat, or airplane.
- Derealization: Includes feelings of being unfamiliar with your surroundings, emotionally disconnected from people you care about, and/or distortions in time or size and shape of objects.
- Depersonalization: Feelings that you’re an outside observer of your thoughts, feelings, your body, or parts of your body; emotional numbness.
If you recognize some of these symptoms, you can use the Isabel Symptom Checker to help understand what might be causing them and to communicate better with your doctor.
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