Contents:
- Medical Video: Vertigo: causes, symptoms, and treatments
- What is vertigo?
- What causes vertigo when fasting?
- How to prevent vertigo during fasting?
Medical Video: Vertigo: causes, symptoms, and treatments
Fasting may not be easy for some people, especially those who experience health problems. Resisting hunger and thirst for approximately 13 hours is sometimes not easy. You may be able to experience fatigue, dizziness, headache, want to faint, even vertigo during fasting. What causes vertigo when fasting?
What is vertigo?
Vertigo is a feeling of imbalance, so you feel like you are spinning or the environment around you is spinning and you feel dizzy about it. This can be very severe and make it difficult for you to do your daily activities. Generally, vertigo occurs in the elderly who are aged 65 years and over, but can also occur at any age.
Vertigo can appear suddenly and last for a few seconds or longer. When you experience vertigo, you will feel a loss of balance (making it difficult to stand or even walk), feeling sick, and dizzy.
What causes vertigo when fasting?
Vertigo is caused by a balance disorder in your body, which depends on various parts of the sensory system, such as the eyes, sensory nerves, and the inner ear. The presence of a disturbance in the ear makes the brain receive signals from the inner ear that do not match what is received by the eye and sensory nerves. So, your brain is confused, and you feel dizzy and unbalanced.
When you fast, some things can trigger you to experience vertigo during fasting, namely:
- Migraine. Migraines or side headaches during fasting can also cause you to experience vertigo, even if the migraine you feel is not too severe. This migraine can be triggered by noise or sensitive to light. The vertigo you feel can last a few minutes or longer.
- Poor blood circulation. This makes your heart not enough to pump blood to the brain or inner ear, so you can feel dizzy, want to faint, and not balance (vertigo).
- Low blood pressure. This condition can also cause blood flow from the heart to the brain and inner ear to be blocked, so you can experience dizziness, weakness, and vertigo during fasting. Usually, you can experience this if you stand too fast from sitting or lying down.
- Low blood sugar. When fasting, it is common for blood sugar to decrease because there is no food intake that enters your body. This makes you feel weak, tired, and dizzy. Also, it can cause your vertigo to recur.
- Dehydration. Fluid deficiency or dehydration is also common during fasting when the amount of fluid you drink is less than the amount of fluid that comes out of your body. This makes you feel dizzy, weak, and also tired, and triggers vertigo.
How to prevent vertigo during fasting?
There are a number of things you can do to prevent vertigo from recurring during fasting or to help relieve symptoms of vertigo, namely:
- Do simple sports,
- Sleeping with your head slightly raised. You can put two or more pillows under your head so that your head is higher than the body.
- Wake up from sitting or from sleeping slowly. Sit for about a minute before you stand up from your bed.
- Avoid bending to pick up items.
- Avoid lifting your neck up high, such as when you want to take items on a high shelf.
- Move your head slowly during activities.
- Do sports that can trigger vertigo to get your brain used.
