Dizzy after your head knock or concussion?
Understanding Dizziness After Concussion and How Your Neck Plays a Role
Have you ever experienced dizziness or a sense of imbalance after a concussion? It’s not just your inner ear or brain working overtime—your neck plays a huge role in how your body stays balanced. Let’s break this down in simple terms and even try a fun exercise to help you feel how your body works.
What Causes Dizziness After a Concussion?
After a concussion, dizziness can happen when there’s a mix-up in the signals your body uses to keep you steady. These signals come from three main systems:
Your inner ear: Helps detect motion and balance.
Your eyes: Give visual cues to your brain about where you are in space.
Your neck: Yes, your neck! It has sensors called proprioceptors that tell your brain how your head and body are positioned.
When these systems aren’t working together properly after a concussion, you can feel dizzy, unsteady, or disoriented.
How Your Neck Helps with Balance
Your neck isn’t just for holding up your head. It has tiny sensors in the deep muscles, especially in the suboccipital muscles (those small muscles at the base of your skull), that help your brain understand where your head is in space. These sensors are called muscle spindles, and they’re all about proprioception—your body's ability to sense its position without you even thinking about it.
Here’s an amazing fact: the muscles in your neck have the second-highest density of muscle spindles in your entire body, second only to your fingers [1].That means your neck plays a critical role in helping you stay balanced.
The Neck and Eyes: A Team Effort
Your neck and eyes work closely together to keep you steady. When you move your head, your eyes adjust to keep your vision stable. But when your neck muscles aren’t working properly—like after a concussion—this connection can be thrown off, making you feel unbalanced or dizzy [2].
Try This Simple Exercise:
Place your hands at the base of your skull (your suboccipital muscles).
Without moving your head, look left and right with your eyes.
Do you feel a small twitch in the muscles under your hands?
That’s your suboccipital muscles working to coordinate with your eyes. This teamwork is essential for balance and stability.
Why Proprioception Matters
Proprioception, or your body's sense of position, is what allows you to move confidently without needing to look at your feet or hands. The deep muscles in your neck send constant updates to your brain about the position of your head. If these muscles are tight, weak, or injured, the signals can get scrambled, leading to dizziness or difficulty balancing.
What Can You Do?
Posture: focusing on good upright posture improves neck alignment and can help activate and strengthen the deep muscles of the neck which aid in both coordination and balance.
Eye and Head Coordination: Practicing simple movements that combine eye and head coordination can help rewire the connection between your neck and eyes.
Professional Help: A clinician trained in concussion management can assess your neck and help restore proper function with targeted therapy.
Your neck and its proprioceptors play a huge role in keeping you balanced and steady, especially after a concussion. By understanding how your neck and eyes work together, you can take steps to reduce dizziness and get back to feeling like yourself again.
Get in touch with our clinicians excelling in concussion management to find out what systems are causing your dizziness.