Most falls occur by surprise—encountering a slippery surface, an unexpected change in the height of a curb, distractions.
For example, this is probably a familiar scenario: you get up to leave a crowded restaurant, focusing your eyes between the tables on your way to the door. Suddenly a friend calls over and you turn your head while you keep walking forward at the same time.
There’s a moment of sensory overwhelm between organizing your body toward the sound of a friend and the necessary visual input to orient your movements toward the door. This sensory overwhelm involves holding your breath, which means limited mobility in your rib cage and most of the muscles in your entire trunk, making balance more tricky.
Sensory overwhelm or doing too many different things at once can lead to some of the worst falls.
In order to really improve balance, it’s important to focus our attention on the unexpected and develop our ability to manage sensory overwhelm.
So how do we do this?
Below I suggest some movement lessons to strengthen our ability to focus despite sensory overwhelm, but first of all, I encourage you to approach these movement challenges with a playful attitude.
Too often when we get tested for balance in the doctors office or during a physical therapy session, there is so much tension over getting a good measurement to record that it ends up hurting our balance and our abilities. A tense environment contributes to sensory overwhelm and anxiety.
Let’s observe our breathing and eyesight. When we tighten our breathing by holding our breath and tighten our eyes by squinting, we increase our anxiety. When we breathe more easily and fully and see around ourselves with softer eyes, we also move more easily.
Observing and exploring sight, breathing, and balance
1. Stand in a way that you feel is most comfortable and feels most secure. Best if you could stand either near a chair you can put your hands on the back of or near a wall or a counter. But only use your hands for balance if you need to.
2. Close your eyes. Observe. Do you wobble a bit compared to when your eyes are open? Do you hold your breath when you close your eyes?
3. Observe differences that you can feel in simply standing with your eyes open for several seconds and then closed for several seconds.
4. Next, with your eyes open, inhale and hold your breath. Can you stand on one leg as well while you hold your breath? Try doing this on each leg. You might find there’s a difference from one leg to another in terms of your feeling of secure balance.
5. Can you close your eyes, hold your breath and stand on one leg? Be careful. I’ve taught this to many people and some lost their balance.
6. Open your eyes and feel yourself breathing easily. Maintain that feeling of ease and breathing and full visual access to the environment, and once again shift to one leg for several seconds and then to the other.
Another way to overcome sensory overwhelm is instead of closing your eyes as you stand on one leg, try turning your head from side to side.
This lesson is helpful to do daily for a while until you find that you have greater movement awareness when you move through the world full of sensory inputs and distractions.
Reading through obstacles
Be careful doing this as you won’t have a chair or wall to rely on as you did with the earlier lesson. You might find it fun to do this movement challenge with a small group of friends.
This movement lesson is a great way to adapt to sensory overwhelm. It challenges our abilities to react to the unexpected by walking through a home-built obstacle course, which you can easily construct by throwing a few pillows or books on the ground in an arbitrary manner.
As you begin, focus your eyes ahead of you while also feeling the obstacles with your feet. You might choose to move around your obstacles or move over them.
Can you maintain a soft focus and maintain your breathing?
Only after you feel comfortable with your obstacle course, you can try walking backward over the same obstacles.
A video clip from the Embodied Balance program showing a woman walking through obstacles on the floor.
As you improve your ability to weave through and over obstacles on the floor, you might find that you breathe more easily and that you could actually face a greater challenge by reading something you hold in your hands as you navigate the course.
You can also change the obstacle course so you’re facing fresh challenges.
Having good balance isn’t just about keeping our feet under ourselves. It also involves easy, full breathing and managing the visual stimuli of the environment. Breath and sight are the hidden dimensions of balance.
-Frank Wildman, PhD