I just moved back to Los Angeles from Berlin a few days ago, and I’m
experiencing what I call life vertigo: that swimmy, disoriented
feeling we feel in response to a change of conditions like a big move,
changing or losing a job, death of a loved one, divorce, or other
drastic changes. Over the course of my move, my perception of time has
been bizarre, I’ve acquired countless bruises from repeatedly walking
into stationary objects, some simple everyday tasks are comically
outsmarting me, and I can’t seem to keep more than one thought going
in my head at a time. In spite of all this, I’ve managed to get a lot
done in a few days, and am soldiering forth to establish my life
again.

However, as I drove on the freeway today in what was probably the most
incredible rainstorm I’ve ever seen in LA, I occasionally felt
overwhelming pangs of panic in my chest. My heart felt like it was
about to explode, and parts of my brain were screaming at each other
that something horrible was happening. The rain was epic, but this
feeling of panic was not precipitated (no pun intended) by any events
in particular, or by a lack of bad weather driving experience, and so
I felt that I was having an irrational physiological response to a
sudden change of conditions, the rain and flooded streets, layered
upon another rather large sudden change of conditions, moving across
the world; my mental conduit for properly interpreting the changes in
my environment was inflamed.

All of this got me thinking about the physiological causes of vertigo,
like labyrinthitis, or inflammation of the inner ear. The name stuck
out as a fantastic metaphor: we navigate through the labyrinth of
life, feeling as if we know where we’re going only to find sometimes
that we don’t recognize where we are and can’t see how we got there,
and so we feel disoriented and panicked because we can’t tell which is
the right direction. What I find really interesting about
labyrinthitis is that the prolonged vertigo associated with it can
directly cause anxiety, panic attacks and even depression because of
the brain’s chronic misinterpretation of sensory input, i.e.
perceiving physical danger where there is none.

A common treatment for labyritnthitis-related anxiety and depression
is the same as clinical anxiety and depression, which is to prescribe
anti-depressives. I’m not proposing this as a commentary on depression
medication in general, but it seems a bit strange to treat depression
resulting from a physiological condition the same as emotional
depression, and I think that’s telling of our symptom-obsessed culture
(and the industries that encourage it).

The problem with only addressing symptoms is that we sometimes don’t
look deeply enough past the symptoms, whether emotional or physical,
to see what is causing them in order to find a real solution, and can
end up covering deep wounds with band-aids. That might mean treating
the symptoms of chronic vertigo while the cause worsens, or in my
case, it might mean treating the panic I felt on the freeway without
addressing the deeper anxiety from moving across the world, or even
more deeply, why that move provokes so much anxiety in the first
place.

Generally, it’s been shown that people who feel that their condition
is out of their control are less likely to improve than those who try
to have some positive control, and it’s as true for life vertigo as it
is for medical vertigo. A patient who doesn’t believe that they can be
helped is no better off than a panicked driver who lets go of the
steering wheel or a weary job hunter who doesn’t submit a resume; if
we want to get through it, we have to try. For me, that meant
looking past the panic, taking deep breaths and calming myself down so
that I could navigate through the rain safely, keeping in mind that my
body was overreacting due to deeper causes. And for all of us, it
means not letting the overwhelming feelings from the changes in our
lives take control of our perceptions so that we can navigate forward
through the labyrinth of life, even when we’re not entirely sure which
direction forward is.