What Causes Motion Sickness

Whether you know what causes motion sickness or not, you know the feeling. Cramped into the backseat of your mother's tiny sedan while driving through the hilliest part of the state, you try to focus on the words in the book in your lap instead of that queasy feeling in your stomach.

What is motion sickness?

Motion sickness occurs when your sense of balance, also called equilibrium, gets thrown off balance. Motion sickness is also called travel sickness because it happens so frequently during trips. Basically, what occurs is that the brain gets confused due to the contradiction of the motion sensors in the body and the balance mechanism in a person's inner ear.

When traveling up and down hills on the highway, in a plane, or on a boat , the body starts bumping up and down and rocking about, causing the brain to react. While your eyes are focused on the road straight ahead, your body's motion sensors are telling you that you're sitting still, but the delicate inner ear balance mechanism can tell that an obvious change has taken place. Together, they trigger a discrepancy that causes what is commonly known as motion sickness.

A person's sense of balance works by five parts of the body's nervous system joining together to perform one task. First, the inner ears monitor which way the body is turning, like when a person is walking forward or backward, turning side to side, or moving up and down. The eyes tell where the body is at that time, whether laying down or standing up, as well as directions of motion. Third, muscle and joint sensory receptors can tell which parts of the body are in motion, and fourth, skin pressure receptors can tell which part of the body is touching the ground or facing downward. Rounding out the process is the central nervous system – the spinal cord and the brain – which receives bits of information from all four of the other systems and puts them together to make sense of everything.

Motion sickness occurs when the central nervous system receives contradictory messages from the four systems it is working with. Essentially, the eyes are perceiving that it is on a ride that the body does not feel.

Symptoms of motion sickness

The symptoms of motion sickness begin as soon as the change is detected within your body. Your stomach begins to turn round and round, your palms start to sweat, you feel hot and clammy. Sometimes this is followed by hot sweats and actually being physically sick. Some people have even reported feeling drowsy or depressed, getting a headache, yawning and feeling like all of the blood has drained from their face.

How long does it last?

Motion sickness generally lasts as long as the trip lasts. As soon as the journey ends, all of the symptoms slowly subside and you're feeling normal sooner than you know it. If you spend ten hours at a theme park in the summer riding and re-riding the world's largest roller coasters, you can bet it will take a lot longer to shake that unpleasant queasy feeling. The same concept can be applied to spending a week on a cruise ship boat.

Sometimes the symptoms take several days to wear out, and a person could feel dizzy for up to a week afterward. Though slightly annoying, motion sickness is not considered a serious illness but instead is summarized as a sense of spinning, nausea, and vertigo.  There are treatments on the market now that offer relief for motion sickness that can be taken as soon as the sick feeling begins and provide relief for up to seventy-two hours for extended travel.