Equilibrium Problems and Asperger's?

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I've read before that people with Asperger's syndrome have difficulties knowing exactly where their bodies are in space, but does anyone else experience dropping feelings when walking (akin to being on a boat), or just the feeling of movement when sitting at times? Perhaps this occurs more when I am stressed, but it is certainly an issue I've been dealing with for as long as I can remember. I do have seasonal allergies and am prone to sinus infections, but I haven't been able to prove the correlation. Doctors seem baffled and my neuropsychologist blames stress or a vestibular problem. Can anyone relate? My balance is excellent - I ride a bicycle most days out of the week for cardio and used to ride a skateboard/unicycle in my younger days. It's a chicken or the egg problem, as they say, for I do not know if the equilibrium problem perpetuates the stress, or vice versa.

Yes! I know what you mean. I sometimes feel like I'm rocking on a boat when I'm sitting down. I also always feel off-balance when I'm walking, although I don't know if other people see me walking weirdly. I probably couldn't walk a straight line without putting all my concentration on it. I don't have allergies or get sinus infections though, so I don't know about that.

If I close my eyes or enter a dark room I get a feeling of movement pretty strongly; it feels like the floor is moving in a circle. With my eyes open it's less, but still there. It's something that's become a lot more pronounced as I've gotten older, so I can't say if I've always had it at a low level or it developed at some point. A few years I started using a cane off an on due to whatever it is (doctor thinks it's some benign thing), which I've found helpful in more ways than I expected. I.e. walking in a straight line instead of knocking merchandise off of the racks, and people not assuming that I'm drunk because I'm swaying or stumbling for no apparent reason.

I constantly feel like I'm rocking in a boat when I'm sitting or standing in one spot. It's hard to explain. The more stressed I am, the more pronounced that feeling is.

One time I got some shocking news and I felt like I made a full somersault. I get strong feelings of swaying when my sinus problem flares as well as when I am extremely stressed. I also get the swaying feelings when I am not very stressed. When I am supposed to stand still at one spot I feel like I am slowly falling and I have to move to maintain balance.

I'm beginning to believe it may be some strange form of synesthesia. Thoughts or feeling translating into movement. Who knows. Judging by the responses it seems rather common for us.

So I suppose the next question is, besides a cane (I feel much too young and the problem is too intermittent), has anyone found anything that gives relief? I feel that this is one of the main things affecting my quality of life these days.

^This

I fall off balance super easy at rest or close to at rest. I always feel like I am 'vibrating', for lack of a better term. Like my brain is moving even when I'm not. It' snot a dizzy feeling or anything I just attribute it to my brain going 1,000 mph all the time. Exercise helps these issues a lot. For one thing it's as if the exercise burns off my excess mental energy. Another being that the tiredness from the exercise helps my muscles relax. That and weed

In my early 20s, I was diagnosed with a mild case of benign positional vertigo, which was made much worse by medication for fibromyalgia. It's one of the various reasons why I can't take fibromyalgia drugs (which do nothing helpful anyway). They make it very bad, enough to be dangerous in certain circumstances. I'd get up and feel a cold sensation in my head. Everything would look like purple snow on an old TV set. When my head would clear, I'd discover my knees had buckled without my having been aware of it. I got nervous taking stairs as a result.

I've gotten the sensation of movement while lying very still in a form of meditation and, rarely, at other times while just sitting around. It's subtle, so maybe I'm just ignoring it most of the time. It doesn't usually bother me if I notice it. Sometimes looking at white paint on a wall makes it seem as though little molecules are running around. I don't know what causes that appearance. I also don't know if that's unusual or not for other people.

Maybe one reason I don't spin to comfort myself is because it would make me sick. I liked the sensation as a young child, but then I felt awful during an amusement park ride one time, and I've been unable to enjoy the sensation since.

I have decent balance, but I'm a bit clumsy sometimes. I maintain my body in order to manage my fibromyalgia, and I think this really helps my balance and agility. I'm probably more likely to stumble than most people, but I'm less likely to fall. My ability to catch myself is pretty good.

My ear canals curve quite a bit, and I have pain on airplane flights that isn't relieved by swallowing or moving my jaw. The pressure just builds up and stays that way until we land. Car rides in the mountains are not so bad, but my ears don't pop as easily as other people's do.

I have the problem with my ears popping as well. More than other people, it seems. Mine are always the first to cave to the pressure on planes etc and the last to return to normal. Just the other day I was on a train and it went into a tunnel or something, and I just kind of ducked down suddenly when the pressure hit, caught myself for a moment and looked up, and most people looked absolutely fine, with a few people looking mildly uncomfortable but not as much as me. My boyfriend was with me and he felt it properly too (he has a few AS traits himself, though not enough that I'd think he'd get a diagnosis - maybe that's why he was more sensitive than everyone else) but a moment after me, and he seemed to be back to normal before me.

I don't normally feel off balance if I'm sitting down, not unless I'm ill. Whenever I get a cold it affects my ears, which I haven't heard about from anyone else, but it does for me. Standing up though, I sometimes have trouble. I feel like I'm in the wrong body. It's like it's bigger than it's meant to be. I think this contributed to my eating disorder a few years ago (still have a few traits of it, still want to lose weight). Basically, it's like my body is always further in any given direction than I think it is, thus, it must be bigger than it should be. But it must just be due to my own balance and spacial awareness. Perhaps I'm moving further in that direction than I think I am? Like I said, I don't normally have these problems sitting down. Consider also that I'm a fairly good driver (failed my test due to a meltdown in the middle of it, but that's another story) and have no trouble with the spacial awareness of the car, which is a fixed shape, and where I have to be sitting down in order to drive it, of course. It's just something that happens when I'm standing up. I also don't walk properly. I seem to be completely incapable of an inconspicuous gait; there has to be some large movement. Normally I waddle, but being female I of course learned that movement I the walk can be accepted and even encouraged, so I mastered high heels. I can't wear them as high as some girls do, not for long, but at least then when the movement is in my hips nobody really thinks anything odd of it. The only problem is that it sometimes attracts more male attention than I would like. So sometimes I just go back to waddling instead.

It's always more prominent in the morning because I'm tired, but I guess the gist is that I move further than I expect to. It's so odd. And annoying. I knock things over a lot because I'm not exactly sure of where I'm standing. Makes me feel like such an idiot.

Yes, I happen to have the sensation of falling sometimes, especially after walking a longer flight of stairs or after riding a car. I think it is somehow connected to the fact that I have a very good sense of time ( I can usually determine the time correctly within a maring of +/-5 minutes) an direction ( I usually know where north and south are).

ASPiXiE, I sometimes duck when going under something I'm way too short to have to worry about. Do you also do that? I must look pretty funny to other people when I do it, but I keep being afraid I'll bump my head if I don't.

As a child, I had trouble learning to ride a bike despite having ballet, dance, tennis and riding lessons. I was rubbish at the first three and reasonably competent at the last.

I have a terrible sense of balance: the slightest unevenness in a pavement will cause me to lose my balance. This is why I can't wear any sort of heels, my to my regret. I also can't close my eyes and turn around as I tend to fall over.

That said, I am very good at proprioception as I hate being inadvertently touched by strangers.

I do get this sometimes. I also have Dyspraxia, so I always was told it was related to that. I also have sinus problems too - my nose is blocked most of the time and my ears have also been a big problem to me. I was actually born with a deformity in my nose, where the tubes are more narrow and then get wider when it gets to my ears, so the mucus gets caught in the narrow tubes than creeps to my ears, causing infections everywhere. That is most likely to do with balance problems.

When I was standing up on the bus the other week, the bus-driver whizzed round a roundabout and I went all over the place. I didn't nearly fall over, I just almost got thrown to the other side of the bus by the pressure. I had to use all my muscles to stay still and hold on tight.

When I was a child I used to feel really sick after coming off fairground rides, so sadly I couldn't go on them.

Also I always had trouble learning to swim - even though I used to love swimming as a child and was always going to the pool. I was the last one in the class to learn to swim without any support, and I only just learnt how to do a doggy paddle because it was the only swim I could do without getting my nose or ears under.