Have you ever been on a ride where you were not actually moving, but the image in front of you was moving yet you physically felt nauseous? Is it possible to get motion sickness without being in motion? The answer is yes; if you are an avid video game player, you may have experienced this which is known as “Simulator Sickness”.
The research on this actually started with the military. Pilots have to go through simulator training, and what the Navy found in the 1960s was that some pilots were getting sick from it. The Navy was worried that this sickness would continue into actual flying, but fortunately that was not the case. This was specific to simulators. So they began to do some research and came up with some interesting findings:
- “Generally, simulator sickness decreases with repeated exposure. 95 to 97 percent of people eventually adapt to an environment that causes motion sickness; the rest will be forever sick.
- Active movement in the environment will make you sicker initially, but also make you adapt more quickly than being passive.
- The longer the duration, the more likely it is for people to become sick.
- There have been no documented cases of someone getting sick/disoriented in a simulator, then later crashing an aircraft or an automobile due to disorientation.” (Source)
But why is this Simulator Sickness actually happening?
“The most common theory (taken from many medical websites) about why you get sick is that your body thinks that you have been poisoned and you are hallucinating the movement that you are seeing but not feeling, so you get nauseous and (if you don’t stop playing right away) vomit in order to flush the toxins from your body.” (Source)
So what can you do about this? Well the same things that you do for motion sickness: Dramamine, ginger pills, motion sickness patch, “sea bands” that put pressure on the nerve in your wrist, and of course the many homeopathic solutions that people have come up with. It will be up to you to research the options and see what works for you. Good Luck!