We are accustomed to consider myopia as a physical disease. How do stress and emotions affect vision? And can special exercises compete in effectiveness with eye surgery?
You began to see worse and treat it as an inevitability. Perhaps this is not due to physiological changes and you need to consult a psychotherapist. Why is it often easier for us to literally close our eyes to the problem and what can be done to solve it?
Take responsibility
Ophthalmologists are usually skeptical about the methods of restoring vision offered by alternative medicine. But perhaps some of them deserve attention. The most famous was developed by the American ophthalmologist William Bates in the early 1920s and later supplemented by his followers.
Yoga for the eyes relaxes the eye muscles and the mind. But the method is based not on the Indian spiritual tradition, but on Bates’s assumption that vision is impaired due to mental stress that arises from the effort to discern an object, regardless of the distance to it.
The exercises suggested by Bates, such as palming (putting the palms over closed eyes) to relax, rocking (tilting the head to the side), blinking to moisten the eye, or movements that change the direction and range of gaze to maintain the elasticity of the lens, are very often reproduced in other proprietary methods.
It is much easier to go to the doctor: he will decide everything for us, prescribe drops, glasses, and the responsibility will be on him
Judging by the heated discussions on the Internet, such exercises help someone, others do not.
Journalist Yevgeny Chernykh, for example, four years ago, on the instructions of one of the newspapers, tried one of the vision restoration systems on himself and managed to get rid of age-related farsightedness (+7) in 2,5 weeks. The most difficult, he recalls, was the psychological moment – to take off the glasses, although there was no longer a need for them. Now Eugene is 64 years old and can still read small text without glasses.
There are many materials on the Web that help you independently master this or that vision correction technique. Why does the majority ignore this information and, without hesitation, go to the doctor for regular glasses?
This is how our infantilism manifests itself, says bodily psychotherapist Yulia Reshetnikova: “In order to take care of yourself seriously, you need personal maturity. Often we are not ready to take responsibility for our health. It is much easier to go to the doctor: he will decide everything for us, prescribe drops, glasses, and the responsibility will be on him.”
Change approach
Ophthalmologists recognize that stress affects vision. Psychologists go further, finding a direct link between poor eyesight and psychological problems.
“Just don’t make this approach absolute,” Yulia Reshetnikova warns. “For example, if a client had a traumatic brain injury, then this is where the explanation should be sought in the first place. But if vision is rapidly deteriorating, and there are no physical reasons, then a psychological background may be revealed.
You can correct your vision and prevent its deterioration by working on yourself on your own
“Then we ask ourselves: what does the client not want to see? Maybe it’s something he can’t bear. So it was with one of my clients, whom her husband almost openly cheated on, continues the psychotherapist. – She did not want to notice this, because she was unable to change the situation: having no profession, she had no idea how to survive on her own. In addition to severe visual impairment, she also developed a systemic disease. Summarizing, we can say that the body takes on the burden that the psyche could not process.
In such cases, psychotherapy pays off. Julia Reshetnikova gives another example from practice. Parents brought a boy to her, whose eyesight had dropped to -6 in the first two years at school. In the course of psychotherapeutic work, it turned out that he had a conflict with classmates, and as the problem was solved, his vision improved to -3.
“With children, change is easier to achieve,” emphasizes the body psychotherapist. – It is easier for them to play the problem through metaphors. Art therapy, sand therapy help to express repressed feelings.”
work on yourself
Traditional Chinese Medicine also recognizes that emotions affect vision.
“The eyes, in our view, are the “external openings” of the liver. Accordingly, everything that damages the liver also damages vision,” says Alexander Dvoryanchikov, doctor of Chinese medicine. “And this is primarily anger and irritation.”
You can slightly correct your vision, or at least prevent its deterioration, not only by taking Chinese drugs, but also by working on yourself on your own. For this, preference should be given to foods that nourish the liver (chicken, wheat, sweet fruits and sweet vegetables in small quantities) and blood (internal organs of animals, beans, lentils, dry pomegranate powder, boiled carrots).
It is recommended to massage certain points around the eyes 2 times a day for 5-10 minutes: videos with instructions are easy to find on the Internet. But for a radical improvement in vision, Alexander Dvoryanchikov emphasizes, acupuncture is needed.
Believe in the result
In fact, the eye looks, but the brain sees. The first receives and transmits the images to the second, which interprets them. The GlassesOff mobile app, developed in Israel, aims to teach the brain to “see” better.
The creators promise that people suffering from farsightedness will be able to read the newspaper without glasses and defeat eye fatigue and headaches after 3 months of training three times a week. To maintain the result, one to three sessions per month are enough.
Playing to improve your eyesight is a tempting idea. “Your mission is to determine whether Gabor (a round sticker with vertical black and white stripes) appeared in the first or second picture,” is one of the tasks of this application.
Answer by clicking on the right or left side of the screen. Gabor appears for a second in the center of the screen, more or less blurry or contrasting, among other Gabors or crosses that distract attention.
Whatever method we choose, a positive attitude and confidence in success play a key role
Elizaveta, 59, has been using GlassesOff for 8 months now.
“Most of the time I go without glasses, although I have worn them since I was ten,” she says. — I can easily read the menu in a restaurant or the list of ingredients on the packages. I wear glasses only to read for a long time or when the lighting is dim.
“The method forces certain areas of the brain to extract the maximum from the information that the eyes convey to it,” comments neuropsychiatrist Sylvie Chaukron, head of the Working Group on Vision and Cognitive Function at the Adolphe Rothschild Ophthalmological Foundation in Paris. “Such exercises, as it were, “deceive” the eye: the image that it perceives as blurry, the brain learns to interpret as clear.”
Whatever method we choose, a positive attitude and confidence in success play a key role. “The main thing is that we decide not to wait for the wizard, but to help ourselves, we begin to systematically, daily practice and direct conscious attention to ourselves,” concludes Yulia Reshetnikova. “Then there will be an effect from any exercises, even those that we came up with ourselves.”