Quite a few people have told me “I’m blind without my glasses!”, which makes me cringe. It’s clearly not true, and what kind of message is this sending to your hard-working eyes? You’re telling them they’re defective! Take your glasses off right now. If you can see color, and depth, and shapes, and movement, and outlines, even though it may not be with sharp clarity, you are not blind!
Most folks who wear glasses think they need them to see better than they can without them. Yet often as they start vision improvement, and spend more time without their glasses, they realize these eye-cages make them feel safer, or less anxious, or form a necessary barrier between them and others. One client who is almost out of her glasses completely told me she only wears them when she visits her mother, who never listens to her, and is always telling her what to do!
If you see this pattern in yourself, be grateful! This is a coping mechanism you learned when you had few other strategies for dealing with Life. Maybe it’s time to upgrade this old behavior now, and learn a different, more healthy way to respond to stress than putting glasses on your face. This reminds me of someone I knew a long time ago who would regularly complain about her husband, then reach for a cigarette! This calmed her, but at what cost to her health?
A great deal of vision improvement training is about awareness. See if you can pay attention to what your eyes are saying to you when you put on glasses, and when you take them off. Clients often exclaim about the brighter colors without glasses, and how they can see more than they thought. Many even say they feel freer.
If you need glasses to drive a vehicle legally and safely, please wear them. I’m on the road too! When you have a few minutes, try experimenting with taking your glasses off, seeing what you really feel, not just focusing on the immediate clarity or blur. You might learn something surprising about yourself. And isn’t continuing to learn what what Life is all about?
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I wore strong glasses, then contact lenses, from age 5 into my 40s. While making many mistakes, eventually l learned how to improve the way I use my eyes and to see in a more relaxed, healthy manner. It is my pleasure to coach others to do the same. Visit me at https://NancyLNeff.com.
At this point in my life, YES, I do need them.
After all of the prescriptions that I have had, and having gone through behavioral vision training, I am happy to be wearing glasses that give me 20/20 vision. They are not a strong prescription, as I have previously needed, but I do need to wear them constantly due to astigmatism.
They are minus lenses prescribed as a spherical equivalent, instead of an astigmatism cylinder lense. With the behavioral optometrist, I was able to eliminate all of my myopia, but nothing more can be done about the astigmatism, except the glasses.
Without them my vision is 20/80, and if doing a lot of close work, worse than 20/100. Near vision is impossible without them.
Dale, I’m glad you found a comfortable prescription that lets you do what you need to do. And I’d challenge you that you “need” the correction (like you need oxygen 🙂 ) and to have it as a goal to reduce and eventually eliminate it. Here’s something I wrote about astigmatism to give you a few thoughts: https://www.iblindness.org/1051/yes-but-i-have-astigmatism/