I wanted to introduce myself and also post some questions I had about my recovery.
've been wearing glasses for about 27 years. My prescription in 2007 was a -5.25/-6.75. In 2012 I found an optometrist who agreed to reduce it to -3.25/-4.75 for 20/40 correction. After I found out what my prescription was I worked on my own over the span of a year (in 2013) to carefully reduce it in 1 diopter increments.
Fast forward to today: I wear a -0.25/-0.25 glasses for daytime driving.
I'm able to confidently drive in the daytime with these and can see most road signs, but my vision isn't perfect. My questions are:
1) The vision quality/amount of blur fluctuates a lot and seems to be affected by the muscles surrounding the eyes. When those muscles cramp up, the vision gets blurry, but when they relax they get clearer. I can also feel the muscles at the side of the eye working when the distance vision clears up.
This is very different from the case of wearing strong glasses, where everything is crystal clear all the time and there are no fluctuations in vision.
Is normal vision supposed to fluctuate like this? Will it ever become HDTV sharp 100% of the time?
2) Night vision is still poor. The green light from a traffic light at night appears as a starburst of multiple lights instead of a single, sharply focused image. Sometimes I also get a ghostly haze or halo over objects. What causes this poly-oplia? This doesn't seem to be improving at the same rate as my overall distance vision.
As a result I've been avoiding extended night driving. I have been able to et by with a -1D on short distances over known roads, but I'm afraid to go on the highway.
Any suggestions here for building up to being able to drive on the highway at night?
I wanted to introduce myself and also post some questions I had about my recovery.
've been wearing glasses for about 27 years. My prescription in 2007 was a -5.25/-6.75. In 2012 I found an optometrist who agreed to reduce it to -3.25/-4.75 for 20/40 correction. After I found out what my prescription was I worked on my own over the span of a year (in 2013) to carefully reduce it in 1 diopter increments.
Fast forward to today: I wear a -0.25/-0.25 glasses for daytime driving.
I'm able to confidently drive in the daytime with these and can see most road signs, but my vision isn't perfect. My questions are:
1) The vision quality/amount of blur fluctuates a lot and seems to be affected by the muscles surrounding the eyes. When those muscles cramp up, the vision gets blurry, but when they relax they get clearer. I can also feel the muscles at the side of the eye working when the distance vision clears up.
This is very different from the case of wearing strong glasses, where everything is crystal clear all the time and there are no fluctuations in vision.
Is normal vision supposed to fluctuate like this? Will it ever become HDTV sharp 100% of the time?
2) Night vision is still poor. The green light from a traffic light at night appears as a starburst of multiple lights instead of a single, sharply focused image. Sometimes I also get a ghostly haze or halo over objects. What causes this poly-oplia? This doesn't seem to be improving at the same rate as my overall distance vision.
As a result I've been avoiding extended night driving. I have been able to et by with a -1D on short distances over known roads, but I'm afraid to go on the highway.
Any suggestions here for building up to being able to drive on the highway at night?
Vasanth
Hi Vasanth,
Can you share what you practiced in 2013 to reduce your presciptions? Do you work regularly with an eyechart ? What is your average visual acuity at 20 feet when wearing the .5 lenses? Checking indoors allows you to control the level of lighting, to get more consistent readings. Nobody is 100 % HD sharp all the time. Even people with the best vision can deteriorate in seconds if something unpleasant is experienced (remember the Bates story of the girl who had the most remarkable vision, could count the moons of Jupiter, but when asked to do some math, which she really disliked, she became myopic). Night vision is really not much different, but mentally, it can be very intimidating, as there is so much less in the way of visual colors, cues, and details which we rely upon during the day. Our central vision is lower(cones), our peripheral vision is hightened (rods). Rods are active in dark, and are extremely sensitive to motion and light, but worse at detail and color. So the mindset at night has to adjust, and not have the same expectation as that during the day. If we are at all nervous or anxious, we can tense up, exacerbating the wrong habits of staring, straining which led us into myopia in the first place.
Rather than think of the amounts of 'blur,' think of it in terms of the amount of 'clarity,' as even recalling and focusing on our visual imperfections is more of a strain, mentally, than remembering and imagining things seen clearly, things that bring us comfort and effortlessness. What kinds of things help you see clearly, when you walk, when you're outside, when you're driving? What has worked best for you?
I wanted to introduce myself and also post some questions I had about my recovery.
've been wearing glasses for about 27 years. My prescription in 2007 was a -5.25/-6.75. In 2012 I found an optometrist who agreed to reduce it to -3.25/-4.75 for 20/40 correction. After I found out what my prescription was I worked on my own over the span of a year (in 2013) to carefully reduce it in 1 diopter increments.
Fast forward to today: I wear a -0.25/-0.25 glasses for daytime driving.
I'm able to confidently drive in the daytime with these and can see most road signs, but my vision isn't perfect. My questions are:
1) The vision quality/amount of blur fluctuates a lot and seems to be affected by the muscles surrounding the eyes. When those muscles cramp up, the vision gets blurry, but when they relax they get clearer. I can also feel the muscles at the side of the eye working when the distance vision clears up.
This is very different from the case of wearing strong glasses, where everything is crystal clear all the time and there are no fluctuations in vision.
Is normal vision supposed to fluctuate like this? Will it ever become HDTV sharp 100% of the time?
2) Night vision is still poor. The green light from a traffic light at night appears as a starburst of multiple lights instead of a single, sharply focused image. Sometimes I also get a ghostly haze or halo over objects. What causes this poly-oplia? This doesn't seem to be improving at the same rate as my overall distance vision.
As a result I've been avoiding extended night driving. I have been able to et by with a -1D on short distances over known roads, but I'm afraid to go on the highway.
Any suggestions here for building up to being able to drive on the highway at night?
Vasanth
Hi Vasanth,
Can you share what you practiced in 2013 to reduce your presciptions? Do you work regularly with an eyechart ? What is your average visual acuity at 20 feet when wearing the .5 lenses? Checking indoors allows you to control the level of lighting, to get more consistent readings. Nobody is 100 % HD sharp all the time. Even people with the best vision can deteriorate in seconds if something unpleasant is experienced (remember the Bates story of the girl who had the most remarkable vision, could count the moons of Jupiter, but when asked to do some math, which she really disliked, she became myopic). Night vision is really not much different, but mentally, it can be very intimidating, as there is so much less in the way of visual colors, cues, and details which we rely upon during the day. Our central vision is lower(cones), our peripheral vision is hightened (rods). Rods are active in dark, and are extremely sensitive to motion and light, but worse at detail and color. So the mindset at night has to adjust, and not have the same expectation as that during the day. If we are at all nervous or anxious, we can tense up, exacerbating the wrong habits of staring, straining which led us into myopia in the first place.
Rather than think of the amounts of 'blur,' think of it in terms of the amount of 'clarity,' as even recalling and focusing on our visual imperfections is more of a strain, mentally, than remembering and imagining things seen clearly, things that bring us comfort and effortlessness. What kinds of things help you see clearly, when you walk, when you're outside, when you're driving? What has worked best for you?
Thanks for the tips. My main practice was based on David DeAngelis' power vision system but I didn't really have a structured practice, other than doing some eye rotations and stretches during the day. I mostly just let the undercorrections do their work and tried to avoid using the minus in front of a comptuer screen.
David teaches a technique called CBT for training your eyes to clear blur. Basically it involves tensing up your eyes and then relaxing them to relieve the tension that's causing the blur. I would apply that technique to distant objects when I'm driving for example.
I would wear one pair of reduced glasses driving and a weaker pair for the computer work. From time to time I would check the eye chart to check that I could still meet the driving standard with the reduced glasses. I've been a little lazy about working with the eye chart lately but I'll check my measurements and let you know what I find. When my eyes are "warmed up" it feels like my vision is a 20/40, but there is the daily fluctuation and one of my eyes is weaker than the other one. I"m waiting to stabilize even more and improve the weaker eye before I take the DMV test.
When you test with the eye chart, are you supposed to do it in a bright sunlight room, or in a darkened room? How do they do it at the DMV?
As far as things that helped. Probably the biggest is the driving, especially the long commute to work has helped my eyes to open up. Also I've gotten into the habit of wearing a +1 glasses indoors. When I drive I practice the CBT exercise above and I also do some Bates related tracing of objects in the distance like cars etc and that helps open things up.
Watching TV without glasses (or with a plus lens) also seems to help. I'm able to see the TV subtitles which I wasn't able to see before.
Anyways thanks for the tips. I'll keep you posted on my progress.
08-09-2014, 06:20 AM (This post was last modified: 08-09-2014, 06:21 AM by vavst4.)
Okay so I took some eyechart measurements. I do find a big disparity between lighting conditions and taking them at the end of the day and first thing in the morning.
When I checked yesterday it was around 11PM after a day of computer work and evening of close reading on my ipad. My eye muscles felt cramped and everything was initially fuzzy. It took several minutes to clear the 20/40 line.
Then I checked again this morning after waking up. In a few seconds (and a few blinks) I was able to see the 20/40 line. As I spent a few more minutes in front of the chart and started tracing letters things started to clear up even more. With my weaker right eye I was able to eventually make out 20/30 and with both eyes together I could see 20/30 and roughly see some letters on 20/20 but not quite get to 20/20. The vision kept fluctuating but overall when the chart went out of focus I was bring back into focus at least the lines on the 20/70-20/40 range with a few blinks and I could feel the eye muscles on the side working. Eventually the eyes felt "worked out" and I figured it was time to stop.
I'm going to start practicing with the eyechart some more. It looks like the main things I need to work on is that the eye muscles (when tired) tend to get "stuck" on the close range and then take a while to "warm up" to seeing distance. I'd like to get it to the point where the adaptation to distance is nearly instantaneous under all conditions. Let me know if you have any tips.
Congratulations on the success in your vision improvement program.
It's an astonishing achievement: after having more than -5 in 2012 forward to 2014 you're already in the 20/40 zone which is roughly -1. So far you cleared four diopters which is an impresive result.
For further improvement make a habit to look at smaller and smaller details all the time, and make a daily habit to look at the distance (at least 10 minutes every 4 hours). As bigger distance - that better. That's something we don't do enough in modern times. Throughout history people looked at the distance much more than people today and looking at the distance is very beneficial to us as it relaxes all the visual aparatus. Pay attention that you don't strain to see - just look. If your vistas are blocked - look at the clouds: they are miles away.
Have you tought to incorporate an occasional face massage into your program?
(08-09-2014, 06:20 AM)vavst4 Wrote: Okay so I took some eyechart measurements. I do find a big disparity between lighting conditions and taking them at the end of the day and first thing in the morning.
When I checked yesterday it was around 11PM after a day of computer work and evening of close reading on my ipad. My eye muscles felt cramped and everything was initially fuzzy. It took several minutes to clear the 20/40 line.
Then I checked again this morning after waking up. In a few seconds (and a few blinks) I was able to see the 20/40 line. As I spent a few more minutes in front of the chart and started tracing letters things started to clear up even more. With my weaker right eye I was able to eventually make out 20/30 and with both eyes together I could see 20/30 and roughly see some letters on 20/20 but not quite get to 20/20. The vision kept fluctuating but overall when the chart went out of focus I was bring back into focus at least the lines on the 20/70-20/40 range with a few blinks and I could feel the eye muscles on the side working. Eventually the eyes felt "worked out" and I figured it was time to stop.
I'm going to start practicing with the eyechart some more. It looks like the main things I need to work on is that the eye muscles (when tired) tend to get "stuck" on the close range and then take a while to "warm up" to seeing distance. I'd like to get it to the point where the adaptation to distance is nearly instantaneous under all conditions. Let me know if you have any tips.
All good tips by Aureus; If possible, I would suggest a much more frequent break schedule from nearwork, at least every hour or more. If possible, get outside, take a short walk, where you can get natural light/sunlight, focus and shift on natural scenery at varying distances, in open expanses. Open expanses help open up our eyes, and engage peripheral and central vision together. There's a lot of strong evidence to suggest that more time spent outdoors is associated with much less myopia. No surprise. The more time spent outdoors, the less chance one has of developing bad habits at the nearpoint in the first place, which easily carry over to distance seeing. Bates had that figured out long ago when he implemented his eye education into public school systems. He witnessed, (and well documented) how visual problems evolved in the school systems, where much indoor/nearpoint work was now part of modern culture. I would agree with Bates that it isn't how MUCH we use our eyes at the nearpoint, so much as it is HOW we use them at the nearpoint. And how we use them at near affects how we use them at far. They're the same eyes we use for both. I relate to this because I restored my vision from about 20/175 to normal levels (my daily chart readings now are in the order of 20/15-20/20) WHILE having to use my eyes at near, on computers and other nearwork for 8 to 10 hours daily. My distance improvement struggled until I learned how to better relax the tension and unconscious strain at the nearpoint. Then everything got easier, and using them at near often felt like a benefit, when I eventually had to drive home for the day. I too have a somewhat long commute.
The things that help prevent vision problems are usually not enough to help restore problems that already exist. You've already acquired the wrong habits, ingrained them with years of repetitive reinforcement, and wearing lenses only helps deepen it all even more subconsciously. It can often feel like a wrestling match, you, wrestling against yourself, or some unknown force within oneself. Vision is a funny thing like that, it wants to operate totally independently, without our conscious intrusion. But we have learned how to intrude, in all the wrong ways, and weren't even aware of it. Most ignore all the signs and symptoms of strain because they are just trying too keep up. Keep up with the expectations and volumes of information that we have to learn to get an education and be a productive in the workplace.
Some of the things that will help are, as I said, taking more frequent breaks from nearwork. Myopes strain almost all the time, so need much more time to rest the eyes and strain than someone simply trying to prevent problems. Learning to rest them properly by palming, closing them, or just getting outside to open them up will all help. Closing them or palming may seem like such a simple practice, but it's amazing at how many people can strain even more while doing so, and get no benefit. One has to remember or imagine things that bring comfort, things that are very positive, and be able to put troubles aside. Remembering static images is also not helpful, as it's best to remember or imagine things with movement, or oppositional movement, as we constantly think of different parts of our imagined images.
Learning to imagine halos, especially those that are seen around printed matter can also be very beneficial. One shouldn't look directly at letters, rather, let your eyes dance and hover all around and through them, never landing on any part. The eye never stops moving, and it can be quite a strain to try to stop it and hold our vision on any one spot. By imagining the halos, we unconsciously stop trying to look 'at' the letters so much. Letters at the nearpoint are never seen still, rather, should be seen having a slight motion to them, a motion of their own accord, not forced. But even a slight, constant sway as you sit is more beneficial than letting things be stationary. Nearwork is a stationary activity, and fosters stationary habits of mind and body, none of which are beneficial to the visual system. Break those what ever way you have to. Reading fine print can also be very beneficial, and helped me much. It forces one to use better central fixation, because in order to read it, one has to be more relaxed. And when one is more relaxed, the fovea operates more properly, at near as well as far. Read fine print several times a day, even a small sample will suffice. All the same principles apply to looking at fine print as to normal size letters, or chart letters. The best way of breaking bad habits is to replace them with good habits, as Bates said, and learning new habits at the nearpoint will pay big dividends with vision at all distances.
The reason I ask if most of us vision improvement practicioners here, me included, have gotten to be pretty good blur interpreters. I have no doubt your vision improved just curious that's all.
I've been at this vision improvement thing from the beginning of this year and the first 1 to 1.5 diopters were easy and after that it's been a total grind.
This is a citation from sleepmaster's post at another symilar thread. (I'm giving the answer here cos so makes sense to me):
(08-13-2014, 11:08 AM)sleepmaster Wrote: I go to an optometrist every month for an eye exam to keep me honest since I tend to overestimate my visual acuity since I'm a good blur interpreter.
This is great - I support the attitude that honesty is important during the visual imporvement program. And I would add another thing to this: to find a will to continue with efforts to improve your vision even after discovering you're not progressing so well or you're not progressing at all. Or you're regressing. Dishonesty is for the weak.
sleepmaster,
It's greatyou eliminated one and half diopter since the start of this year. What you're experiencing now is your first plateaux and this is rather typical for most of the people who do something to improve their vision naturally.
The plateaux is crushed by changing the exercing routine or by enriching it with something new and that can be a new exercise or a set of exercises, a slightly edited or totally new approach to whole this matter of improvement but it can also be something that seemingly doesn't have anything in common with the state of your eyes: a new sport, a new hobby, or say discovering a very effective meditation. Oh yes, even finding a girlfriend can help.
08-13-2014, 03:00 PM (This post was last modified: 08-13-2014, 03:14 PM by sleepmaster.)
After my first 30 days of doing this stuff, I dropped -1.875 diopters in my weaker eye and 1.25 diopters in my stronger eye, though I think those results were inflated by .25 diopters due to me finding a really good bridge that I looked at extreme far away distances on for 30 minutes right before my eye exam.
Since then, I've improved my vision more than that though it's been a grind. I am now in the low -2s.
I want to stress that I put a lot of effort into what I do and I am a vision improvement fanatic even compared to people on this board.
Zero diopters or bust. I want it all.
I definitely agree that switching things up is good, similar to why the PS90X exercise program is effective.
(08-13-2014, 03:00 PM)sleepmaster Wrote: I want to stress that I put a lot of effort into what I do and I am a vision improvement fanatic even compared to people on this board.
Zero diopters or bust. I want it all.
You have already had a great improvement in this year and it's a fair reward for your efforts and your fanaticism.
Just be aware that it's very hard to dictate anything to our biology. We can do it to some extent but beyond a certain limit it's not very wise to do so as one can get some negative feedback. Those ones who go to the gym know this very well. Many of them have hurt shoulders, back problems and injured joints just because they wanted too big muscles, too quickly and didn't pay attention to their actual body needs and potentials.
I have a feeling you'll have more improvement but I wouldn't be very surprised if you'll have another plateaux once you reach -1 diopter zone.
Yeah I've learned the price for overtraining my eyes.
I don't like how I'm slowing down in the low -2s so I started palming much more frequently this week, 20 timess a day for the last several days. I've tried every palming position known to man, but now I palm face down on a bed with a pillow under my forehead, using gravity to palm with some pressure on the acupressure points in my forehead. That way the palming feels more like a deep message at the same time. I still make sure for the bottom of my hands to graze my cheeks to take advantage of the relaxing sensation of touch as much as possible for the visual system.
For those out there that say palming doesn't work and it's just a temporary phenomenon where your eye is seeing the illusion of better vsion, well doesn't even that illusion become a memory of your visual system, a superior form of imagination if you will, a memory your visual system can draw upon to try to replicate without palming by ever so slowly adjust the muscles that grip and shape the eye to what the visual system is tricked into seeing as the new normal. A palming session is like going forward 10 steps and even though you give back 9, it's still worth it.
It seems like the -3 area is a common plateau from what I've seen. Bates once said a person's vision is an aggregate adaptation to the various enviornments one is in in their daily routine. I think when you're -4, -5, -6 myopia, and worse, the enviornment with its distances is more of a stimulus to lessen your myopia than when you're at -3.
My first mini-plateau was around the -3 area as well. I thought I was accomodating too much for close up work, so I started using my computer with outstretched arms and trained myself how to interpret blurry print on a monitor, which was a pain initially. Basically pushing print without the plus lenses. I do use a +0.5 plus lens for reading now, but that's after it became too inconvenient to type with outstretched arms. And I want to stress I not only use the mildest of plus lenses, but I only use them for defense.
I don't think it's wise to use plus lenses that are more than 3.5 diopters away from your visual acuity. I've worn corrective lenses for nearly 30 yrs of my life and I was overprescribed by 1-1.5 diopters when I was a kid, and that combined with using glasses for close up work wrecked my eyesight. Well Just my opinion, but I think you use natural means to get to -3, and then you can start to use the weakest of plus lenses very carefully, and palm more frequently when you do that.
That brings me to another point. I'm in the low -2s and improvement is clearly slowing down, and since I've been doing primarily natural means to get here, I'm now at a crossroads. I know the distances in outdoor enviornments aren't the same stimulus they were 2-3 diopters ago. I want to know if there's something else out there besides jumping the plus lenses from +0.5 diopter to+1.0 for close up work. I guess it's about time I upgrade to the +1.0 since +1.0 where I am now is like where I was when I using the +0.5 when I was -2.75.
I don't like plus lenses myself -- I think growing up wearing thick glasses all the time made me not want to wear any kind of glasses at all. If they work for you, great. Can you find greater distances to look at? One of my vision clients talked about taking a road trip with a friend who drove, so he could look at the sea, and the mountains in the distance. He said he could feel his eyes "doing something different". When Meir Schneider was coming back from blindness, he used to do Long Swings looking out at the ocean as I remember, just letting his gaze travel farther and farther outward.
I do long swings on bridges during periods of traffic, at intersection medians, large parks with multiple outdoor soccer games going on, shopping parking lots where pigeons are flying around, etc. I haven't found mountains and oceans to be as effective, because while the distances are greater, they don't have the same movement and detail. I could work them in as a changeup though.
Quote:I started 14 months ago to get rid of my glasses with -4.00 dioptrie in both eyes and Astigmatism.
With my left eye I was able to see nearly normally within 3 weeks.
I was lucky to find out that my right eye had actually Amplyopia ( if it is not cured early enough, it will lead to unrecoverable blindness ), which no optician checked for before. It did not move only looked in 1 direction and very unsharp. Currently I can get nearly normal vision in parts of my right eye temporarily.
After 1/2 year of practice I got a statement from a doctor that I am now able to drive a car without glasses in Australia as ny vision had improved to about 1/2 - 1 Dioptries.
This guy went from -4 to -1 diopters in six months?! His vision was better than mine starting out but not by much.
