If you are a young person and even if you are 25 or older and you are spending a lot of time looking at things up close and you are not allowing your vision to relax, you may or may not have migraine headaches, you may or may not have headaches, you might, and that could be the cause of those, and if your vision is already poor, many of these things that I'm talking about today, perhaps all of them, will improve your vision to some degree. If your vision is starting to go, then doing these behaviors is likely to really enhance the quality of the vision that you will build and maintain over time.
These days, we're spending a lot of time looking at things, mainly our phones up close and computers up close, and we are indoors. Now, there are a lot of recommendations out there right now. We should look up from your computer screen. It's actually not going to solve the problem just to look up from your computer screen. You need to go to a window. You need to look out at a distance. You want to get out onto a balcony. You want to relax your eyes and look out at the horizon. You want to go into what's called panoramic vision. Let your vision expand. So what's the protocol? How often should you do this? You might be surprised, but for every 30
minutes of focused work, you probably want to look up every once in a while and just try and relax your face and eye muscles, including your jaw muscles, because all these things are closely linked in the brain stem and allow your eyes to go into so-called panoramic vision where you're just not really focusing on anything and then refocus on your work at least every 90 minutes of looking at things up close. You might say, that's impossible. How am I supposed to do that? I, you know, I'm in an office or I'm in a building. Get to a window, get onto a balcony and just let your eyes relax, not just to lighten the load on your mind or to think about
other things, but to maintain the health of your visual system. In other words, you want to exercise these muscles and that involves the lens moving and getting kind of thicker and relaxing that lens. And the relaxation of the lens is actually one of the best things you can do for the musculature of the inner eye. You can actually train or improve your vision by looking at smooth pursuit stimuli as well as near far. So spending a few minutes, you might even just do this for two minutes of looking at something up close. That's going to
activate these accommodation mechanisms and then moving it at arm's length and focusing on it for five, 10 seconds, maybe more, maybe 15 or 20 seconds, then slowly moving it into a location and then out. Spend two to three minutes doing smooth pursuit. There's some programs on YouTube. You can just look up smooth pursuit stimulus. You could do this with a pen if you want it. Someone else could hold a wand and you could do that. If you've got someone, they can do that for you. Practice accommodation for a few minutes, maybe every other day, just bringing something in close. You'll feel the strain of your eyes doing that.
I can feel it right now. Move it out. You'll feel a relaxation point. Move it past that relaxation point where you will have to do what's called a virgin side movement to maintain focus on that location as it moves out, bring it back in. It's worth doing. It's really worth preserving your vision. And again, if you're a young person, this is great because then you can actually build an extra strong visual system.