Exercise Your Way To Better Eyesight

Stimulating perception is one of the most effective methods of improving eyesight. Although your eyes respond to light and images and send these signals to your brain, it is your brain that ultimately decides what you see of the world around you. It is the information stored in your brain that is reactivated by what you see.

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and advanced computer programs to map specific areas of the brain, scientists have been able to observe both what happens to the signals the optic nerve sends to the visual cortex and how the cortex interprets them. It turns out that the more information you possess about the visual world, the more adept your brain is at interpreting what the eyes see from even a minimum of clues. For example, you can recognize a person you know well from nothing more than the sight of a familiar tilt of the head, the curve of a chin, or a hairstyle.

The basis for recognizing other persons and objects begins when a baby learns to know its mother as separate from self. Afterwards, the things a person knows and learns influence how he experiences different objects. What we know determines how we see an object. Seeing becomes perception only through knowledge of the object.

Unfortunately, if you have glaucoma, the drops, the cataracts, and the decreased vision often corrode your desire to examine objects carefully. You may find you have little interest in examining the features of a person's face, or looking at paintings. Yet developing your perceptual powers can actually help you to overcome the debilitating effects of glaucoma and its treatments. Perception-sharpening exercises like those outlined below can help.

Before performing any of these 11 exercises, take a few minutes to practice your breathing. Breathe in from your diaphragm or stomach, through your nose; breathe out through your mouth. Your breathing should be slow and steady. Now you can begin the exercises. For the following perceptual exercises, pretend that you are an artist or a writer and that you must examine details.

1. Look at a building. Observe the brickwork, the inset of the windows, the door frame, the roof. If you can read the building address, look at each number individually. Keep your eyes traveling over the surface of the building. Do not stare at one spot.

2. Bring a friend. Look at your friend's face - the eyebrows, eyelashes, nose, cheeks, mouth. Pretend you are going to draw the face and you want to represent each feature.

3. Look at a tree. Then look at the bark, a twig, a leaf, the veins in the leaf, and so on.

4. Blink a lot. Blinking is nature's way of lubricating your eyes.

5. Slowly open and close your eyes, one at a time. Move your head back and forth with your eyes closed, then, for a fraction of a second, open each eye slowly. By opening each eye very slowly, you can eventually blink with only one eye at a time.

6. Draw a large E in black magic marker on a sheet of paper. Look first at the lower bar, then at the upper bar, the vertical bar, and the center bar. Picture the E in your mind. Then step five feet away from the E. Blink slowly a few times. Look at the E again, then blink slowly again a few more times. Never stare. If you can see the E, move back a few feet. Repeat this sequence until you can no longer see the E.

7. Stimulate the cells responsible for peripheral vision. Extend your arms out to each side. Wiggle your fingers. Can you see the motion? If not, bring your arms closer to your body until you glimpse your wiggling fingers.

8. Close your eyes. Visualize a large circle. Pretend there is a pencil affixed to your nose. Trace around the circle. Squeeze it into an oval. Trace around the oval. Make it into a figure-eight. Trace around the figure-eight. Write your name, tracing each letter.

9. Tape a piece of paper over the bridge of your nose. Hold your index fingers in front of you and move them first clockwise, then counterclockwise, then have one finger go clockwise and the other counterclockwise. Follow the motions with your eyes.

10. When reading, sit where you can see a wall calendar or some other item with large type. If you can find an eye chart, hang it on the wall. Raise your eyes occasionally to look at it. If you read in daylight, look out the window after every five or six pages. Focus on a distant object when you do so.

11. Pause occasionally in your reading and remember the last word you read. Visualize the whiteness around the word. Think of the blackness of the letters. Look at the word again.
Remember to avoid staring. Move your eyes around the object. When you think of it, shift your eyes. You see best when your eyes make saccadic movements, that is, tiny automatic movements that your eyes make to fixate on objects. Your eyes will experience the least fatigue when viewing an object consisting of words or letters with quick glances.

In addition to perceptual exercises, the following are 4 tension relieving exercises that may be helpful:

1. Massage your jaw. Yawn. Allow yourself to make noises. releases facial tension.

2. Feel the sternocleidomastoid muscle - the muscle that runs from behind your ear, down the side of your neck, and into your shoulders. Place four fingers on each side of the muscle and massage the muscle, checking along the whole area for tension and sore spots. Massage twenty times.

3. Do shoulder rotations, ten times with each shoulder.

4. Move your head loosely around in a circle, first clockwise, the counterclockwise, ten times each.

These exercises should relieve tensed-up muscles and promote healthy circulation. Many of us become tensed up when we concentrate on an activity. Tension in the body restricts blood flow, and restricted blood flow to the optic nerve is implicated in glaucoma.