5. Two Types of Eyestrain – Physical and Mental

The best way to understand eyestrain is to feel it for ourselves. Please look at the following picture for a minute.

When you look at this picture, how does your eyes and mind feel?

Do you feel the tension building on the side and in the back of your eyes? Do you feel some tension building in the back of the head, neck and shoulders? Does your mind feel uncomfortable as if you are getting a headache? This is strain. Our eyes and mind are made to work together to make the image clear. Since the world is sharp, they naturally adjust themselves to focus the image clearly. In its attempt to make this image sharp, it creates tension in the eye muscles and the mind.

Now look at this picture for a minute.

How does your eyes feel now? Did all the tension in the eyes, back of the head, neck, and shoulders seem to slowly melt away? Does the mind feel comfortable and relaxed? This is how normal vision should feel.

Our visual system is like a finely tuned machine, every part support each other to work perfectly. When we throw a screw into the machine, it may fall through without causing any problems or it may get caught in a sprocket and start a process that damages the entire machine.

When looking at the blurred image earlier, it is as if we have just thrown a screw into the visual system and immediately felt the effects of it. We experienced two types of strain, a physical strain where the muscles are tensing to force the image into focus, and a mental strain where the mind strain to force itself to create a sharp image. Our eyes and mind work as a team and when our eyes cannot focus the picture clearly it affects the mind. The mind tries harder to create a clear image which forces the eyes to tense even more. These two forces feed off each other to create eyestrain. The greater the eyestrain becomes, the worse our eyesight gets. The worst our eyesight gets the more we strain. This becomes an endless cycle that builds deeper tension in our visual system.

How do we end this cycle of strain that seems to feed on itself? This is like a chicken and egg problem. Which should we deal with first, the physical strain or the mental strain? The current solution is to throw in a pair of glasses so the eyes see clearly. This helps to prevent the strain from growing more intense. However, the strain on the eye muscles and mind are still there. If nothing else is added to the cycle, then our vision will remain stable. For most of us, our vision gets worst rather than remain the same. There are a few factors that cause our vision to deteriorate:

• Most of us wear our glasses all the time. Our eyes adapts to the lens power and lose some of its flexibility to focus. It is like curling a one pound dumbbell with your arm, and holding it for a long time. When you let go, the hand and arm muscles have problems adjusting and moving until it has enough time to recover. If you do not remove your glasses, you do not allow the eye muscles to let go and relax.
• We continue to work long hours in front of the computer or read a book without short breaks. This creates more tension in the muscles. Using the dumbbell metaphor, before the hand and arm muscles could recover, we curl a two pound dumbbell and hold, causing more tension and strain in the muscles.
• Most of the time, we are stressed by deadlines, busy schedules, frustrating problems, or anger at a situation or person. Stress creates tension in the mind. Many of us deal with stress by tensing and holding our muscles, and some of this tension happens in the eye.

All these factors destabilize our eyesight, and slowly cause the cycle to turn again. Since, the original problem was never solved, the cycle continues from where the glasses helped to slow or stop the strain. This is why our prescription continues to get stronger each or every few years.