Mental Eyestrain – Thoughts

Our eyes are a little different from our other senses. We do not have any control over our sense of smell, sound, touch, and taste. They are fixed and continually send signals to our brain to process and react. It is mostly the same with our eyes except we have partial control to blink, look near or far, and move the eyes in many directions. This allow us the flexibility to do many things with them, however, also making it vulnerable to stress and emotions.

Stress and emotions are caused by external factors (work, relationship difficulties, financial problems, or busy schedule), or internal factors (uncertainty, pessimism, or perfectionism). Stressful and strong emotional thoughts invoke a fight or flight response in our body. During fight or flight, when you sense danger, the body respond by dumping stress hormones into the bloodstream. These hormones sends the body into emergency mode. This cause the heart to beat faster, blood pressure to rise, muscles to tighten, breathing to quicken, and the senses to sharpen. These changes prepare the body to fight or flee from the danger. Our body deals with stress the same way whether it is a physical or psychological threat. When we stress over a tight deadline, traffic jam, or argument with a spouse, our body treat it as if we are facing a life-or-death situation. (HelpGuide 2010) Stress cause real physical changes and tension in our body. Any thoughts that lead to tension in our body and eye muscles is mental strain.

Some of the effects of stress are (AIS 2010):
• Headaches, jaw clenching, grinding teeth
• Neck ache, back pain, muscle spasms, difficulty breathing
• Light-headedness, faintness, dizziness, nausea
• Panic attacks, anxiety, worry, guilt, nervousness, fidgeting
• Difficulty concentrating, racing thoughts, suicidal thoughts, forgetfulness, disorganization, confusion
• Feelings of loneliness or worthlessness, frustration, irritability, edginess, anger, hostility, depression, wild mood swings

Stress and strong emotional thoughts cause the body to react by squeezing and tensing the muscle. For example, have you watched a scary movie that truly frightened you? At each scene where you know something is about to happen, didn’t your heart beat wildly, your eyes squeeze shut but leaving just a crack to peek at what is going to happen next, and all the muscles tense tightly as if trying to make the body small and invisible to the horror? It is exhausting to watch! And fun! Muscle tension is a natural byproduct of stress and emotions. This tension affects our eyes even if we are not consciously using them. Try an experiment to test this for yourself.

• Close your eyes.
• Allow your mind to wander; as it does, try to sense what the eyes and face are doing. Can you feel the eye and face muscles tensing and moving with different thoughts?
• Try remembering an angry thought.
• Can you feel the eye tensing, locking and staring at the person or thing that causes the anger? Can you feel your face muscles tensing?

We are stressed for many hours every day and we have a hard time turning it off. Stress and emotions trigger our eye muscles to contract just like any other muscles that we have control over and the effect last long after the stress ends. This makes our eyes vulnerable to stress and emotions.

To solve the mental strain, we must learn to deal with the thoughts leading to stress and strong emotions. There will always be stress in our lives, but we can choose to deal with the stress in a calm manner, rather than allow it to races through our body and mind like a chicken running around with its head chopped off. We need a way to quiet the mind so that we can properly manage the stress. When the mind is quiet, the body can relax, and both will benefit. We will train to quiet our mind and to focus without straining later on in our lessons.