CHAPTER 15 Near Sight—Your Eyes Need Movement, Too!

“Looking at beauty in the world is the first step of purifying the mind.”

—Amit Ray

The typical model of fitness is one of focusing on stretching and contracting muscles as a means to alter body composition and performance. It’s less common to hear of an athlete focusing on their visual acuity in a training program or a business executive harnessing the auditory spectrum for a mental edge. The truth is your senses are the foundation of your physical and mental well-being. You can leverage them as tools to discharge stress, wake yourself up, calm yourself down, or induce most any state you desire. This section will break down exactly why this is and how to begin incorporating them into your daily life for more energy, less stress, and, perhaps mostly importantly, looking better naked.

I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM, WE ALL SCREAM FOR EYE STRAIN

One of the biggest emerging health problems of our generation is the eye strain and related conditions caused by restricting vision to staring at screens that we hold right in front of us for an average of almost eleven hours each day. As frustrating as it is to have sore, red eyes, such visual restriction is also contributing to more serious conditions, including myopia (aka shortsightedness). This occurs when eyeballs keep growing beyond the point of normal development; an increasing number of optometrists and other eye health professionals are beginning to believe that the sharp spike in myopia is being caused by overuse of smartphones, iPads, and other screens.

Eye expert and co-founder of PEEK Vision Andrew Bastawrous told the UK edition of Wired: “People are doing more near-plane reading activity with smartphones which is encouraging the eye to become myopic to meet that environmental need. There’s also evidence that suggests this is happening too quickly for it to be purely an environmental or genetic response. More recent data suggests a more important factor has been that we spend less time outdoors than we used to.”¹ Not only does your depth of vision change when you’re outside, taking your eye muscles through a broader range of motion, but researchers suggest regular exposure to sunlight is a crucial component to eye health as well. If you care about your vision (and posture), take off your sunglasses and move with your head held high instead of staring down into the phone when you’re taking a walk outside.

While staring compulsively at screens is a major part of the vision problem that’s reaching epidemic levels in some countries—in South Korea 90 percent of high schoolers are myopic—a lack of time outside is also a prime culprit. Unless you’re running a daycare out of your home, indoor environments tend to be more static than outdoor ones, so there are fewer stimuli to catch your eye and cause your vision to wander as it naturally would in the wild. Indoor spaces are also far more predictable, so even their familiarity prompts less visual stimulation than when we enter a new room for the first time. Bastawrous told Wired, “You can walk into a room that you’re familiar with and what you’re actually seeing is the cached content in your internal hard drive of that room rather than actually seeing new information.”

In contrast, being outdoors offers a unique visual and auditory experience every time we engage in it—provided, of course, that you’re not fixated on your phone. In his bestselling book The Rise of Superman, Steven Kotler observes that participating in a challenging outdoor activity like skiing, downhill mountain biking, or—my favorite—surfing can quickly put you into a flow state because the novelty, unpredictability, and variability of the natural environment that you’re moving quickly through is forcing your brain to focus entirely on the task at hand. This is the complete opposite of sitting on your couch for hour after hour tapping out tweets or binge-watching Game of Thrones. So it seems the remedy for the visual ills of being stuck indoors staring at screens is to simply allow your vision to wander outside with more regularity.

ALIGN YOURSELF

Anytime you have the chance to walk or cycle somewhere instead of driving or using public transport, take it. Use your phone calendar (irony noted) to schedule a quick outdoor break, if only for a few minutes. While you’re outside, use your eyes to zoom your vision in and out from various points nearby, in the middle distance, and far away. And if you suspect you need help limiting your screen time (hey, me too!), then install an app like Freedom, Moment, or RescueTime to set better boundaries. Then use that time you’re getting back to be more active, more often outside.

LOOKING UP AND OUT

“The health of the eyes seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired so long as we can see far enough.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, American adults spend nine out of every ten waking hours indoors. This might not be quite so bad if we made an effort to frequently gaze out into nature, but while 43 percent of Americans work from home at least one day a week, many of us still spend the majority of our work time cooped up like battery hens inside office buildings.² And unless you happen to be a high-flying executive with a corner office or an employee at some New Agey company with a rooftop garden or indoor/outdoor space like Apple’s new headquarters, you might not see the sun from the time you get to your desk in the morning until you clock out in the late afternoon (it hurts my eyes just writing it). This can be an even greater challenge during certain times of year, such as in the winter when it gets dark before quitting time.

Instead, your poor eyes face a continual, Monday to Friday, nine a.m. to five p.m. barrage of artificial light from excessively bright overhead bulbs that could be called the “junk food” of the light spectrum (you could think of it like an artificial sweetener—tastes all right but leaves you drained). This junk light from TVs, smartphones, and tablets is seeping out of those infernally bright LEDs in your office (and probably your home, too).

Dr. Alexander Wunsch, a prominent expert on photobiology, put it this way: “I call these LEDs Trojan horses because they appear so practical to us. They appear to have so many advantages. They save energy; are solid state and very robust. So we invited them into our homes. But we are not aware that they have many stealth health-robbing properties, which are harmful to your biology, harmful to your mental health, harmful to your retinal health, and also harmful to your hormonal or endocrine health.”³

ALIGN YOURSELF

If you work in a corporate office with empty space, see if there’s part of the building that offers a better view. You might not get the corner office (that’d belong to your boss—perhaps a decent enough reason to work toward becoming your own boss, just saying), but maybe you can at least score a desk with more natural light. If not, schedule as many meetings as possible in rooms with a view. And ask your boss to replace the LEDs in your office with more natural light-producing incandescent bulbs that won’t damage your eyes, and if he or she won’t do it, invest in some blue light–blocking glasses.

BUSTING STRESS WITH YOUR EYES

“It’s not that something different is seen but that one sees differently.”

—Carl Jung

What if I told you that you could stop chronic stress in its tracks simply by changing what you’re looking at? I admit this sounds a lot like the superpower of an X-Men character (though Wolverine’s claws might have a greater “wow” factor), but this isn’t just the stuff of science fiction or comic books. Stanford neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman’s research has shown that stress and vision exist in a loop. On one end, when we experience stress, it changes our visual perception and alters the shape of our eyes. “Autonomic stress and arousal change the way you view the world around you,” Huberman has been quoted as saying. “There’s a physical shift that makes it easier to track a single thing, but more difficult to track multiple things in your environment.”⁴ This is because the sympathetic fight-or-flight state evolved to keep us alive when threatened by predators and rival tribes, so we start to home in like Chris Kyle in American Sniper when we perceive a threat. This may be an actual threat, like the guy who killed a mountain lion with his hands in February 2019, or an imagined one, such as traffic jams or alarmist news reports.

Fortunately, the relationship between the visual and autonomic nervous systems isn’t one-way. Because it’s a two-way open loop, we can use vision to modulate our stress level and reopen a panoramic view of the world. Pretty cool, right? No matter how stressed you become, you always have the power of your panoramic vision to bring you back to a calmer state.

ALIGN YOURSELF

Next time you’re feeling stressed, gaze out into nature, preferably at a tree, hillside, or other green scene in the middle or far distance. In as little as forty seconds, you will start to tip the autonomic seesaw back in favor of a parasympathetic response (relax, rest, and digest). If you don’t have access to such a view, looking out the window regularly will be of great help as well (open the window to allow the full spectrum of light to enter the room). Finally, get a photo or two printed of mountains or the beach to put on your walls for an extra dose of nature therapy. That’s better for your eyes (and mental state) than staring at the same picture on a screen.

TUNNEL VISION

If an angry-looking lion ran into the room, you’d have some obvious physical reactions, like leaping to your feet, trying to find the nearest exit, grasping for a makeshift weapon, and perhaps even dropping this book. (Don’t worry, I’m not offended—surviving an attack by an apex predator comes before finishing this chapter.) But there’d also be some less obvious reactions. One is your peripheral vision shrinking, and your peepers concentrating on only what’s in front of you—in other words, tunnel vision. Your survival now depends on you being aware of the lion’s every move and mobilizing each muscle, sinew, and iota of energy to either kill it, escape, or die trying. And this all-out effort is in part conducted by focusing your eyes on the 500-pound ball of muscle that wants to tear you limb from limb.

Maybe that’s a silly, overly dramatic scenario. But even lesser stressors create changes in your visual system similar to outrunning an oncoming, growling prehistoric death-machine. When we’re in a busy, frenetic environment like a bustling city street, the New York subway, or the London Underground, we’re in a state of continual vigilance, ready to respond to the potential threat posed by fast-moving traffic, loud noises (see Chapter 16), and running late for that important meeting. In a paper published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, researchers found looking at photos of cities after being exposed to a stressor either made participants feel more anxious or didn’t improve their recovery from the stimulus. In contrast, those who were shown pictures of nature reduced their anxiety. The difference? The cityscape triggered the sympathetic nervous system (be on your guard!), while the photos of a forest prompted a parasympathetic response (relax).⁵

On top of our eyes continually reacting to the environment, our actions and behaviors can prompt alterations in our vision which are inextricably tied to the state of the autonomic nervous system. One of these is staring at a screen for hours on end. By doing so, we’re voluntarily reducing the entire world to a tiny field of vision that extends no more than a few inches in front of our faces. On one level, electronic device addiction is creating physical changes in our eyes. One study found a large quantity of screen time narrows the blood vessels in children’s eyes, which is an indicative marker of early-onset cardiovascular disease. In contrast, kids who spent more time being active outdoors without a cell phone or tablet had healthy retinal vasculature.⁶

Most of us cannot completely avoid looking at screens, or even want to. But you don’t have to become a tech teetotaler to improve how you treat your eyes and, in turn, enhance your autonomic nervous system tone (like toning your six-pack, but more important). First, try taking a break from the news cycle or at least limit your exposure to checking the headlines just once a day. Then, start batching your email and social media use into specific times of the day instead of it being open season all year long.

ALIGN YOURSELF

When you have to be in front of your computer for an extended amount of time, set a timer for twenty-five minutes. Each time it goes off, get up (from the floor hopefully) for a much-needed eye break by taking a five-minute stroll while staring at various distances, including the horizon. Feel free to throw in some lunges, squats, or jumping jacks for an extra movement boost.

LET THERE BE DARK

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”

—Helen Keller

In the Czech Republic, there’s a term you won’t find in any guidebook: terapie tmou. While this sounds like some sort of tasty chocolate dessert—or maybe I’m just hungry—the phrase actually means “darkness therapy.” That’s right—healing yourself with an absence of artificial light. The good people at the Beskid Rehabilitation Center and many other Czech wellness retreats believe that spending up to a week in total darkness can alleviate a wide variety of issues, including sleep disturbances, depression, and social jet lag (when your body clock and lifestyle get out of synch). Marek Malůš, a professor of psychology at the University of Ostrava’s Faculty of Arts, says that darkness therapy is a form of REST, restricted environmental stimulation therapy—a ritzy name for sensory deprivation.⁷ His research has found that people who participate in a week of dark therapy experience a significant reduction in anxiety and feelings of depression.

A form of this technique that is more popular in the West is isolation tanks, which combine light restriction with hydrotherapy. Everyone from psychonauts like Joe Rogan to pro sports studs such as two-time NBA MVP Steph Curry or biohackers like Ben Greenfield rave about the relaxation-promoting benefits of closing off the outside world, turning off the lights, and floating in mineral-rich water that mimics the elevating effects of the Dead Sea. But rather than having to fly to the Middle East, you can likely find a few flotation/isolation pods at your local spa. And the results aren’t merely anecdotal—a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine concluded that “Stress, depression, anxiety, and pain were significantly decreased whereas optimism and sleep quality significantly increased for the flotation-REST group.”⁸

ALIGN YOURSELF

You don’t have to fly to the Czech Republic and spend a week in darkness or push your claustrophobic boundaries in an isolation tank to reap some of the benefits. A more affordable option is to find a peaceful area in your home as a space to retreat. Simply lie down in a darkened room (draw the curtains, remove all electronics, cover any light sources), throw on an eye mask if any light is creeping in, close your eyes, and listen to relaxing music for twenty to forty minutes (silence is a great option too). This would be a fantastic opportunity to practice a breathing technique (see Chapter 5, on nose breathing) or simply be with yourself for some quiet introspection (see Chapter 18, on mindfulness).

FOCUS ON YOUR FEET

How do you avoid tripping over the stray bucket that a building crew kindly left on the sidewalk, dodge passersby in a busy airport, or even avoid falling over your own feet? Adaptive locomotion. Your eyes are constantly monitoring your surroundings and making micro-adjustments to your balance and positioning in three-dimensional space. Most are imperceptible, except when you need to leap away from that lunging Rottweiler or leap back from the crosswalk when that Hummer you were sure was going to stop doesn’t. Your visual, vestibular, and musculoskeletal systems are in a state of constant interplay, like the various sections of a well-conducted orchestra.

Unless, of course, you’re gazing down at your phone like a zombie. We’ve all had to step aside to let someone blunder by with absolutely no awareness of what’s going on around them because Instagram apparently cannot wait. Sometimes I envision “Terrible” Terry Tate flying out of nowhere to go all “Office Linebacker” on this distracted person. But the clueless phone addict isn’t just compromising their own short-term safety or annoying the bejesus out of the rest of us—they might actually be hindering their ability to effectively move through the world. Researchers at the University of Columbia found that people who text during perambulation (walking) move more slowly and are, perhaps unsurprisingly, unsteady on their feet.⁹ Worse still, a study published in Frontiers of Psychology states that loss of anticipatory control and the resulting change in adaptive locomotion can increase fall risk in the elderly and start to mirror the destabilizing effect of Parkinson’s disease.¹⁰ Remember, you’re always training your movement (and thought) patterns—each step is a practice and opportunity to become more balanced or, in the case of the cell phone, more distracted and unstable.

The remedy isn’t complicated. Focus on your footfalls, not your phone, and try to look up, down, out, and around you instead of just seeing what’s right in front of your face. If you watch your kids, grandkids, nieces, or nephews when they’re outside, you’ll probably notice that their head and neck act like a gyroscope—always twisting, turning, and tilting to look at something new and exciting. Contrast this to how most of us adults walk around with our gaze fixed firmly in front of us or looking down at our precious phones.

As we get older, we seem to lose our sense of wonder at the world. Re-expand your sense of wonder by simply extending your scope of vision. According to Florence Williams, Outside magazine contributor and author of The Nature Fix, “We’ll get the biggest bang [for our nature-immersing/vision-restoring buck] when we turn off the devices” and “listen to birds, watch clouds and the sunset.”¹¹

ALIGN YOURSELF

Take a walk, and put your phone into Do Not Disturb mode so only your nearest and dearest can contact you in an emergency (I personally choose airplane mode, but to each his or her own). Focus on what’s going on around you—just because you can do two things at once doesn’t mean it’s the best decision. This is particularly true when you’re on a trail or walking alongside a body of water. If you want to get all the stress-busting benefits nature can provide, remain fully engaged by putting your tech toys away. Consider shedding your shoes because the high density of nerves in your feet can further increase your proprioception and, as Richard Louv writes in his book Vitamin N, “Barefoot walkers are more likely to look down, to take care of where they step and are less likely to fall. Walking barefoot enhances awareness of texture and terrain.”¹²

EYE EXERCISE ROUTINE AND ITS BENEFITS

We’ve talked a lot of theory in this chapter. Now it’s time to leave you with some practical takeaways. We enlisted the help of my good friend Ryan Glatt, brain health coach and psychometrist at Pacific Brain Health Center, for his go-to eye exercises to improve brain health. Performing them every day will not only help your vision, but will also have a beneficial knock-on effect for your physical health, mental acuity, and emotional well-being. Before we get to the exercises themselves, let’s first examine why they’re helpful.

Biomechanics

Due to being fixated on our screens—laptop, phone, TV, or otherwise—for hours every day, we are typically in a posture that is sub-optimal and often asymmetrical. For example, many individuals look at the phone near where they removed it from their pocket; down and to the right. This rotates the rib cage and the head toward that same vector, and causes a “battle” with the muscles on the opposite side of the body. Some may become lengthened, others may become shortened. The point is, you are causing a musculoskeletal argument, when everyone was getting along just fine without your compulsive lower-diagonal phone-checking. (By the way, it doesn’t look any cooler to glance down at your phone that way.)

This can lead to torsions (not permanently, but there is potentially the development of a neuromuscular bias) in certain parts of the body that may manifest as tightness in weird places, such as one side of the back of your skull, the side of your neck, a strange part of your lower back that you can’t seem to place, etc. This same disruption also occurs when you hold a coffee cup or phone while walking, which can disrupt the important “contralateral swing” of the arms that is so important to healthy gait (see the Seinfeld episode in which Elaine’s colleague doesn’t swing her arms when she walks, and so lurches about like a cave dweller). So whether it’s a static posture or a dynamic motion, ipsilateral-visual-fixations may compound over time to be sensationally annoying, and even potentially increase injury risk or cause pain.

Nervous System

As discussed previously in the chapter, our autonomic nervous systems can be affected by our vision. For example, we are often stuck in central “fixed” vision; focused on a single target in front of us, often positioned or near-positioned centrally. Spending too much time in central vision can not only cause fatigue, but possibly increase the tone of the sympathetic nervous system, triggering the fight-flight-freeze mechanism and all the neurochemical and psychological goodies that can come with it. These include persistent anxiety, chronically elevated cortisol that leads to disease-breeding inflammation, and sleep disruption.

On the other hand, panoramic vision—the more “expansive” field of view—may have the opposite effect, leading to an engagement of the parasympathetic system, helping us to potentially achieve the ever-valuable rest-and-digest response that so many of us suppress with our always-on lifestyles. This is probably why looking out at a beautiful, expansive view in nature may deliver the deep sigh of relief, wonder, and relaxation that so many of us crave—maybe we are just too centrally bound all the time via our vision.

Some simple potential applications include:

Not staring at your phone while eating; that is central vision and may trigger sympathetic response, which is not helpful for digestion.

Not staring at your phone while pooping (I love this one), because it does the opposite of rest-and-digest due to centralized binding. Space out while you poop with a view instead.

Get outside not just for the exercise, but for the change in vista.

People who look “spaced out” seem to look like their eyes are stuck on a panorama. If you start feeling spacey, focus on something central without distractions.

People who are hyper-focused or super stressed probably need to space out more. Stare into space or look at a horizon for a few minutes and see how you feel.

Anxious people seem to have their eyes dart around the room a lot. Perhaps fixating on something soothing or enjoying the sensation of panorama could help.

GENERAL VISUAL HEALTH

As we age, we gradually lose what is called “the general visual field of view,” which leads to visuospatial deficits, loss of functional and independent activities, and even getting your driver’s license revoked because of poor vision and insufficient perceptual-cognitive abilities to react to the dynamic, ever-changing environment that is the road. In addition, the most common neurodegenerative disease is macular degeneration, affecting many times more people than dementia. While people may have various viewpoints on the topic (most agree that a healthy lifestyle prevents these age-related visual deficits), giving your eyes some variable movement and keeping them “fresh” cannot hurt! Here are six simple exercises to strengthen and mobilize your eye muscles; you can think of it as yoga for eyeballs!

1. Horizontal Saccades

Keeping your head still while sitting or standing, stick your arm straight out in front of you, as if you’re giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Start moving your arm (and therefore your thumb) across your body horizontally left and right, back and forth. You can think of a metronome going side to side at a steady rhythm. Let your eyes follow the tip of your thumb, which will result in a steady left-to-right eye movement, almost as if you were scanning the horizon. Do not let your eyes leave the tip of your thumb, as staying focused on it and not being distracted by external factors is important. As you move your arm back and forth, extend it out all the way each time until your hand is as far away from your face as possible. Repeat this and the following exercises for one minute. If during any of these exercises, you feel any eye strain, headache, dizziness, nausea, or fatigue, you can reduce the speed, distance, or duration of the exercise.

2. Vertical Saccades

Keeping your head still while sitting or standing, stick your arm straight out in front of you, as if you’re giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Start moving your arm (and therefore your thumb) vertically, up and down your body. Let your eyes follow the tip of your thumb, which will result in a steady eye movement up and down, almost like looking toward the sky, then toward the ground, without moving your head.

3. “X” Saccades

Keeping your head still while sitting or standing, stick your arm straight out in front of you, as if you’re giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Start moving your arm (and therefore your thumb) in a diagonal direction, similar to making a big “X” across your body. Let your eyes follow the tip of your thumb, which will result in a steady eye movement diagonally, almost like looking in the upper corner of a room and then down toward the ground outside of your opposite hip, without moving your head.

4. Near-Far Switches

Keeping your head still while sitting or standing, stick your arm straight out in front of you, as if you’re giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Then, choose a target in the distance (a spot on the wall, a distant tree outside, a street sign, the handle of a door down the hallway, etc.), ideally several feet away. Look at the thumb close to you, and then look at the chosen target (precisely!) that is farther away. Keep switching between the two targets, as we’re typically used to focusing centrally on a target in front of us.

5. Panoramic-Central Switches

Keeping your head still while sitting or standing, stick your arm straight out in front of you, as if you’re giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Then, choose a landscape in the distance or on the horizon (a parallel street, a mountain, a distant freeway, etc.), ideally as far away as possible. If you have ever been seen a lovely view and taken a deep breath or sighed while appreciating its beauty, that is the mechanism we are trying to replicate here. Look at the thumb close to you, and then look at the panoramic landscape. Keep switching between the two viewpoints; central and panoramic. If you feel like it, stare at the panoramic view for longer.

If you cannot find a sound panoramic view (such as when you are indoors), pretend! Imagine looking out from a beautiful mountain range, staring out to sea (like you’re in Malibu), or focusing your gaze on a forest (like in Yosemite Valley), or whatever else strikes your fancy. Of course, you want to conjure this sensation without closing your eyes, and the feeling might include “spacing out,” or feeling like your eyes are moving away from your nose. Try not to get distracted by other moving targets in either field of view. Repeat this for one minute. Remember, if you feel any eye strain, headache, dizziness, nausea, or fatigue, you can reduce the speed, distance, or duration of this exercise.

6. Wall Ballers

Get a tennis ball and stand about three to four feet away from a wall. Hold the ball at shoulder height, and initiate a gentle overhand (or underhand if it’s easier) toss against the wall, ideally at a height a few inches above your head. Catch the ball, being sure to grasp it in a quick, strong fashion as it comes back to you. The motion of the ball should be a smooth arc, equaling a quarter of a miniature rainbow. Repeat this faster if you are up for it, and let your eyes follow the ball for an extra visual workout. Get closer if you’re feeling dangerous, and do not be discouraged as you get used to the exercise. Perform fifty repetitions on each side.

For extra fun, replace the wall with a person and play a dynamic, short-lived, visual-health-focused session of catch. For extra challenge, get two tennis balls and throw and catch them with both hands at the same time, or throw and catch them in an alternating fashion (wall ball juggling?). Some fighters and boxers get farther away from the wall and even do “wall ball boxing,” where they juggle the ball up in the air against the wall using only their fist (hard but super rewarding). If you want to do this but just can’t get the hang of doing it with a ball, use a balloon to get some extra hang time.

Alignment Assignment

Start paying more attention to the ceiling of every room you walk into as a way to raise your gaze, open your posture, and de-stress your mind. Make a point to look out into the horizon regularly each day and sprinkle in some gratitude as you do so for good measure.

Try one of the eye exercises mentioned above each day this week until you’ve successfully done them all. If one feels more challenging than the others, put more focus on that technique until it becomes easy. If you’d like to try the expert version of the exercises, remember to smile while you’re practicing.

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