When using the plus lens, my eyesight was getting better and my eyes were approaching normal vision. It was, however, harder and harder to achieve improvements, despite the fact that I was doing ocular stretching and training using “reading” glasses.
While doing this work on recovery, I was diagnosed with 0.50 diopter of myopia in each eye. I had reached the point of reading through positive lenses of +4 diopters (D) with artificial light. I could read in sunlight using +6 diopter lenses. Despite my hard work, my improvements were very slow. It was as if the last traces of my myopia didn’t want to let me go—so that I could free and release my eyes.
I often noticed a very interesting fact. The morning after I had been up late, I would notice that my sight was apparently clearer as I went to the office. I didn’t understand this. I thought that a short period of sleep would mean that the nervous system had less time to “recover.” This system rules homeostasis and consequently is responsible for your well-being. In most cases, physical and mental weariness worsens focusing capability. My own case seemed to be an exception to the rule.
I started wearing a low-power positive lens—not only while training and reading, but also indoors, at home, and at the office. Since I was myopic, I was wearing my positive lenses and needed them to create a blur-driven stimulus to let my eyes get used to it. The result was an increase in their acuity, reducing and eliminating overaccommodative, near-point stress. Even after a night at home working, I would notice better visual acuity in the morning.
I finally understood why. Overaccommodative stress caused by near-work has increased in our society—living and working indoors—so that you hardly glance toward far distance. Environmental factors do indeed contribute to the development and worsening of myopia. Knowing this, we can take the necessary steps to reduce and completely eliminate the indoor stress.
The people whose myopia is very high will find an advantage in not wearing glasses indoors and at safe places (like at home), or at most, if their myopia is very high, it would be better to wear lower-power lenses. In the case of low myopia, not wearing lenses indoors won’t be enough to decrease the negative state of the overaccommodation condition, but such people should wear “leisure” lenses (positive lenses), which create slightly blurred vision.
In my case, when my myopia decreased at 0.50 D, I was wearing positive lenses +1.00 D at work, and +2.00 D lenses at home (where I felt safe). These elements are personal and approximate: concerning any level of myopia, the precise protocol to learn the right dioptric power of indoor lenses doesn’t exist presently.
Everyone, being sensible, should create such slightly blurred vision when indoors, so as not to overload the visual system with excessive near-work. The stimulus (blurred vision) shouldn’t ever be excessive, so that it overcomes the suitable level for creating a focusing system adaptation. In the opposite case, if the eye becomes too myopic with positive lenses (even transitory), it is likely to give up trying to focus on the objects and environment, considering it an impossible task.
My visual acuity after a night out was due to the fact that my nervous system wasn’t subjected to overaccommodative/near-point stress or the “indoors” stress when I was at home. To avoid this problem I started wearing “leisure” lenses at home and at the office.
Keep in mind: Such positive “leisure” lenses should be worn only when the place or environment and your job don’t require full optical correction for safety reasons, common sense, or as prescribed by the law. This indication works well also for the use of undercorrection lenses for nearsightedness with high myopia and in all cases of myopic defocus.
Retinal defocus progression is the fundamental factor to take into account so as to obtain gradual improvement. To achieve improvements, it is necessary to gradually increase the optically induced blur once the visual system is adapted to the relationship between reading distance and training lens power. The same concept works well for hyperopia, but is used in the opposite way: reading distance is to be shortened gradually, using stronger and stronger negative lenses.
I have learned all of this from my personal experience. For more than a year I was imprisoned in a refractive state of –0.50 D in each eye. Even though I was reading with lenses a lot, my eyes almost didn’t react to them, and I wasn’t succeeding in improving my focusing capacity.
I understood my mistake later on. I was reading the text wearing the lenses, but I was regulating the relationship of distance/lens dioptric power (+4.00 D in that time), allowing myself to read the text easily. What I was supposed to do was to increase the relationship of the lens dioptric power/reading distance and concentrate on focusing the induced defocus state, using CRB (Contraction/Relaxation/Blinking) movements. (See Chapter 5 for more on CRB.)
To gain improvements and to accelerate them, it’s very important that the letters of the text we are reading while wearing training lenses are not in focus (in a retinal defocus state). Later on, the letters should be focused with CRB movements. The visual system reacts and gets used to the new refractive state by repeating focusing on each single word or letter, compensating for the initial functional refractive error. Each time we train our eyes with retinal defocus we should wonder, “At what distance will I be able to read today?” By doing so, retinal defocus progress, as well as the other adaptation and improvements, will be achieved.
Keep in mind: We are talking here about therapeutic defocus. That would be myopic defocus for myopia and hyperopic defocus for hyperopia. It is not a destructive or palliative defocus—which occurs when a myopic person views near with negative lenses and a hyperopic one with positive lenses. In such cases, an inauspicious accommodative stimulus—led by convergence—will find a further stimulus for increasing accommodative response.
The proximity of the observed object is one of the stimuli for the accommodative response. This occurs when we look at or view a near object. Two actions occur when we look closely:
1. The eye “accommodates” (adjusts the internal lens to reduce blur detected at the retina).
2. The eyes “converge” (adjust their position to reduce disparity between the images seen by both retinas).
For these reasons there is a close relationship among the observed object’s distance, the visual axis’s converging, and the accommodative response.
Under normal conditions, without optical modification due to external lenses, whenever the eyes converge the eye becomes myopic because of the cross-link relationship to the accommodation system. This is a normal physiological process and the only exception exists when a myopic person is training for myopic retinal defocus (with positive lenses) on the near text (within arm’s distance). In this case (impossible in natural conditions, not faked with positive lenses for therapeutic purpose), the process of focusing, affected by the lenses and helped by CRB movements in the presence of myopic defocus, occurs in a paradoxical condition, together with eye converging.
In normal conditions, whenever converging, the eye becomes myopic, therefore causing accommodation to act—but when training with optically induced defocus (for therapeutic reasons and for acting over the accommodative balance), we are looking to decrease the accommodative response in the presence of convergence. It’s much more useful to train with near-point retinal defocus (with suitable lenses) than with far-point retinal defocus. In the latter case, it would be necessary to run long distances (near or far from the observed object) so as to bring the eye to the state of slight retinal defocus.
So as to compensate for this condition of paradoxical focusing—paradoxical defocus that occurs in the presence of convergence—it is necessary to take some short breaks while working on focusing in the presence of optically induced retinal defocus. How to do such breaks? Relax your eyes by looking in the distance and do some eye rotations in both directions. By doing so, the stimulus for converging will be canceled, and your focusing capacity will respond to your training in retinal focus/defocus.