Day 3: Can You See Me Now?

When I was in Africa I was struck by many amazing things.  But one thing in particular was the lack of eye-glasses.  In the country of Zimbabwe, I would pass hundreds of children walking to school in brightly colored uniforms denoting their grade level – purple, orange, yellow.  Giant smiles, agile limbs, and no glasses!  It was a beautiful thing to see.  Back in the US, however, The National Eye Institute (a branch of the National Institutes of Health) says that nearsightedness (called myopia) has increased from 25% to 41% since the 1970s.  Holy cow!  So, a little info on how your eye works, shall we?

Farsightedness, or the ability to see things at a distance, is the most relaxed version of the eye.  When the ciliary muscles inside the eye are relaxed, the lens in your eye flattens and allows distant images to be seen clearly.  When you need to look at something up close, the ciliary muscles contract, making the lens more round which gives more clarity to the image just in front of you. Up-close vision means muscle tension, distance vision means muscle relaxation.  Dig?  So the million hours I spent with my nose in a book as a kid probably had a lot to do with training my eye to see up close.  Nice.  Big Brain.  Big Glasses.  Guess who would have been lion supper back in the jungle days?  The nerd in the front row (me).  Cool.

The increase in myopia can probably be tracked to the hours and hours we spend training our muscles to tighten – school, computers, reading, television.  What if you picked up a 15-pound weight and held it up with your bicep muscle group?  Eventually the muscles in the arm would shorten, to make the task easier to do.  This fatigues the muscles, as well as reprograms the motor units between the brain and arm, resetting the resting length to be the shorter version.  With all that up-close eye strengthening,  your eye muscles may not even remember how to relax!

Parents and teachers, outside time is not only about large muscle exercise, but also about the smaller ones.  While tracking animals in Africa I had to be taught how to relax my eyes to see the giant herds of animals in front of me.  I didn’t know how to see in three dimensions until I realized that I held my eyes tense at all times!   Try taking a break from your computer screen and look out a window for a minute or so every hour.  You should be able to see layers of images, and not just one flat picture.  Can you see which tree is the farthest?  This is a great way to practice your long distance vision.  It will also keep you from wearing out your up-close vision so you have greater muscle health longevity in the eyes as you move into the later years of life.