This research showed just how much your brain affects your sight. Truth is, it’s not you eyes that determines whether you can see or not. It’s your brain.

Scientists have been able to send “sight signals” through the tongue of blind subjects and allowed him to “see”. In other words, his brain can now interpret taste as sight. If you’re myopic, or if you suffer from the common eye problems, the problem might lie in your brain, not your eyes.

The thing about the brain is that practice makes it perfect. Blind subjects who learn Braille often quickly forget what they learned when they  take a “blitz” approach (like a student studying for exams). But if they took their time and keep learning, they master the skill.

If you keep staring, if you keep refusing to blink and if you continue breathing shallowly, then your brain will learn these “skills” and make them a habit. Once it’s a habit, then it’s difficult to change – thus the impression that myopia and such are not curable.

So far the attention has always been given to the eyes. Now I want you to perceive the problem a little differently – look at your brain. Eye exercises are meant to train your brain just like frequent diving trained the brains of the sea gypsies. Eye exercises don’t “strengthen” your eye muscles.

1. Palming. This is probably the easiest of all vision exercises. I have a friend who have perfect doing this everyday – and she is not even aware of natural vision improvement. When I asked her why, she said it relaxes her eyes. Definitely start with this.
2. I know it can be hard to do – especially if you’ve been wearing glasses your whole life – but if you’re starting out, try to cut down the amount of time you wear your glasses. A cripple would never learn to walk again if he doesn’t try to stand on his legs without his crutches!
3. Last but not least, try to blink every 3 to 4 seconds. This is can difficult to do because believe me, people who have eye problems don’t blink enough. It will take sometime to adjust but once you picked it up, it’ll be a good habit of yours. You won’t even notice you’re doing it.

But did you know that it’s not just your body that can adapt? That’s right. Your eyes also can adapt to different needs. If you constantly look at close range objects, like reading, watching tv and doing the dishes, your eyes adapts and pretty soon you’ll soon find yourself excelling in looking near distance objets… but at the expense of long distance sight… thus the myopia.

So do we counter this? Easy enough. Adopt a simple habit.

For every 60 minutes of looking at close distance objects, look away at something at least 10 metres away for about 10 minutes. I do this by looking out my window into a field. It relaxes me, which of course, is also beneficial to my eyes.

Photo by K’s World

One of the most common questions I received ever since I started telling people about eye strengthening exercises is, “Why haven’t I heard of it?”

My answer to them is always the same: There a lot of things that you don’t know!

Ever heard of the saying “Money makes the world go around?”

Well, it couldn’t be truer in this case. The optical industry is a big industry. It was worth $30.2 billion dollars 10 years ago. Disregard exponential growth for a moment, how much do you think it’s worth today?

Now I don’t know about you, but I think someone do stand to gain if people continue to buy glasses and have lasik operations performed on them. Don’t you think so?

Here’s an example. Have you heard that numerous people actually recover from cancer? Oh yes. It’s not just a coincidence. The majority of the public never knew cancer is curable… in fact, to claim that there is a cure for cancer is to break the law.

Preposterous? Welcome to reality.

Now, they can always debate whether or not eye strengthening exercises or a cure for cancer is scientifically valid or not. They can debate all sorts of things.

Bottom line is: There are people who regained their vision. Not just one or two. Numerous people did it. Just check the testimonials here.

That means it works. So please don’t tell me all sorts of fancy scientific studies that shows it doesn’t work if you haven’t even tried it. You’re just too plain lazy and you’re justifying yourself. Period.

The term “eye exercises” is a little misleading

Now, for those of you who are willing to put in a little time and effort to try it out, here’s a simple yet potent eye strengthening eye exercises.

But before I go into the details let me clarify something. The term “exercise” is actually quite misleading. It implies that your eyes need training and stress to develop stronger muscles so as to see clearly.

The opposite is actually true. Stress makes your eyesight worse. What these exercises do is to “train” your eye to see the way nature intended, and therefore relaxes your eyes so as to see clearly.

Your sight is the same as any other senses that you have. You don’t find yourself trying to taste… you simply taste. But you tried to see… which is probably why your eyesight got worse.

The “Eye Strengthening Exercise” I Promised

Now for the actual eye exercise. This is actually more like an activity than an exercise.

It’s called “centralizing“. The point of the exercise is to get you to focus on one thing at a time. Narrowing your vision improves your eyesight simply because trying to see everything at once strains your eyes.

So instead of seeing the whole field, you should see first one tree, move on to the next, and then the next, then maybe move on to the tables and so on. I know this is a new concept but try what you’re about to do with somebody who has perfect eyesight and you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s what you do: Place your left and right thumb about 30 – 40 cm apart. Now try look at your left thumb in such a way that you cannot see your right thumb. If you’re myopic, it’ll be difficult because you’ll always be able to see both of them at any one time.

As you improve, you’ll be able place them closer and closer to each other and centralize your vision.

Note: Remember to blink often while doing this eye exercises. Do not stare. And oh, never wear your glasses while doing any eye strengthening exercises.

Photo by Chris Gin

If you’ve read my previous on how sunning can benefit your eye and how glasses deteriorate your vision, then you would know by now that keeping your eyes relaxed is key to perfect vision.

Contrary to popular belief, the more effort you put in to seeing, the worse you eyesight gets. Look at that picture, even birds rests their eye (just kidding). Seriously, your eye works best if no effort is involved in seeing.

If you feel the need to close your eye, don’t keep it open. If you do, that counts as effort and it will definitely strain your eye.

But what if you’re working or you’re “in the flow”? Well, that brings me to today’s tip. And it’s called palming.

Wait a minute… if resting is so good for my eye, why doesn’t my eye improve from sleeping?

The answer might surprise you – your eye don’t rest when you’re asleep! It sees what your mind sees when you’re dreaming! Your pupil shrink when you dream of something you don’t like and so on. Your eye move left and right and so on.

Why Palm?

Before I go into the how-to, let me just quickly tell you why you should do it. Knowing the why would exponentially increase the chances of you actually doing it!

Palming is a great way to quickly recharge your eyes batteries. There’s no such thing as palming for too long so don’t worry about over doing it. What palming does is it blocks all lights reaching your eye so you can see total darkness.

Now, unless you have perfect eyesight, what you think is total darkness really is not black. True black is what people with perfect eyesight see in total darkness. If you don’t believe me, palm (I’ll show you how later on) and compare what you see with the blackest object you’ve ever seen.

I’d dare bet that object is darker than what you saw when you palm. Seeing true black is crucial to your eye because it put your eye in total rest.

But even you don’t see true black, you can still rest your eye by palming.

How to Palm

Palming is easy to do.

1. Lightly rub your palms against each other.
2. Place your left palm on your left eye and your right palm on your right eye, in such a way that your fingers should overlap. It’s like you’re “cupping” your eye.
3. Make sure you don’t apply pressure on your eye, just block out all the light. If there’s still a little light when you palm for the first time, don’t worry about it.
4. Make sure you close your eyelids while palming.
5. While you’re palming, you can imagine your favorite scenery, or anything pleasant to you.

That’s all! It’s really that easy to quickly rest your eye! Do you have any experience you want to share or any comments on the this post? Please post it in the comments section!