My Journey Back to 20/20; My Next Steps to Improving My Myopia.

A couple of weeks ago I got myself some new glasses for my myopia, with the prescription stepped back a little. I adjusted quickly to them and have since been looking into myopia (short sightedness) further to figure out my next steps going forward.

Looking through my eyes without glasses.

In most cases, myopia is not caused by broken or damaged eyes. It's a common issue in a society which spends a lot of time doing close up work. Normally, the muscles in our eyes adjust our lenses to focus when changing between distance and close up viewing, but when we spend long periods of time doing things like reading, writing and looking at screens, then the muscle can seize up and get stuck in that close up position. This is called pseudomyopia and can be corrected without resorting to corrective lenses. Often it can be as simple as refusing to wear your glasses (I've known people to do this) and pushing your eyes to refocus on distance. However, if most of your life is spent doing close up work, then it may stay locked in that close up position.

Today, so much of our life is spent looking close up, from school to screens and working in offices, so it's should be no surprise that psuedomyopia happens.

Looking back at when I first got diagnosed with myopia, I was probably about 10 and an optician we knew from the Christian Community noticed that I was blinking a lot. She suggest to my mum that I get tested for myopia at the optometrist she worked for. I now know that blinking is one of the ways that your eye attempts to engage in refocusing. It's how I get my Active Focus working now (more on that later).

At the time I wasn't aware of any issues with my eyesight. At school I could see the blackboard fine, so it didn't even affect me there. However, I was instructed that I should wear my glasses for viewing the blackboard and watching tv, so I dutifully did, although I tried to avoid wearing them otherwise. As my glasses got strengthened each return visit I reached a point where I genuinely couldn't see the blackboard without glasses.

Had I only worn them for distance viewing, I may have not deteriorated, but wearing them in school for the blackboard meant that I still had to look down at my page to write and my eyes would then have had to adapt to the adjustment from the glasses, locking in that muscle a bit more. I realise that I probably didn't help matters with certain habits, like spending more time looking at the ground in front of me rather than up at the world. So I can see a lot of places where I went wrong.

After reading through the End Myopia website and through posts on the Facebook support group I have been planning my journey towards improving my vision. I should note that none of these sites will give you a step by step programme to improving your myopia. This is for two main reasons; firstly it would be like offering medical advice and that can cause legal issues, especially if there is actually a medical cause for your myopia. Secondly, everyone is different with different levels of myopia and often astigmatism. I'm pretty confident there are no underlying medical causes for my myopia so my eyes aren't broken and I can recover. What I'm writing about here is describing my own journey and decisions purely for information and documentation purposes.

The first step I took was to step my glasses prescription back by +0.25, something I was pretty confident and comfortable with doing. I now wish that I'd actually taken a bigger jump, because after doing some tests on the End Myopia website, it seems I could have been much more over prescribed than I thought. Also, there is the cost of buying more pairs of glasses rather than less. It's not a write off, however, because its proven a point to myself and that is that this can be done.

I've not sat on my laurels and expected just changing glasses to work miracles, although some have found that this is all they've needed, at least for initial improvements. I've been working on Active Focus. The idea behind this is to coax your eye muscles back into use. Most start by moving a page of writing until it is just coming out of focus, then trying to see it clearly by staring, blinking or just looking. It can take months to get the hang of, or it can come in a day or two and it's different for everyone. I tend to have to blink a few times and even then it sometimes just improves rather than clearing fully.

I've been taking two approaches to doing close up work; I either use my daughter's -3.25 glasses, without astigmatism adjustment, as it's not needed close up, or I move what I'm working on a bit closer and remove my glasses, keeping it at the limit of my vision.

I’m getting the impression that astigmatism correction should probably be avoided until your sight is at -3.00 or better, so I've ordered the next three pairs of specs with that correction still in place. They are actually in increments of -0.50 this time, so one pair is -3.75 (which is what my own tests calculated), one is -3.25 (The same as my daughter's, but with the astigmatism adjustments) and one is -2.75. I figure I'll start wearing the -3.75 pair when I don't have to drive for a couple of days, giving me time to adjust in an environment where clear sight isn't essential. If I don't adjust quickly enough then I'll put my -4.25s on for driving, to be on the safe side.

To be continued...