Today’s been another really interesting day in the support forum.
Good questions, good comments, and I’ve just spent over an hour writing explanations and suggestions and tips. I wonder how much of that gets forever buried in the thousands of posts and threads and pages, never to be seen again.
So here’s one for you, saved to the blog.
If you’re a casual reader, you really just want to take this as high level concepts, not actionable advice. Fixing your myopia is both really simple, and sometimes also full of tricky nuance.
Matt writes:
Thanks, Jake. All makes sense to me. With the progress I’ve seen here recently, I am tempted to try and sprint through prescription reductions to try and get to the no glasses zone as soon possible. But, I just did several reductions in a row, one in September, then another in October.
If you remember from my post a month ago (thanks for putting that on the blog, by the way), I had put this vision project on hold due to some personal challenges. I went 9 months at a prescription I knew I could reduce. When I finally did, I saw very fast progress (current normalized is down about a diopter per eye from the beginning of September). I don’t know enough to explain why the progress was so fast and easy, but my guess is that my biology was just “ready.” Given that experience, I know that waiting won’t do me any harm even though I want to push the pace here (reminding myself that the I’ve done is ALREADY aggressive).
Further, with my recent post about fluctuating vision due to too much sugar and not enough sleep, the idea of allowing time to let the changes settle makes sense to me. All the advice I’ve gotten here has always been spot on, so I’ll give this normalized at least two months, maybe three. Even at 3 months per normalized prescription, the -1.00 / -1.00 is not too far away for me. Here’s to 2016 –
Which is what got me started on a bit of tangent about vision changes:
There are two “phases” of improvement. The first one is really a matter of sorting out 1) overprescripion, 2) ciliary spasms / close-up strain, 3) using active focus, and 4) a net lower relative acuity than the previous optometrist prescription, realistically.
So it looks pretty dramatic, all the diopter reductions you speed through. It’s great for marketing my amazing guru-esque-ness, and it creates lots of confidence in students. Everybody wins.
But then it sort of creates an expectation of that being always the way it is.
Reality is, most people’s eyes will truly improve by 0.75 to max 1.25 diopters a year (barring ones with huge ciliary spasms). Axial change tends not to happen at a faster rate than that. So no matter how hard you work, you won’t really beat a diopter a year of actual improvement. This takes various routes at various degrees of myopia (low myopes need more work than high myopes), depends on the person, etc etc. But as long as you get the maximum amount of usable stimulus, the rate of improvement is what it is. This is why you could be wearing one prescription for months and months and months, as long as you always get some blur challenge, and then as you reduce seemingly blast through reductions just as if you’d had “worked harder”.
It’s human biology, so figure this as a very rough approximation of a likely explanation. Based on what I’ve seen over the years, that’s basically what happens though. If you know you’re getting the right amount of stimulus, it doesn’t hugely matter if you stick with a prescription seemingly longer than recommended.
I don’t tell this to people online as part of sessions, because it creates the tricky issue of lots of possible misinterpretation. Staying on top of reductions is an easy way to make sure students get stimulus.
So there’s that, for a bit of a look behind the wizard’s curtain.
Housekeeping notes:
I opened up a few more invite spots in the system, which means that if you were doing the free 7 day course, you probably got the version with the invite link this time around. I still need to send you manual registration links but not to worry, if you signed up I get that e-mail and follow-up with that link for you in short order. Any issues, just drop me a line.
Cheers,
-Jake
