Two interesting stories, today.  First one is from Paul, who asks via e-mail:

I’ve been browsing through your 7 day email course and first of all I wanted to say thank you for all the incredible and free information. If been also checking out your „join“ page and thinking about buying the course, but as I am a student, although health conscious and willing to invest if I see a good opportunity, which you course seems to be, I wanted to contact you first. 
 
The first question that popped up is if this course is useful for me. I’m currently at 1,75 Diopter and most of the examples on your blog are much higher. There is one 14-year old buy on your „sales“-page who went from 2.25 to 2.00, but the rest starts at 3 and above. You also said that until 1.5 it is more of a muscle spasm than lens-induced. 

E-mails I get tend to fall into just two categories.

One, proper grammar and spelling, which always seems to go along with well-thought out questions.  Always glad to get those.

Two, the purposely or otherwise butchered language e-mails.  Those are almost exclusively complaining, often rude, and predictably asking for free stuff  (plenty of free stuff in the blog!).  

Here’s what I responded to Paul:

Low myopia, high myopia, the program is definitely equally relevant.  I have a disproportionate amount of higher myopes, largely because those are the ones that tend to seek out help much more frequently.  
 
A word of caution:  Low myopia is particularly vexing to resolve.  Think of improvement more in percentages rather than diopters.  For somebody to go from a -4 to a -3 is a 25% improvement, and pretty easy to quantify and appreciate.  But to go from a -1.75 to a -1.25 is an even larger 30% improvement, but it’s just -0.50 diopters and not as obvious to see the difference in. 
 
As you get into it, keep that in mind.  Habits and patience, and having the right expectations is key.
 
Depending on your current lens wear it may well take about 2 years to have complete natural vision back.  It’s not that much effort other than the original learning curve, but it’ll definitely take some time.

It took me personally what felt like positively for-friggin-ever to get that last -1.5 sorted out.  

To this day I still have days where I’m just a bit off.  When I fall off the no-sugar wagon, spend too much time in front of screens, happen to spend a few weeks in Europe during winter, I can definitely tell.  

In a way it’s much more confidence inspiring to start at a few diopters, have all that progress, and then have the confidence and habits already in place when it comes to that last diopter or two.

On the other side of things, Alex’ high myopia progress story on the forum:

It’s been a few weeks since my introduction, so I thought I would post an update on my progress. I ordered my first pair of differential prescription glasses a couple weeks ago. My current prescription is -12.50 R (-1.5 cyl) and -13.75 L (-1.5 cyl). The differential prescription I ordered is -10.75 R (-.75 cyl) and -12.00 L (-.5 cyl). 

It took nearly two weeks for my order from Zenni to arrive, so I have to admit that I have been “cheating” in the interim, using + reading glasses over top my current prescription to do the active focus screen activities. I do finally have my differential prescription, and I am happy to say that they work great. I can get a bit of blur just outside my normal working range, and I have been practicing active focus with good success. Additionally, getting outside to take breaks from screen time has been great.

I think there is already a bit of improvement. I don’t yet see a difference in the Snellen, but my centimeter has gone from about 7.5-8.0 cm in each eye to 9.0 cm.

Very important, to deal with high myopia.  It’s really tragic that there is exactly zero warning from mainstream optometry about those high prescriptions.  They just write you double digit glasses, no comments.  Imagine every pharmacy giving out morphine for any pain symptom, never asking questions.  That’s optometry for you today.

Here’s what I tell Alex:

It’s particularly challenging to hit bullseye on the first differential with high myopia and including astigmatism correction. Very glad to hear that this worked out. 

Getting out of that double digit prescription range is going to be the best long term investment in your eyesight you could have ever made. Things tend to not work out well for long term double digit myopes. Especially later in life when the lens hardens, and tissues become less flexible, there are almost always complications that are pretty unsettling.

The way you are going about it though, it’s basically certain that you’ll get away from all those risk factors. 

To put in perspective, 8cm is -12.5 diopters and 9cm is -11 diopters. 

Seeing improvement will work better with the Snellen once you have the normalized prescription, and a few more months into the sessions. It’s also good news that there is very little difference between your left and right eye, and the astigmatism correction is relatively low. It’ll make things a lot easier, basically just having to work on reducing spherical correction.

Paul is definitely much closer to great eyesight without glasses, than Alex.

But Alex is going to see progress more immediately and in a much more confidence inspiring way.  Paul’s odds of leveraging my process successfully are actually higher because of this.  

Life, full of ironies.

The headline image, blue tint lenses.  One of the little tricks to beat plateaus, when you get really stuck and aren’t seeing improvements.  More on all that, over in the program.

Cheers,

– Jake