Karen posts a two month review in the forum:
I started about 2 months ago, in early January. All in all, it has not been a particularly good start to the year. I’ve spent about 3 or 4 weeks either being sick or getting over being sick, so I’ve had very little energy, and my motivation has been intermittent at best. The sidewalks have been iced over for a month and a half, and it’s cold out. So my short walks are limited to low traffic side streets where I can walk in the road, usually in the dark. All of that makes it very easy to avoid going out at all. After all, why would I want to? I’ve often gone days without spending more than 20 minutes outdoors total, including time spent crossing parking lots. I’ve only been doing exercises you can do indoors.
With spending all my time indoors, I’ve been kind of mediocre about avoiding unnecessary close up work. I do spend a lot more time at a computer 65-75 cm away than I do at 50 cm or less, but it can be 10 or 12 hours a day if I’m at home in the evening. I probably end up with mildly strained eyes 3-4 times per week. By evening, I’m usually tired enough that I don’t really care that I’m straining my eyes, and keep on doing whatever I was doing that caused the strain in the first place. If you’ve got any suggestions for finding motivation when you’re tired and worn out, I’d welcome them. Despite all this, I’ve made some real improvements.
The difference between my vision at the start of the day and at the end of the day is much slighter than it was when I started, about one Snellen line, or less on a good day. When I started, it was closer to 2. Also, my overall vision has improved. When I started, I could read 20/30 line reliably, and could sometimes make out the 20/25 or even 20/20 without much trouble using glasses with a -8.25 prescription. Now, I can read the 20/20 line with that prescription almost every time, and on good days have managed the 20/15 first thing in the morning.
With my vision, the cm is hard to measure consistently because I think I’ve got 2-3 mm of measuring error, and the difference between a reading when my eyes are rested vs tired is at most half a cm. That said, I’ve definitely had some improvement. When I started, the best I ever measured was a little over 12 cm, giver or take half a cm on each side. Now I’m measuring 12.5-13 cm in the same conditions, about a .5 cm improvement.
Most importantly, I’ve only had one eye-strain headache since I started the program. Before, I was barely noticing the eye strain until my head started pounding. Now I notice it as soon as it starts to occur, and early in the day, I immediately take a break to mitigate it. The only exception was at a music festival in a hotel with poor lighting, wearing my full strength prescription. I ended up with a massive headache because I was too busy listening to pay attention to my eyes! The next day I wore my computer lenses all day at the same venue, and while everything was blurry, the headache did mostly go away. I think the full prescription had gotten too strong. For me, being able to control eye strain headaches alone is huge. The reason I found the vision improvement program in the first place is that I was having bad headaches 2-3 times a week on the computer, and the optometrist’s first suggestion was to increase my prescription. I suspected the headaches where due to too strong a prescription (which I told her), so I was reluctant to shell out for the new glasses.
I’ve started to get more motivation again this week, since the forecast is for temperatures to get above freezing in the near future, and daylight savings starts this weekend. It means I’ll be able to start doing the outdoor portions of the program, not to mention getting back to my usual routine of hiking and running as hobbies, instead of just reading books and browsing the internet. I’ve begun believing in spring again. Here’s hoping the rest of the year is healthier and happier than the start!
The original forum post is here.
Indeed, winter is not perhaps the most ideal time to start a vision improvement project.
Even though we start will all of the close-up aspects, and a lot of the background, theory, and prescription practices all squeezed into the first month. Once you have all that though, odds are you will want to get outside, and enjoy your eyesight the way it was intended – to see the beauty of the world, at many distances (not just 60cm away, on a screen).
The take-away from Karen’s experience is strain awareness.
Being both able to feel eye strain and catch it before it contributes to your long term myopia, and measure the impact of eyestrain are half the battle.
Once you have both an empirical (measurable, tangible) understanding of strain, and an intuitive (sensing the symptoms of strain) understanding, the likelihood that you might choose to ignore your eyesight health are greatly reduced.
And from here on out, it is just details.
And while I present you with many details in the paid program, or the main core details in the free program, these are all just ways to address the strain you now understand. Adding a bit of positive stimulus, and better managing some aspects of your close-up environment put you on the track that many others have reported excellent results from.
Enjoy!
