What happens when you get new differentials?

Does your vision improve rapidly, do you end up seeing just as well as with the previous, higher diopter differentials in a matter of days?
Or is it a long, tedious process to get back to your previous level of centimeter distance from the screen with the lower correction?

As usual, interpreting your experience isn’t entirely straightforward or one-size-fits-all.

Biology is always a very individual experience. And there are variables such as whether it’s your first differential, how well you do with active focus, whether you get enough distance vision / outdoor time, and other factors. There is however, a general theme, a guiding principle on how to evaluate your gains right after switching to lower correction differentials.

Credit here to Jason, asking this very relevant question on the Facebook group:

Curiosity isn’t going to kill this kitteh.

This is why the Facebook group is quite handy.

Besides being a great place to find likeminded myopia dissent, questions come up that remind me to add to the ever growing list of Q&A topics here in the blog. I enjoy the reminders and questions, and happy to share with you the collective experiences students have had over the years.

Let’s look at what’s up with the differential change (at least, generally speaking):

Initial Boost In Centimeter Progress

My response to Jason’s question:

Make sense?

If you get a lot of centimeter gains (relatively speaking) after a differential diopter reduction then your eyes were ready for it!

You do want to give your visual cortex plenty of time to catch up to lower correction. I endlessly repeat the “wait at least 4-6 weeks between focal plane changes” guru-mantry for plenty of good reason. You want to catch (and clear) double vision artifacts, you want to get all you can get out of the reduced diopter stimulus, before moving on to the next reduction. There’s exactly zero benefit to rushing the process!

Also a quick thanks to everyone helping out the newbies with questions, and contributing to productive conversation in the group. Very helpful, making my life a lot easier, the community garden of myopia insights.

Off-Topic: It’s been a bit quiet on the front of Jake-contributions lately. I’ve been extra busy relocating to a new part time home base (which if you’ve known me for a while happens at least every year or so). A new country, new language, and this time even the numbers are a mystery! 5 looks like this: ၅ and then 6 is this guy: ၆. Better not have some undiagnosed upside-down dyslexia!

This means of course finding a place to live, as well as coffee shops and Wifi and setting up a video making facility and all that. Some of that looks like it’ll take an extra while, this time. A new wrinkle is me having financed a restaurant venture for the girl (she’s been wanting to do this for ages). Of course that meant all sorts of things, from funneling the funds, to providing some emotional support, to keeping myself from bringing franchise guru friends and turning the whole thing into a typical Jake-mega-project. Distractions aplenty.

I’ll be back in Vietnam soon though, so hopefully that’ll translate to new YouTube content and working on various endmyopia projects. In the meantime you can find me on the Facebook group (occasionally), stalk the semi-secret Instagram, or shoot me a quick e-mail!

Cheers,

-Jake