Pro topic.  Blog visitor noobs, don’t email me asking me why you can’t find active focus.  Read!  ;)

Active focus is a very key premise of our method of natural myopia reversal.

You go from passively seeing your world, the way high prescription glasses will force you to do, to being actively engaged in the quality of your eyesight.

Sounds fluffy unicorns, right?

Not really.  Some will have you believe that making zero effort is just fine for human biology, but you hopefully know better.  Use it or loose it, as the saying goes.  Challenge it to make it better.  Or in this case challenge it to create the stimulus to reverse axial elongation (which no, isn’t a pipe dream like some lens sellers will tell you, because in fact optometry science says is possible – and hundreds of students here do it every day).

You need active focus.  What is active focus?  Here’s a whole big list of links!

The problem with finding active focus is that it’s a bit like trying to teach someone to wiggle their nose for the first time, or arch one eyebrow.  Try explaining how to “reach” a muscle that you never consciously engaged before.  Tricky!

What I find helps is having as many people as possible who had the experience, explain it in their own words.  Read many variations, find something that strikes a cord.

Today’s cord, courtesy of Julia in the forum:

I struggled with active focus for a long time. For months. I guess I was pretty skeptical, so first I had to convince myself that active focus is even possible. That was done by examining a landmark, centimeter numbers, or Snellen results. Clearly, those results vary throughout a given day. I have signs in my office at work, and their level of clarity varies every time I look at them. To me, that demonstrates that there is “wiggle room” in my vision, and that sometimes I see clearer, sometimes not. The fact that my vision can CHANGE meant to me that active focus is possible. Now I just need to be able to purposefully try to get to the clearer end of that wiggle room, without just having it naturally happen (either getting better or worse) over the course of a day.

To get active focus to happen, I find it helpful to pick a sign and stick with it. My eyes can do active focus easiest on signs that it has encountered before. I suggest that you pick a sign in your office or print out a sheet of paper with various font sizes to use as a sign. Pick a font like Arial. For me, I hung a sign about 5 to 10 feet in front of my desk. When I’m working at my computer, all I have to do is glance up a bit above my monitor to see the sign. I keep my differential glasses on while trying to read the sign so that there is enough blur. I like to pick a font size so that the letters are barely distinguishable from each other. In my head, I read the individual letters to myself as I look at each letter in the word. I do this again and again, as if willing myself to distinguish each letter from the other. I’ll practice this maybe 5 times a day. It’s easy to practice, because it can be done while you’re sitting at your desk, and it’s easy because all I have to do is look up above my monitor to see the sign. One day, it cleared for me. Now it’s very easy for me to look at the sign and have it clear (if it isn’t already) within seconds. So you should try what I did.

Also, even though I have gotten active focus to work, it doesn’t automatically work every time with any sign. Again, familiar signs are easiest. Also, I can’t be moving around (like walking). I find that I need to stand still or be sitting, and I need seconds to minutes to work on an unfamiliar sign. I feel like based on other accounts in the forum, active focus is harder for me than for most people.

While you’re waiting for active focus to work, maybe you can work on improving your habits. Like start getting into the routine of taking walks every day, peripheral vision, etc. because for me, finding time for outdoor distance vision was the hardest change to incorporate in my schedule. So maybe you can work on getting good habits while waiting for active focus to happen.

Julia was kind enough to respond to a thread by Randall, who hasn’t managed to get active focus quiet yet.  Hang in there Randall, you will find it!

Thanks to Julia for taking the time to share her experience.  More gold as always, over in the forum.

Cheers,

-Jake