Do This Daily To Keep Glasses Away Forever

Have you noticed how road signs and fine print are harder to read as time goes on? The text on your phone seems blurrier. You move your head back and forth, the squint, maybe a clean your glasses if you're already wearing them. But nothing helps. So you go to the eye doctor and they say, "That's normal. Your vision is just changing with age." And just like that, you walk out with either glasses or a stronger prescription. And it seems like every year your prescription gets worse and everyone tells you that it's just the way it works. But what if it isn't the way it really works? Hello, Hellchampions! Today we're going to talk about how to support your vision and make the best of your eyesight and hopefully avoid glasses forever. And the first thing we have to understand about vision is that it's not just about your eyes. It's a whole body phenomenon. It's about your whole physiology. Your brain, your circulation, inflammation, metabolic factors, and on and on. Your eyes are actually an extension of your nervous system. And if you feed your brain and your body, if you move your spine, if you do all the different things that normally would support your body and your brain like I've talked about in a bunch of different videos, now you're also supporting your vision at its root. And while it's wonderful that we have sophisticated technology to help people see with glasses, we also have to understand that glasses don't handle any of these factors. Here's a mind-blowing example to give you something else to think about. Just look at this from a different perspective. What if vision is actually pretty flexible? So there's something called DID or dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder. And with this, you have one person who can shift their physiology, can shift their personality. So they don't necessarily even know this, but they become a different person in their mind, in the same body they can have multiple people living. And one of these people, one of these personalities could have really poor vision. They might need so-called "coke ball glasses," like really strong glasses. And then they switch personality, not even knowing that it happened or how they did that. And all of a sudden, the new personality, the new identity has 2020 vision. And that shift happened in a matter of seconds. Now think about this. It's the same person. Nothing has really changed physically. They have the same eyes, they have the same brain, except they became someone else in their mind. They have shifted to a different physiology when they became that different person. And they have shifted to a different belief system, if you will. They believe they are someone else. And it's not something that they have control over, but they believe they're somebody else. And now their physiology shifted. And something as profound as eyesight has dramatically changed. So here's a few different facts on your eyes. One thing is that the retina, the back of your eye, with the photosensitive receptors that detect light and turn them into an electrical signal, that's actually brain tissue. That's connected to the optic nerve, which by the way is cranial nerve number two. So it's an extension of brain tissue. And then the focus and the pupil's size is controlled by your autonomic nervous system. So we'll talk about the differences about things you can't control and things you can't. And your vision and your eye movements depend on muscles to move the eye, but also on posture and spinal integrity to make the whole system work. And if we want the best vision possible, we have to understand the things that interfere with our ability to see clearly. And one would be chronic inflammation that breaks down body parts. Oxidative stress does the same thing, but we also have things like blood glucose dysregulation. So people that have type two diabetes or insulin resistance, they tend to damage those fine blood vessels in the back of the eye. Also hypertension or high blood pressure will damage those fine blood vessels that the vision so strongly depends upon. And chronic stress, high levels of cortisol, and simply just something called sympathetic dominance that we're always a little bit on edge, we're always a little bit stressed that will drive this cortisol and often be connected to these other problems as well, like hypertension and inflammation and so forth. If we have what's called mitochondrial dysfunction, if our little energy factories don't work properly, now they can't make all the energy that we need. And if we have excess blue light, like virtually everyone has today from their phones and computers, that will stress the eyes. If we smoke or if we have poor posture, that will also interfere with our ability to create clear vision. And then there are certain things that your eyes need. Just like any other body part, they need certain nutrition and some specific things for the eyes, in addition to all the general stuff that I talked about in so many videos. Eyes really like lutein, zia-zanthin, vitamin A, omega-3s, and zinc. Eye sight depends on oxygen and blood flow so that those tissues can make energy, and they have to reach all the little micro vessels in the eye. The eyes have muscles, and we need to support and train and activate those muscles, just like any other muscle in the body, use it or lose it. And clear eyesight also strongly depends, of course, on the brain body connection. So we'll talk about some exercises in a second, but first I want to touch on the best food for the eye, but I'm going to go over it pretty quick because I've done so many videos on what the best food is to support the body. And they're very very similar to all the other foods that we would eat for metabolic health to reduce and control inflammation, to support the brain, to support heart health. So if we eat things like eggyoaks and leafy greens and bell pepper, we can get nutrients like lutein, zia-zanthin, and vitamin C, which helps protect the macula, the most precious, the most receptor dense area in the back of your eye on the retina. And they also help filter out blue light, which is damaging to the eye. And if we eat things like salmon and preferably wild caught salmon, if we'd sardines and macrol, these fatty fish, they contain tremendous amounts, the highest food source amounts of omega-3s, the EPA, and the DHA that performs so many functions in the body. And in terms of importance for the retina, DHA actually makes up 50 to 60% of the mass of that retina as building blocks to make it function the way it's supposed to. So it's critical for the health of the retina to get enough DHA. But these omega-3s also help the body control inflammation, and they prevent dry eyes. Some of the good foods are blueberries and black currents, and they contain a compound called anthocyanins. They help improve the capillary strength in these small blood vessels, and they also help improve night vision. Some of the good foods are beef liver and cod liver oil. And of course, the cod liver oil gives us more of that precious DHA, but both of these foods will give us large amounts of preform, the active form of vitamin A. So we can get it through vegetables like beta-carotene and convert it, but it is more potent if we get the preform, the finalized version of vitamin A, which will support both the cornea and the retina health. A couple of examples of foods that contain zinc, or pumpkin seed, and lamb. And zinc is critical for making the vitamin A actually work and do something, and it also helps night vision in doing that. And so far, I just want to give you a quick idea of how we need to start off with healthy cells and healthy tissues, and how we need to provide all the tissues involved with building blocks and the things that they need to make energy. And next, we're going to get into some detail on the exercises to improve your visual acuity. We're going to show you how to perform them, what the exercises are, but also I'm going to get into some detail. And if you stay with me and really understand some of these relationships, I believe that you're really going to stick with these exercises and see amazing results. And these exercises are designed to strengthen the visual apparatus, if you will, all the pieces involved, but we really need to develop some precision. We need to improve precision and develop some endurance. And this is where most vision fails is with the endurance, because a lot of people can see okay sometimes, but have you noticed how your vision really gets bad when you're super tired and you're stressed? So you start off by rubbing your palms vigorously together. And what you do now is you create some heat. Now the heat increases circulation and now you put that cup-tanned over your eye, you don't push on it, you just cover it and now obviously it gets dark. You cut out some sensory stimulation and it helps you relax. And now you add some slow deep breathing to that that's going to further your relaxation and really activate that para-sympathetic nervous system. And we're going to come back to this. I just want you to realize that the parasympathetic is part of your relaxation. We have two branches called the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. And the sympathetic is your fight flight and the parasympathetic is your feed breed and your relaxation. And that becomes very important for your vision and your focus. Our modern lifestyle affects our health and physiology in so many different ways. For example, because we spend so much time at computers and with cell phones, we actually blink a whole lot less than we would otherwise. So by blinking more on purpose, what you do is you help spread fluid and lipids across the cornea. And what that does, it helps clean it off and it prevents dryness and it cleans it off so we don't get micro-damage. So what you can do is try for once every hour, you blink 10 times. And when you blink, you close your eyes for two seconds and you squeeze a little bit. You activate the muscle, try to create a little bit of pressure inside the eye. So it would look something like this. One, two, open. And you close, squeeze and open. And what that does, this is the really, really cool part. So there's something called the OCR or Aucullo Cardiac Reflex. And once you do that little blink and squeeze, you create a little bit of pressure in the eye. And that pressure is detected by a pressure receptor or a borrow receptor. And that sets in motion a reflex that's going to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. So if you recall, there's the fight flight and there's the feed breed. The fight flight is about stress. The feed breed is about relaxation. It improves your digestion and your immune system. And it turns out it improves your ability to focus your eye. Because there are two muscles inside the eye called intraocular eye. And both of those get activated. You increase their activity when you increase the parasympathetic activity. And as a result, you will increase the convexity of the lens. It becomes more convex. It becomes thicker and rounder. So it will cause a convergence, a stronger focus of the light onto your retina in the back. And at the same time, it will reduce, will activate another muscle and reduce the size of the pupil, which is the other factor that you need. A smaller pupil helps pinpoint your focus, if you will. A larger pupil will spread the light out and make it hard to focus. And you can probably tell this right away as you do this exercise of the blink and squeeze that you probably get some instantaneous improvement of your focus. And if you do it regularly, then you create a long-term strengthening of that parasympathetic function. And you have probably noticed that you can see better when you're rested and relaxed. And maybe you've also noticed the converse of that is that it's very difficult to see clearly, to see focused when you are under stress or during low-light conditions. Because both stress and low-light create the same effect. When you stress and endanger, you open up the pupil so you can take in a lot of light. So you can see a lot of things, not necessarily crystal clear, but you can detect a lot of stuff. And the same thing happens, obviously, in low-light. Because now the pupil dilates so that you can let in the little light that there is. And if the pupil is dilated, now the light scatters, and it's very difficult to focus in a pinpoint way. And the second exercise is simply to look in different directions. And you want to do these very slowly and you want to hold your head as still as possible for this exercise. You want only the eyes to move. And you can start out with just up and down. So you look straight ahead, keep your head still, and then you just move your eyes up. And you move them slowly down. And you move them up and slowly down. And you're going to notice that you really have to force yourself to do it slowly. Because it's much easier to just kind of flip them up and down at high speeds. But that defeats the purpose. We're trying to develop control. And then you try left, right. Same thing, you hold your head still. And you simply let the eyes move left and center and right and center and so forth. Again, slower is better. And then you can also do it diagonally. And you start looking up to the side and down on the other side. Back to center. You look up to the other side, back to center and down on the other side. So again, you're going to notice as you do them more, it will be easier to do them slowly. Because in the beginning, if you don't really pay attention, like I'm not really paying attention when I'm talking at the same time, the tendency is just to whip the eyes around. And then you can do clockwise and counterclockwise also. And the slower you do them, the better. And the benefit of this is that you strengthen the muscles that move the eye and you strengthen the brain area that is connected to that specific muscle. You also increase the ocular motor control, the precision with which you can make these movements. And you increase the blood flow to the area. So you can do these exercises up to a couple of minutes, but you want to start with a lot less than that. And the reason is that eye movements are actually really hard work. But you can't necessarily tell, especially in the beginning. So you don't want to go until you feel really fatigued because by then you've probably done too much. So let's talk about some details. This is really, really cool stuff. And you don't have to understand all of it. You just need to see that there are different connections. And this is why this stuff actually works. So here is the human eye. And you don't have to memorize or know any of these names. They're totally relevant. I just want to show you the mechanism that the eye just doesn't move by itself. There are muscles that connect at different sides. So if you pull the medial and the lateral rectus, now you move the eye straight to the side. But in order for you to look up and to the side, you need to involve some of the other muscles. And you can even rotate the eye this way with a superior oblique. Now all I'm trying to say is that there are different muscles and they're controlled by different nerves. And again, the names are not important at all. But what I want you to notice is that there are different distinct areas in the brainstem. So this is very high in the brainstem right under your brain. And as you're working the muscle, as you're activating that muscle and you're working the muscle like just like you go to the gym and you do curls. Well, the muscle, whether it's the biceps or whether it's a tiny little muscle in the eye, it's connected to what's called a brainstem nucleus. And the one that does most of this is called the ocular motor. It's cranial nerve number three. And just stay with me not to memorize any of this, but just to know the relationships. And the ones involved with eye movement are these four. And they're controlled by nuclei pretty high up. But one thing that I want to point out, because we talked about the parasympathetic, the autonomic nervous system, well, that's a specific area in this case. So the cranial nerve number three is connected to two of these nuclei. And the autonomic function, the thing that you can't control is the low portion, the edding your best fall nucleus. And if these muscles, they can either be voluntary or operated autonomically for you. So when you are deciding where to look, so you can look straight ahead and then you decide to look over here, that's voluntary. You have a choice. You can decide where to look. And that's cranial nerve three, four, and six. They were on that previous graph. And they're called extra ocular. They're outside of the eye. But then there is also some that are processed by your autonomic nervous system. And that's everything involved with focus. Everything involved with seeing things crystal clear is that edding your best fall nucleus. And it is involuntary. So you can choose where to look, but you can't decide to focus. That's an autonomic and automatic function. It's done for you. And we also refer to that mechanism as intraocular control because those muscles are actually inside the eye itself. But here's the point of all this. Notice how close these two are. They're actually overlapping. And why is that important? Because the neurons, the brain cells, they actually fire sort of individually, not one by one, but they fire in clusters. They're very discreet. They're very separate. They're very distinct areas that fire at a time. However, blood flow is not distinct. It is quite regional. So it's like when you're pumping blood into an area, it overflows. It spills. It's more of a general area. So when you activate your motor, your voluntary eye movement muscles, now that you can do on purpose, but there's a spillover to the nuclei next to it. So you can activate this top one. And it's going to spill over to the bottom one that you don't have voluntary control over. So in terms of these eye exercises, that you can actually strengthen your focus, strengthen your parasympathetic function by doing the voluntary movements, by deciding to look in different directions. You can even affect the involuntary functions. So exercise number three is called near-far-focused drill. This is an excellent example of you can decide where to look and now that focusing happens automatically. So you can do this for two to three minutes, but again, start with less. So then what you do is you hold your thumb up or some similar object. The thumb is convenient because you typically carry it with you and you hold it ten inches or a little bit further wherever you can create a clear focus. So you look at that for a few seconds, you don't need to look at it for any specific length of time, but you don't want to rush it either. You want to make sure that you can lock in. If you look at it and then you look far away. So if you do this outside, you want to make sure that you look at least 20 feet away. Well, it's a good thing to do it outside or wherever you can look through a window or even at the horizon. And what you're doing now, it's close. Your eyes are kind of straining a little bit and then you look far and your eyes relax. And you simply do that for a few seconds of close and far and then you shift back and forth and you keep repeating that for a couple of minutes. So what this does is it strengthens. It activates and trains and strengthens the ciliary muscle which controls the shape of the lens. So when that muscle contracts, it's a circular muscle, then it becomes smaller and the lens is allowed to thicken. Then when you look far away, the muscle relaxes and the lens flattens. So one thing that's really important is that you have an elastic lens. And this will strengthen the ciliary muscle that controls the shape of the lens and also to some degree the constricting pupil muscle. It also strengthens the brain area of course that's controlling these muscles and that would be the eddinger vest fall which is the parasympathetic. So again, you're activating the involuntary system by choosing to look in different places. And this exercise also improves the flexibility of the lens. So you're sort of pumping the lens into different shapes. And when this ciliary muscle can strict, it gets smaller and the lens is suspended by little threads if you will. And as the muscle gets smaller, the lens is allowed to thicken. It's allowed to kind of bounce out and be thicker. And then once you relax, that ciliary muscle grows and it starts tightening those little threads and the lens flattens. But the point is that when you try to really focus, you can't really push the lens to get thicker. It only relaxes into being thicker. So the more elastic it is, the better you'll be able to focus. Exercise number four is called the 2020-2020 rules. So what you do there is every 20 minutes you look more than 20 feet away for 20 seconds. And what this does, it reduces eye strain. So if you're looking at a computer or a keyboard or something close up for hours and hours, you tend to get very tired, very fatigued. So this is a chance to give your muscles and your brain a break. But if you remember, I told you that eye movements is hard work. And I hear you giggle a little bit because you're thinking, well, I wasn't even breathing hard when I did them. And we want to understand this rule. Use it or lose it. I know you've heard it a thousand times. But what does it actually mean? And if we compare muscle versus brain in that regard, what does that mean? Well, a muscle needs activation. The brain needs activation, but they're different. The muscle gets stressed by putting tension on it. The purpose of a muscle is to exert force, to shorten and exert force. And then we break some fibers and we can repair them and it gets stronger. Well, that part is the same with the eye muscles. But the brain has a different need. The purpose of the brain is to process and send signals. And if it gets to do that, that's very hard metabolic work. The brain is 2% of your body weight. It uses 20% of your energy. So how does that turn into hard work? How does that brain get to work harder with eye muscles? In fact, it is harder for the brain to do an eye muscle workout than it is to do a heavy leg workout. It is more strain, more effort for the brain. So let's explain that. And you may have heard the story of the little red riding hood. And when she walks in and she sees someone in the bed and she says, "My what big eyes you have." Well, chances are that little red riding hood was actually looking at a homunculus. And this is what the homunculus is. If you notice the really big eyes here. What this is, it's a representation of how much cortical area, how much area and space in the brain is taken up by different body parts. So all sensory information, everything your body is detecting in the world around you and by touch and smell and taste, etc. It comes in to two different areas. The incoming is the sensory, the somato sensory cortex. So all the information comes into the blue area, then the brain sends it to different places to process. And then the information comes back to the motor cortex and it sends the information out. So in this motor cortex, different body parts have different importance. So this is how important all these different body parts are, how they are represented in the brain. So the hands are basically responsible or taking up most of the real estate in that area in the brain. And if you notice, the eyes are huge. The eyes are probably bigger than the legs. But then once we use the eyes, what we'll talk about in a little bit, we're involving so many different other areas as well. So simply by you doing eye movements, all of the nuclei in the brain stem that we talked about get activated. But in addition to that, it's a crazy amount of different areas in the cortex, not just the brain stem. And I'm just letting this run here so you don't actually look at the details. Not even going to read it to you, but if you really want to know, you can pause and go back and look at it again. But the point is that it's so many different areas of the brain of the body gets activated. And the moral of that story is that eye exercises is really, really hard work for the brain because it's a quick and powerful way to engage the entire brain. And this is also why you want to start very slowly and carefully because if you do squats, you can feel the muscles in your legs start to protest. You get a burn very quickly. But you don't necessarily feel that about the eye muscles. And even less do you feel the controlling areas in the brain and everything that gets activated. So if you do too much, you're really shooting yourself in the foot. You want to start very, very carefully and make sure that you feel good afterwards. So now a lot of people are probably wondering, will everyone see results? And the answer is that most people, the majority of people will experience better vision, less fatigue and a sharper focus. And they'll notice this relatively quickly. But we also have to realize that there can be more severe cases. Like if there's a structural problem with the eye, like severe myopia from an early age, or if there's like an inherited eye shape that needs correction. There are people who have been in accidents or trauma, and there could be some neurological damage that we can't reverse the retrain all the way. And in those cases, you will probably not see any dramatic changes. Don't expect to just do these exercises and get rid of your glasses forever. That probably won't happen. But what you can do is you will still see positive benefits. Just like exercise is a good thing. Doing these exercises for the eyes will activate so many critical areas for you. So you can protect what vision you have right now. And you can probably prevent further decline. Number five is neck and upper back mobilizations. And you could start with doing head rotations. So you simply turn your head all the way to the side and all the way to the other side. And again, slow and controlled. But if you do that with a slight variation, it becomes a completely different exercise. So you look straight ahead and you maintain your focus straight ahead. And now what's happening is that your neck is neurologically paired to your eye muscles, your eye movement. Because as you turn your head one way, the eyes have to rotate the other way at the exact same rate. That's an incredibly complicated movement. It takes so much brain activity, so much brain coordination to pull that off. And then what you can do also is some gentle head tilts. Just do them slowly and carefully. You can start with side to side or also called lateral flexion. And just near put the ear toward the shoulder straight down. Then you can also go forward and backwards. You know, there's forward flexion and extension. And then one that I really like is to combine two of those. So you go straight to the side and then you go forward. And then same thing to the other side, straight to the side and forward. And you'll really feel that one very nicely. I also like shoulder rolls, which is just what it sounds like. And if you have a foam roller or you could sit on a chair and actually just lean back on that to help really get that extension in the upper back. And the benefits of this mobilization other than what I've talked about with the brain and the specific nuclei is that you can reduce tension. It just feels good. And also, of course, you increase the brain activity, the muscle activation. And you provide extra blood to all those areas. So I challenge you to start doing these exercises and see how that works for you. Just realize that even though it's possible to notice some temporary improvement immediately, even as you do just a couple of repetitions, you fire up that system. But that doesn't mean that you get a lasting effect at that point. But you can get a lasting effect with repetition. The other thing I really want to caution, I've talked on several times in this video, is less is more. Don't do them. Don't get all gung ho and do it till you're tired. You get dizzy or you pass out. Just do very, very little at a time. Start off with just like three or four repetitions. Do them so little that the whole thing takes maybe a minute or two. And then you can add to it. And instead, what you want to do is you do it more frequently. The brain responds very well. The brain is a metabolic machine, but it works very differently than muscles. And muscles will let you know when they get tired, they burn. And they like to kind of get beaten down and then be given along the rest. The brain is the opposite. It will not let you know when it's tired. So you can kind of go over the edge and push it without really knowing it until you feel bad or you get shaky or something you lose coordination. And then you did too much and you need to give it a break. But if you stay within that metabolic capacity, if you just do a tiny, tiny bit, now the brain loves it if you do that again and again and again several times a day. So if you start doing these exercises, there would probably be one of three outcomes. Either you improve your vision to the point where you can get rid of your glasses and maybe never wear them again. Second one would be that you stabilize your vision so that you don't need any stronger glasses. You keep them once you have and you don't need to keep updating them. And the third one would be that you slow the decline. There's still benefit to do in the exercises, but maybe you can't stop the decline, maybe slow it down so you don't have to get new glasses so often. So try this out and let me know in the comments. Give it a month or two though or until you know for sure that something happened. But don't just do them once and tell me it didn't work. It's like the lady told her doctor, don't tell me to change my diet. I ate a carrot once and nothing happened. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. 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