Latest on my vision improvement
It's been about a month and a half since I accelerated my vision improvement by wearing pinholes and reduced strength prescription glasses and I'm really happy! I'm experiencing such good results from my pinholes that I make a point to fold them up and put them in my pocket when I head home from work. One of the things I so love about pinhole glasses is that they don't have any lenses to smudge or get dirty with dust. I don't have to be so concerned about putting my hands near my eyes for fear of getting fingerprints on my glasses. It's amazing all the little things you're forced to get used to while you wear glasses. Oh, and since pinholes don't have lenses and are just plastic with holes in them you don't have to treat them so delicately. Like I said above I stuff them in my pocket when going home, stuff 'em in my pocket when I work on a computer in another department at work, stuff 'em in my pocket when...well..just to stuff for stuffing's sake! Haha, okay, that was lame... Still, the freedom I feel from wearing them is oh so neat.
A few weeks after getting my pinholes I bought two pair of prescription glasses from Zenni Optical. Each were 0.5 diopters less than my current prescription: -2.25 and -1.75. I should note here that I took -2.75 to be my current prescription rather than the -3.00 lenses I used to wear because my eye doctor said I was -2.75 in my left and close-but-no-cigar to -2.75 in my right so he prescribed me -3.00 lenses for both eyes! Bastard. Hehe. Actually I think he did that to keep my prescription stable, probably to keep me from having to buy new glasses. Lucky me that I discovered I can buy prescription glasses starting from like $10 online. Using this newfound info I decided to stop wearing my -3.00 lenses and use reduced strength lenses.
I started wearing them about a month ago -- according to my blog post about them -- and now I'm wearing the -1.75 lenses instead of the -2.25 ones. When I first put on the -2.25 lenses I guess that I got about 20/40 vision. I have a Snellen chart that I found online and printed out and I could read the 20/40 line even though it was blurry, but couldn't make out the 20/20 line. When I was at the supermarket if I stood at one end of an aisle I couldn't clearly read the signs hanging from the ceiling but I could if I walked halfway up the aisle. 20/40 vision isn't that bad really. It's nowhere near the perfect crystal clear clarity of 20/20 vision but it is certainly doable. Of course my point of wearing weaker glasses is to give my eyes even more opportunities to relax and hopefully gradually ween myself off them completely.
My primary means of relaxing my eye is to not strain them, and by that I mean not wearing minus lenses, e.g. prescription glasses, when working on the computer. I probably spend nearly every waking moment (slight exaggeration) in front of a computer so wearing pinholes while working on them helps tremendously. Pinholes have a dual synergistic benefit. One, they help you to see better far away which is an incentive to wear them. The second benefit is that they provide the first one without adding strain to your eyes. Prescription glasses help you to see better far away but do so by adding strain to your eyes. Actually if you look at something far away with them then they're not a problem, but it's not exactly realistic to think that you'll only ever look at something far away with them, hence their propensity to do harm. Pinholes provide a passive eye relaxation benefit, they allow your eyes an opportunity to relax. When my vision gets to the point I can read my computer monitor from a comfortable distance I'm going to switch to reading glasses, plus lenses, since they provide a more active relaxation benefit: they force your eyes to relax.
I do want to speak on relaxation a bit more since I feel I'm gaining a lot in this area lately. Since it's been about a month and a half since I started wearing all these new glasses I've noticed my eyes feel different. When I don't have anything on it feels almost like my eyes are going to fall or something, basically they're relaxing. Thing is, after needing to wear corrective lenses since I was 14, 15 years ago, I've gotten really used to tense eyes, to the point this feels normal. So now relaxed eyes feel weird. At first I had a lot of moments where I wanted to "fix" this feeling, that is, tense my eyes. But learning what I've had about the eyes I knew that relaxation was what I wanted so I had to just get used to the feeling of relaxed eyes. It's actually tougher than it sounds and I think I'll spend a good bit of time getting used to it. It's neat though, seeing and feeling the way I should. I've read a lot of metaphysical stuff about vision improvement, much of it saying to relax. Well, you know what, they may be on to something. I don't know if you need to pony up hundreds of dollars for their classes though since you'll naturally start relaxing the way they promote once you get going on vision improvement.
One last thing before I wrap this post up. Last week or so ago I started noticing that I could see 20/20 with my -2.25 lenses for brief periods of time. This thrilled me a lot since that would mean my prescription would have really changed to -2.25. But when I got home I would notice blurriness in things that were crystal clear in my -3.00 lenses so I took this mean I wasn't quite there yet, haha. (Un)fortunately for me I left my glasses in my car while I went skating this Sunday and when I got back I noticed the anti-reflective coating had lines all over it. I couldn't rub them away or anything so I'm assuming the heat did something to the coating. Because of this I decided to start wearing my -1.75 lenses. I had thought to switch to these a week ago anyway but never did. My theory is that the ciliary muscle is like any other muscle in the body, if you want to exercise it you need to keep giving it stronger challenges. In weight training that means once you get used to a particular weight you need to add more weight if you want your muscles to grow at the same rate that they used to. So with my eyes I think having periods of 20/20 vision with a particular lens strength means I need to reduce the strength of them to experience the same growth/relaxation rate. So my plan now is to buy -1.25 lenses and -0.75 lenses and use them when I start noticing the same 20/20 periods with these -1.75 lenses. I can already notice that I can see 20/20 more often in my -2.25 lenses so this seems to be working, so far. 