There are several things you can do which will improve your eyesight.
They include shifting the focus of the eye and blinking.
These simple eye muscle exercises will make a big difference to your vision.
LEARN TO SHIFT The normal eye sees only one tiny area clearly and therefore shifts with terrific rapidity to encompass a whole picture.
Shifting is a function of good vision.
With mental tension and eye-strain, the eye begins to lose this capacity for rapid shifting and to stare instead.
Starting now, you should make it a habit to relax the eyes and clear the vision by frequent practice in shifting the focus from near to far; that is, looking rapidly from a near to a far object.
BLINKING Blinking keeps the eyes moist and free from dust, provides intervals of darkness and rest, and helps to prevent staring.
Until it becomes second nature to you, keep in mind the fact that you are going to blink frequently.
Eye washes and eye baths and all the countless preparations on the market are merely artificial methods of accomplishing for the eyes what nature can do much better by itself.
Natural, frequent blinking is essential for eye health and is one of the easiest eye muscle exercises possible, but there are always people who approach it like the man who found one teaspoonful of medicine good for him and drank the whole bottle, thinking it would be that much better.
Discovering that blinking rests, relaxes and lubricates the eyes, some misguided enthusiasts blink violently and constantly until they look as though they were suffering from a nervous tic.
It is natural blinking we are aiming at.
Excess does more harm than good.
PRACTICING THE NEW HABITS Already, then, you have learned a couple of techniques which you should begin to put into practice-not tomorrow, or next week, or the day you really get down to your exercises, but now.
1.
Shift naturally.
2.
Blink frequently.
Rest your eyes whenever possible by closing the lids lightly.
Try to close your eyes when you are listening to music or radio programs, whenever you have a few moments in which to do your daydreaming, when you are thinking and planning.
This rest will pay dividends in clearer vision.
After a period of rest, you will see objects better.
These new habits are not difficult or complex in themselves, but again I must emphasize the danger of dismissing them as being too simple to take seriously.
Remember, however, that there is a difference between seeing an object, and trying to see it.
Whenever the eye strains to see three things happen: the eye stares, it ceases shifting, and it loses central fixation.
The normal eye shifts seventy times in a fraction of a second.
There can be no doubt that an overwhelming amount of human ability, talent, and power is lost through the poor functioning of mental control.
Few of us have any conception of our own potentialities or of the energy, now bound up in tension, that we could release.
We watch two individuals of equal ability, training, intellect, and see in bewilderment that one of them rapidly outdistances the other.
"Why," we ask, "was it possible for Joe to accomplish so much? Tom was just as good a man.
" The answer, of course, is that Joe used his capacities and Tom was never aware of his.
He did not know how to release his own talents and energies so as to make his own life more fruitful and rewarding-and, let me add, more joyous.
Practise these simple eye muscle exercises and your eyesight will improve.