Eye Exercises for Farsightedness

Are you tired of squinting to read the menu at a restaurant? Or, read the incoming text messages from your kids? You’re not alone; up to 10 percent of Americans suffer from this eye condition. Not being able to see things in front of you clearly is inconvenient and irritating. Luckily, you don’t have to suffer with farsightedness forever. There are easy eye exercises and natural remedies that can help.

What Is Farsightedness?

Farsightedness, often referred to as hyperopia, is sometimes considered the opposite of nearsightedness. Nearsightedness, or myopia, is where you can see things up close but have difficulties focusing on things far away from you.

Farsightedness is also a refractive error but it affects your ability to see objects up-close clearly. In some cases, you can have hyperopia but not notice any vision impairments, only that your eye muscles are tired and sore often. Hyperopia is very strenuous on the eye muscles and can cause eye strain.

There are a few different causes of hyperopia but the most common is the aging process. As we age, our eyes experience wear-and-tear like all of our other body parts. Our vision is vulnerable to the environmental, lifestyle, and familial factors in our lives.

Symptoms of farsightedness can include:

• Blurry vision
• Eyestrain
• Discomfort
• Restlessness and irritability

And, if those aren’t bad enough, farsightedness can even result in a poor attention span and crossed eyes.

How to Correct Farsightedness

One of the biggest problems with hyperopia is that it doesn’t always have any symptoms. Therefore, it is often left untreated for a long time.

If symptoms are noticed, then corrective glasses and contact lenses are often used to correct the symptoms. But, they don’t often help with the cause of the problem. Glasses and contact lenses act as a band-aid solution for refractive errors. They provide relief in the moment, but don’t address underlying eye issues.

The cause of the problem is the inability to focus clearly on objects that are up close. If your eyes are strong enough, as they are for kids and younger people, they can sometimes correct themselves. But, over time and due to added strain on the eyes, they become weaker and less self-healing.

As you get older, you will need new solutions to focus well on things, besides getting glasses.

Nutrition for Farsightedness

First, you want to ensure that you’re getting the right amount of vitamins and minerals in your diet. Like other organs in your body, your eyes need vitamins and minerals to function properly. These include antioxidants, fatty acids, and zinc. You also need to be drinking enough water each day to hydrate the eyes and ensure proper blood flow.

You want to make sure your body is getting everything it needs to stay healthy. By simply adding the right vitamins, minerals and herbs into your diet, you can maintain healthy eyes and keep your vision in the best possible condition.

Here are a few other tips and exercises to help improve farsightedness:

Resting

Make sure your eyes get enough rest while sleeping and during the day. Unlike the rest of your body, your eyes are always working. If your legs are tired, you sit down and rest. If your arms are tired, you relax them for a while. But if your eyes are tired, you usually continue using them.

It’s a good idea to take a break from using your eyes during the day. If, for example, you’re doing a lot of work on a computer, you need to take regular breaks from staring at the screen.

Try to follow the 10-10-10 Rule. For every 10 minutes of looking at a computer, try to look at something 10 feet away for 10 seconds. This will help your eyes to focus on something further away which relaxes the muscles that contract when looking at something up-close.

William Bates Method

Dr. William Bates was a world-renowned American eye doctor in the early 1900’s. He created a set of exercises that are designed to strengthen your eye muscles. He suggested that you practice these two things: swinging and palming.

Palming is where you cover your eyes with your palms to get total darkness. Before placing them on your eyes, rub your hands together to make them warm. When you place them on your eyes, you should do so without putting any undue pressure on your eyes. Take deep breaths, relax and concentrate on the darkness. Do this for about 10 minutes every day.

He also suggested that you practice swinging. In this exercise, you focus on something in the distance. It could be a tree across the street or a chair on the other side of the room. Then, you sway from side to side while maintaining steady focus on the object. As you’re doing this you should also blink to keep your eyes moist and clean.

Blinking

Blinking is something that we do naturally all the time. However, there are some instances where we don’t blink as much as we should. When we’re looking at a TV or a computer screen, we do it a lot less. Sometimes it’s so little that it causes eye strain and dry eye syndrome.

Blinking rehydrates the eyes; it also gives your eyes a temporary break from focusing and helps to prevent eyestrain. If you spend a long time looking at a computer screen, ensure that you try to blink regularly. This will help your eyes to reset and reduce the chances of computer-induced eyestrain.

Roll Your Eyes

Rolling your eyes is easy and can really help with your vision. Plus, it can feel very satisfying. Like blinking, you don’t need to sit down and do this during a set exercise plan. Instead, you can do it at any time of the day.

Just take a break from what you are doing, sit back and roll your eyes in a circular motion. Do this in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions for about one minute total. This will help your eyes stay lubricated and also alleviate eye strain.

By incorporating these simple exercises into your daily routine, you can address your farsightedness. With consistency and practice, you’ll be picking up a menu without a second thought to grab your glasses. These natural remedies to improve farsightedness will eliminate the need for those pesky eye glasses and contact lenses once and for all!