60-Second Eye Reset That Fixes Neck Stiffness

In today's world, with all of the phones and computer screens that we're on, it creates a lot of eye strain, and that eye strain can lead to neck pain and poor vision. Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online, and today we're going to talk about eye strain and how that affects not just your vision but also your neck pain. Studies have shown that when we are on a screen for extended periods of time, that our blink rate reduces significantly. Now depending on what study you read, the numbers are a little bit different, But you can assume that you're blinking at about a third of the rate that you normally would be when you're looking at a screen. So what that leads to is eye strain, because if the eyes are not blinking, they are straining harder. The vision is going to suffer because the eyes are fatiguing and the muscles around the eyes. So we need to give them a chance to rest, and it doesn't take a lot. What I'm going to show you today is an exercise to help with that. So we're going to do what's called a visual reset. What we're going to do is first assess ourselves. So I'm going to challenge you to check your range of motion in your neck, see if you're stiff or if you have pain in any direction. And then I'm also going to challenge you, if you have a Snellen chart or something that you can see that's not quite clear that you could read, put that out there and kind of get an idea of how well you see that. Now you've got your assessment done, you've got a baseline. What we're going to do is we're going to do the reset right now. So we're going to cup the hands and we're going to close the eyes and we're going to cover the eyes, just getting complete darkness. Now, really important here, don't put pressure on the actual eyeball, just cover the eyes. And we're going to hold this for 30 to 60 seconds. Now, while we're doing that, we also want to focus on breathing through the belly. So to show you that, we were going to be here. We're going to breathe into the belly, so you should expand as you inhale, and then as you exhale, everything should shrink back in. So there should be movement through here. If you find that you're breathing a lot up and down in the chest like that, that's stress breathing and that's not going to help you. So practice the breathing, practice covering the eyes. After about 60 seconds, we're going to open the eyes and blink rapidly. We're going to blink for 15 seconds or so, and that's kind of just reintroducing the light back into your eyes and not going so fast. Now that we've done that, we want to do 2 things. We want to reassess the range of motion in the neck. So if you had a tight or pain area, then we want to reassess that, see if that's improved. And we also want to look at that thing you were trying to read now and see if it looks more clear. Now, a lot of times people are going to find that this has improved them quite a bit. And if that's the case, this is a thing that you should be doing Probably 2 times an hour if you're on screens a lot. What you're going to find is that over time, you're going to have less eye strain, you're going to see things more clearly, and neck pain should be gone. So give this a try. If you want to learn more about this stuff, I wrote this book called Rewiring Pain. I'll leave the link in the description below. This talks about all kinds of different drills you can do for the eyes and other brain areas. And in the back, there is actually a questionnaire, which is right here, and it will tell you exactly where to start in the book. So you don't have to read the entire thing. You can actually just go to the chapter that the questionnaire indicates and dive right into the drills that are gonna be most beneficial for you. So give this a try. If you have any questions or comments, leave them below. And until next time, live healthy.