Bill Daniels explains how stress narrows your peripheral vision, which signals your brain the environment is unsafe and triggers neck tension. A 60-second drill: fixate on a point while wiggling your fingers at the edge of your visual field, then add deep belly breathing and reassess your neck range of motion.
If you have nagging neck pain and you can't seem to get it to go away, what you don't see might be causing the problem. Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online, and today we're going to talk about the visual system and how it impacts neck pain. Now, our visual system is very large. We should be able to see about 180 to 190 degrees side to side, and that's with our peripheral vision. We should also be able to see above us and below us without actually moving our eyes in any of those directions. The purpose of our peripheral vision isn't to see details. We're not going to read anything clearly over here or be able to see detailed information outside of what we're actually focused on. Instead, what it's going to do is pick up movement and it's going to pick up light. And the purpose of the peripheral field is that it tells us if some kind of danger might be coming at us. Now, if we think about the definition of pain, Pain is an output by the brain telling us that I don't think what we're doing is safe. So if, if the brain feels threatened, then it's going to start creating issues with pain, stiffness, weakness, immobility, and all of these things impact our movement clearly. So if we are going to improve our movement and reduce our pain, one of the things we need to do is improve our peripheral vision, especially when we're talking about neck pain. Because think about this, if your peripheral field narrows, which does happen, if you are only seeing here instead of here, your brain knows that it can't detect what's happening outside of that area, and it should be able to. So now it's going to naturally slightly tense up or even cause pain. So you can be prepared to take on some kind of hit or some kind of danger coming that way that you don't see. Now, that could also relate to pain. Your brain might be saying, don't turn your head in certain ways because I already can't see over here. So for example, if your peripheral field is limited on this side and you're only seeing to here and not to here, then what's happening is your brain's going, whenever I turn my head this way, I'm seeing even less of what's happening on that side. So I'm not, I'm not thinking that's safe. So I'm going to give you pain in the neck so that you don't turn your head that way as much or as quickly. Your brain is always looking to be safe first. And if you watch some of my other videos, you hear me talk about this in more detail. Now, why does peripheral vision get more narrowed? Oftentimes it's related to stress. There are actually studies that show that as we get stressed, our peripheral field narrows. And that becomes a very primal thing because if, We are cavemen, we're out hunting, and we see a bear, we are gonna focus on that bear and not be concerned about what else is going on around us because we wanna know what the threat is. Well, if the threat is now here, we stop seeing what's out here because this is no longer important. Well, stress doesn't just show up as a bear. It can show up as work stress, relationship stress, nutritional stress. It can be— Sleep stress. Injuries that you've already had. It can be all kinds of different things that add to that, and I'll have more videos on that in the future. So if our peripheral vision is narrowed, we can't turn our head, it hurts. One of the things we can do is improve our peripheral vision in order to improve our neck mobility. So here's how we're going to do this. We are going to use the AIM system where we assess, implement, and measure. So we're going to assess first. How far can you turn your head? Where does it hurt? Which way can you go? How quickly do you move into that? How confident are you moving into that range of motion? Get a real idea of how this feels. Then we're going to do a peripheral vision exercise, and this gets very simple. We're going to have a focal point. So right now I'm looking directly at the camera. We're going to take our fingers. Now remember, the peripheral field sees movement, so we want to wiggle the fingers like this. And while we're staying focused on the target in front of us, We're going to go as wide as we can until we can't see the fingers anymore. Now you may find that, okay, I lose it on one side, but I can still see it on the other. And that's okay. Then you know that you have a weaker side with your peripheral vision. So what we do is we just think of it like you're grabbing an object. If you lose it right here, come back, regrab that vision and pull it back just a little further. You'll find that you're able to expand your vision by doing this just a little bit. So do this for about 60 seconds. See if you're able to expand how much you're able to move your hands where you can still see them. Then we're going to reassess that neck movement. So we're going to turn our head to whatever range of motion or direction that was bothering you before. And if that has improved, then we know that peripheral vision is part of the problem with your neck pain. Now, We talked about stress being the driver of peripheral vision. So what we want to do is we also want to lower our stress levels. We're going to do that by adding some belly breathing to this drill. Now belly breathing, remember, we want to be right here and we want to breathe into this, not to this. So when we breathe in and then we breathe out, should all be right here. If you're this person where you go That's stress breathing and that's contributing to your stress. So what we want to do is just really focus on trying to get some pressure into the belly. And when you inhale, it should expand. And when you exhale, it should contract back down. So you may need to do that separate from the peripheral vision, but once you've got the hang of both, do your belly breathing while you do your peripheral vision exercise. Then reassess again and see if that's improved your neck pain even more. So give these things a try. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. I try to answer every comment that I get. If you want more information about this, I do have my book that I wrote last year called Rewiring Pain. I'll leave the link in the description below. This goes into all kinds of different eye exercises and other brain exercises that you can do to improve brain areas. To help with pain, and in the back we have a questionnaire that's a few pages long. This will tell you exactly where to start in this book, so you don't have to read the entire thing. You can go right to what you need to work on and get the help that you need. So like I said, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below, and don't forget to like and subscribe. And until next time, live healthy. Bye.
Stop Stretching Your Neck. Try This Instead (It Might Improve Your Vision Too)
