Persistent neck pain may stem from poor eye convergence, the way your eyes align on near objects. A simple 30-second drill using your thumb trains convergence by moving it toward your nose until the image doubles, then resetting. Many people see immediate improvements in neck mobility and vision after practicing this technique.
Does your neck and shoulders feel like concrete? It could be due to poor movement in the eyes. I'm going to show you a quick 30-second drill today that could make that all feel better. The first thing we want to do is we want to assess where you are now. So we are going to test the range of motion in our neck. Primarily, we're going to rotate. So we're going to turn our head left and we're going to turn our head right as far as we can go. See how that feels. See how far you can go. We're also going to tilt left and right like this. And then we're also going to look up and look down. Now you have a good idea of how your neck feels. Now here's another thing. You can also test your vision. If you have a Snellen chart, which is that chart you get at the eye doctor with the big E on the top and all the lines of letters, print yourself one of those out from the internet and paste it up on the wall and get an idea of where your vision is right now as well. Because as the neck gets better, the vision can also get better. So the eye movement I'm going to show you today is called convergence. Now, our eyes are always working together and pointing in different directions to see what they see. Wherever they— those 2 lines of vision from the 2 eyes cross is what you're going to see clearly. That's where your focal point is. Now, you can imagine that if something's far away, your eyes are here, and as something gets closer, your eyes come in a little bit more narrow. So all the way up to— if it comes right up to your nose, It would be like getting cross-eyed, and that's convergence. If our eyes don't converge well, then we have a threat of anything that gets close to us, we're going to get tense and tight. This is super common because a lot of the things we do these days in our daily lives, like looking at our phones and reading books, and even when we're driving, we're, we're right here really focused on what's right in front of us. So we need to get better control of that because when we don't converge well or we get stuck there, then the brain is going to make the muscles in the neck and the shoulders much tighter to hold the head still so that it can see more clearly what's coming at it. So we're going to strengthen that movement with either a pen or your thumb. All you're going to do is take your thumb and stick it right out in front of you. You're going to keep your eyes right on the thumbnail, and you're going to bring that towards the bridge of your nose. So, as you come in, you want to make sure it stays clear, that you see one thumb. If you see 2, you're going to stop at that point, and you're going to look off into the distance. Reset and try it again. Keep bringing that thumb in, trying to see one thumb, and see it clearly, and then pop your eyes off to something in the distance when it starts to split into 2. By doing this, you are teaching your eyes and your brain how to control that movement with your eyes coming in. And in turn, that should allow the brain to feel more relaxed in that position and relax the muscles in the shoulder and neck. Try that 5 times and then retest your range of motion. If you were tight in your rotation or your lateral tilts or your extension or your flexion, retest that and see if it works better. Also, go back to your Snellen chart and see if you can see a little bit more clearly. Let me know in the comments below how this worked for you, and if you got something out of this, please don't forget to like and subscribe, and until next time, live healthy.
Stop Stretching Your Neck. Try This Instead (It Might Improve Your Vision Too)
