3. Effects Of Eye Strain On Personality

The eyes are the organ through which we see, just as the lungs are the organ through which air is received into the body. Normal sight is an in­voluntary process without any kind of eye strain. Vision is there to be received through relaxed eyes. It is as free as the air. When we catch cold and the lungs become tense, we struggle for breath. When vision is defective the eyes become tense and we struggle to see. The greater the struggle, in either case, the more difficult it becomes to breathe or see.

All defective sight is due to strain. This explains why the harder the near-sighted person tries to de­cipher a street sign or the far-sighted one to read a finely printed page, the less either one can see and the greater the sense of fatigue and discomfort.

Emotions such as worry, grief, anger, fear, or bore­dom—yes, boredom is an emotion too—greatly affect vision because they create acute nervous tension and strain. Once the strain is relieved, vision is improved.

In a majority of cases, eyes can be taught to see naturally, without aid of glasses, by the elimination of mental strain, substituting normal nerve impulses for the abnormal ones which distort the vision. Strain can be relieved only through mental relaxation. Such re­laxation can be achieved best through certain physical exercises and mental drills which, when systematically followed, are a great help in restoring correct func­tion to the eyes and promoting not only better vision but better health.

It is interesting to observe the effect of the eyes on the personality. The more relaxed the eyes, the more relaxed and likable a person becomes. Eye strain and ten­sion are contagious, and the person whose face gives evidence of them creates about him an atmosphere of tension. When you have achieved relaxation of mental strain and when the blood circulates freely through the eyes and head, evidences of facial tension dis­appear. The eyes open more widely, deepen in color, regain a sparkle, and lose their fixed, staring appear­ance. Tension vanishes from around your mouth and forehead.

A release of tension is literally a release of per­sonality. Not long ago, a mother wrote to express her gratitude for the "blossoming" of her daughter's personality as a result of correcting her defective vision and discarding glasses.

Faces that habitually look strained and worried, as a result of eye tensions, acquire a totally different expression once the secret of relaxation has been learned. Many people who seemed closed and tight because of eye defects bloom into gracious human beings when the regime of regular daily exercises becomes a habit. So, take the relaxation drills seriously, whatever the demands of daily living. After a few weeks, the entire system, not the eyes alone, will be benefited.

A constant eye strain to see, resulting in nervousness, insomnia, fatigue, and irritability, inevitably affects the personality. Tension is a misuse of energy because it is blocked off in the wrong channels and used destructively instead of constructively. It has been estimated that eighty per cent of one's energy is lost through tense eyes. Small wonder, then, that a new and more vigorous personality emerges when the ten­sion is relieved.

There is scope here for speculation as to the "happy blind." The blind, as has often been pointed out, have unlined faces. They live without strain and they seem to have an extraordinary capacity for adjusting them­selves to their dark world. Can it be because they are able to draw on that extra eighty per cent of energy which a vast majority of us are expending in strain? It is high time that we learn how to conserve that energy, to channel it in productive ways. It will pay enormous dividends in joyous living.

Tension is an indication that a human being is out of harmony with himself and consequently with his world, for none of us can establish truly harmonious relationships with others while carrying on a form of warfare—even when it is unconscious—within our­selves.

The point that people frequently overlook is that the release of tension is a release of power. It is the re­laxed swimmer who travels the longest distance, the relaxed tumbler who performs miraculous feats of physical endurance on the trapeze. The body—and all the organs of the body—is efficient only when re­laxed.

It is the athlete who tries too hard who falls behind. His muscles are working too hard to work well. It is the weight that is wrongly carried that makes the muscles shake as though with palsy and finally give way, while the same weight properly balanced can be carried with ease and without undue strain.

Much of the energy that might be flooding the whole system and be put to productive use is burned up in anxiety for fear we will not do the job well, that we will not pass the examination, that we will not be able to handle the interview, that we cannot win the race. In the same way, anxiety about health tends to deteriorate our general well-being. We all know the person who is in a constant state of alarm over his health and takes the greeting, "How are you?" literally, plunging at once into a description of his symptoms. We recognize the tense, querulous tone that always accompanies that recital.

We are dimly aware of the sense of controlled power when we encounter it. Often we do not realize what quality a person has that gives us the conviction of confidence, of strength. Here, we say, is a man— or a woman—who knows where he is going. Whatever talent or ingenuity or ambition a person may have, he fails to give us this feeling of confidence if he shows signs of tension and a tight, drawn face.

Frequently, the tension that causes the eye trouble is merely a symbol for a psychic difficulty, the key to a frustration, or a subconscious expression of one's characteristics.

It is not the purpose of this book to attempt to get at the core of your inner conflicts and phobias, of the maladjustments or emotional rebellion that may lie behind your tension. That is a problem for a psycho­analyst, or for you to meet alone, facing your real self with scrupulous honesty.

The near-sighted person is an introvert. He lives within his own small world, which is restricted to familiar surroundings and a few intimate friends. He dislikes crowds, dreads going to large assemblies or participating in sports (in which he rarely excels be­cause of his visual handicap). He usually enjoys read­ing, is apt to be an excellent scholar or research worker, and works slowly, methodically, and with the utmost care.

The far-sighted person, on the other hand, is an extrovert. He is high-strung, nervous, careless of detail, impatient of sustained effort. He tries to extend his world to its farthest limits, to travel, to see hosts of people, few of whom are intimates. He has too many and too scattered interests, too many diverse activities, to give time or to have the inclination for the close bonds of slow-growing friendship. He dislikes study or reading. He is temperamental. He worries, often suffers pain in his eyes, is subject to severe headaches. He ex­hausts his nervous energy, sleeps little, and is in a constant state of ups and downs. He does everything quickly and superficially, gobbles his food, likes to dramatize himself, and organizes bizarre projects for others to carry through.

It is obvious then that if we treat the person with defective eyes simply for a refractive error, we fail entirely to get at the core of the trouble, the basic emotional disturbance which impelled him to contract his world to so small an orbit, or to push back its boundaries to their furthest extent. So we find that not merely the eyes but the whole person responds to this treatment.

It is not enough, in other words, to treat a symptom, as has been too often the case in the treatment of the eyes. No competent physician treats an isolated pain. He knows that it may arise from any number of causes and he makes an effort to get at the true cause and eliminate it. A headache may be the result of any num­ber of conditions: faulty elimination, emotional upset, nervous strain or tension. The physician tries to find the cause of the headache. The ophthalmologist treats it with glasses.

A person suffers from chronic fatigue, from lack of sleep, from sick headaches, from nerves, from emo­tional instability, and as a result suffers from eye strain. At once his family and his friends suggest that what he needs is to be fitted with glasses. And no attempt is made to discover why he is always tired, why he has insomnia or sick headache or sick nerves or emotional imbalance.

Just as diseases of the skin, asthma, hay fever, and migraine frequently prove to have a mental rather than a physical basis, so many defects of the eyes are the result of emotional or mental factors, sometimes going far back into our childhood. Myopia, in particular, appears to be the result of emotional strains and tensions during adolescence.

Josephine A. Jackson declared in Outwitting Our Nerves:

"Eyestrain is another [result of weak muscles] . . . The best treatment ... is an understanding attempt to go to the root of the matter by bracing up the whole mental tone . . . the eyes will right themselves when the general health and the general spirits improve. I have found by repeated experience with nervous pa­tients that it takes only a short time for people who have been unable to read for months or years to regain their old faculty. So remarkable is the power of the mind."

At the outset you must understand that you... [Chapter Incomplete]

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