this video is a crash course in the core ideas of vision improvement it will give you an understanding of everything you need to know to improve your vision in the long term as well as some scientific knowledge all results come from really good application of the fundamentals it's important in my view not to be bogged down by the details extensively written about and instead to focus on the basics i started my vision improvement journey in may 2019 and have improved in line with the expected rate of improvement which is 0.75 to 1 diopters per year i've made a lot of mistakes but that also means i have a lot of experience i've been a mod in the discord server and helped set up the myopia wiki all with the idea of just trying to get more people into vision improvement the advice given in this video is grounded in the fundamentals of embiopia although it has been colored by my own experiences at times all of the big ideas that you need to improve your vision consistently in the long term are in this video nothing big has been left out if this video helps you please feel free to give it a like and subscribe to the channel as i want to make similar videos like this in the future you don't need to pay anyone for coaching to improve your vision all the information is freely available online the only cost are the glasses you'll need to buy as you reduce your myopia this may be a decent amount of money for you these aren't super special magical glasses though they're just regular glasses let's go visit the optometrist you'll have to wear these vision improvement is a contentious topic and the following explanation for why myopia progresses is not what the optometry industry would agree with optometrists and industry spokespeople usually present vague reasons along the lines of you use screens too much you need to go outside more it's genetic and there's nothing you can do about it i can't fault anyone for wanting to trust the vague optometry answers you might have heard them from your optician these answers are half right but they're not put into one cohesive theory for how myopia actually progresses instead it's just a bunch of vague reasons in particular the genetic argument should be debunked in the 19th century myopia prevalence was practically zero yet as of 2020 22 of people around the world have myopia with much higher prevalence in some countries by 2050 it's projected that 50 of the world will have myopia to make such a genetic argument for myopia firstly you need to understand genetics genes evolve over millions of years when natural selection pressures choose traits that are favorable to our survival maybe you're seeing problems already there is no natural selection pressure for people to evolve a huge survival disadvantage like myopia furthermore the gene pool doesn't change that drastically in just under 200 years based on clinical science enmyopia has taken the half right quite vague optometry answers and put them into one cohesive theory to actually try to explain how myopia progresses over time and just remember that the optometry industry has no incentive to teach you or to educate the wider public about how progressive myopia is caused by lens use would tobacco and cigarette companies have any reason to explain how nicotine is addictive at the back of your eyeball is the retina the lens focuses light from far or nearby objects onto the retina to focus light your eye uses a flexible lens and a circular muscle the ciliary muscle when you look into the distance the ciliary muscle relaxes and when you look up close the muscle contracts and becomes tense in nature the eye wasn't primarily used up close most of our activities were distance vision and that's what we evolved for in the modern world that's been flipped around and now a majority of activities involve close-up for long periods of time the ciliary muscle which was contracted and tense for close-up work now fails to fully relax and undergoes a muscle spasm causing a condition called neo-induced transient myopia or pseudomyopia when anae is myopic commonly known as short-sighted that means that the light rays from what you're looking at no longer converge directly onto the back of your eyeball at the retina but rather in front of the retina so a clear image doesn't form and now you have blurry vision the symptom of myopia the ciliary muscle can't relax because of long periods of close-up work so the light rays fail to converge directly on the retina and you get blurry vision as a result if you stopped doing quite as much close-up work and went outside and got some distance vision you would find that your ciliary muscle would relax and your vision would gradually return to normal you would have perfect vision just as before and it would have been like nothing had happened if you're watching this video though it's more likely that you went to an optician or an optometrist and they gave you a really minor prescription usually of less than one diopter to start you off now this is great for a while because it solves the symptoms of your problem but now the real problems begin glasses for short-sightedness are concave and move the focal point the point where the light rays converge further back into your eye unlike pseudomyopia myopia is where the length of the eyeball the axial length is too long eyes have a response system designed to change the axial length of your eyeball in response to where light rays converge in the eye for example when most babies are born they are born hyperupic which means they are far sighted the eye's natural response system changes the axial length in response to where the light rays are converging over time the baby has clear vision this response system doesn't turn off when you get older however when glasses are stronger than what you actually need to see or you use distance vision glasses when doing close-up work light rays converge behind the retina of the eye to reduce pressure on the system the eye's natural response system increases the axial length of the eye your eye is just doing what it's designed to do you end up going back to the optician after you find your current glasses are not powerful enough anymore and they prescribe you even more powerful glasses the cycle can now repeat itself for as long as you continue to go back to the optician myopia as well as astigmatism is induced by lenses in the vast overwhelming majority of cases actual genetic myopia or astigmatism does exist but is exceedingly rare you now know how your myopia progressed over time vision improvement is the exact same process just now in reverse eyes can become longer as well as shorter your optician gave you stronger lenses over a long period of time so now we go in reverse with weaker lenses over a long period of time there are four fundamental ideas to improving your vision these are good close-up habits a good pair of normalized active focus and distance vision these are the four fundamentals and you need to do all of them together missing out on any one of these can jeopardize your success they're all relatively simple but they're also easy to get wrong at the same time if you see yourself not making any improvements it's a good idea to check that you're actually doing these four things correctly before jumping to the conclusion that none of this works diopters are the unit of strength for how powerful lenses are negative diopters are for myopia or short-sightedness and positive diopters are for hyperopia or long-sightedness we focus on negative diopters because we're short-sighted spherical diameters or sph is overall myopia and represents the myopia for the whole of your eye in all directions and planes cylindrical diopters or sil is present when an eye has astigmatism it means there's myopia in a specific plane or axis in your eye think of it as a line going across the center of your eyeball where there is more myopia along this line and in the other parts of your eye there's less myopia axis is the angle where this line is if someone doesn't have astigmatism they don't have an axis value if you're reducing your astigmatism correction never change the axis value as it just means the direction of your astigmatism not the strength although this sounds complicated diopters are really just a number that tells people how far away you need to be for an object before it gets blurry you can check your myopia online right now with a tape measure if you want to there's a link in the description normalized glasses are slightly under corrected glasses that are usually only 0.25 diopters below full strength glasses full strength glasses are well full strength glasses 20 20 vision for distance differential glasses are very under corrected glasses they correct you just enough so you can see what it is you're working on they're used just for close-up work and they're never used for distance activities so you use normalized glasses for nearly all activities you only use differential glasses for close-up work and you only use full-strength glasses where having perfect vision is necessary such as driving a car especially at night active focus is a technique that literally sharpens your vision and lets you see further with less blur the blur horizon is simply the distance before your vision starts to get blurry active focus pushes the blur horizon back meaning you can see more clearly for a longer distance you simply can't use distance vision glasses for close-up over a long time this causes a lot of eye strain and causes the light rays to converge behind the retina normalized and full strength glasses are used for distance vision for close-up work we use differentials which are exclusively used for close-up work they are very under-corrected glasses they're not used for distance vision differential glasses are only really used if someone has above minus two diopters of myopia or astigmatism that's really bad if you have low myopia so below minus two then you don't need differential glasses you'll probably just find not wearing glasses for close-up work differentials correct your vision just enough to the distance you need your eye is more relaxed the light rays don't converge in the wrong places and your myopia will not progress as a result of close-up work if you get into the habit of wearing differentials you'll wonder how you ever used full strength glasses for close-up work when you're completely new to vision improvement you will experience fast improvements in the beginning because you're removing a lot of eye strain and ciliary spasm you can expect to improve by around about 0.5 to 0.75 diopters within the first 90 days which is great because it's really motivating when buying a pair of differentials a rough approach is just to reduce one to two diopters from your full strength glasses you should wear whatever correction allows your head and neck to feel comfortable you should bear in mind those newbie gains though within the first 90 days of wearing differentials you'll likely find that you need to move your head slightly further back because your eyes will have improved due to the loss of ciliary spasm and eye strain if you're new to vision improvement working with a laptop a 2 to 2.25 diopter reduction from your full strength glasses should work a screen that is 60 centimeters or higher away is more of a 1.5 to 1.75 reduction if you are past the newbie gains of the first 90 days for a laptop you would look at 1.5 to 1.75 and for a screen further away it'd be 1 to 1.5 diopters you don't have to take my word for it though because of the way diopters work it's easy to calculate how much to reduce by for differentials although this calculation won't factor in your early improvements that you'll have at the beginning from losing ciliary spasm to calculate the correction needed for differentials sit in your normal comfortable position from where you work and measure the distance from your eyes to the screen now take 100 and divide it by the distance you measured in centimeters and round this number to a 0.25 interval this is how much you reduce by to get from full strength to differentials you can also automate this calculation by just going to a website linked in the description and have the computer calculate this for you when doing close-up work with or without differentials try to be a bit further back from the screen and then try and clear it up with active focus this will help avoid ciliary spasm phones are notorious for eye strain and ciliary lockup try to use your phone without glasses as much as possible or with differentials if you have high myopia when you can watch your media on other devices where you can get more distance from the screen you could use really weak differentials that put you closer to the screen but the whole point of differentials is comfortable close-up work so ideally try for at least 50 centimeters away from a screen with all of that said good close-up habits and wearing differentials are not going to be the direct reason your eyes will improve however they do ensure that your myopia won't progress any further so you will avoid reversing all of the improvements that you will make when your myopia value decreases as a result of following the other fundamentals then you can choose to reduce your differential prescription or you can just choose to move your head further back the choice is yours normalized glasses active focus and distance vision are how your eye improves the point of normalized glasses is to provide a bit of blur challenge in the distance and then you use active focus to clear up that blur challenge resulting in stimulus that encourages your eye to reduce in length if you have or are approaching low myopia you can start to consider not wearing glasses anymore low myopia is anything below 1.5 diopters for our purposes below this point you should begin to only wear normalized glasses for when you need them for an activity the idea is that over time you'll find your reliance on glasses reduces more and more until you find that you don't need them anymore if you're above 1.5 diopters you'll be wearing normalized glasses for most of your distance vision day-to-day activities it's not recommended you wear normalized when starting out in your first four to six weeks your eyes will improve rapidly at this time and any pair of normalized you would have would quickly become redundant there's plenty of stimulus for improvement in the first four to six weeks you don't need normalized just yet now assuming you don't have ciliary spasm finding your normalize is actually really easy it's just 0.25 diopters below your full strength correction if you're above seven diopters and you're a high myope you should consider doing a 0.5 diopter reduction but otherwise 0.25 diopters is fine if you have astigmatism you have a number in your sill column if it's below one diopter you should strongly consider just getting rid of all of the astigmatism correction in that eye as it's just too low to affect your vision that much with one and above diopters of astigmatism get the same cylinder value as you had for full strength and most importantly make sure the axis value is identical to the one you got from the optician if it hasn't changed in a while now you'll obviously be reducing your astigmatism as well as your spherical it's recommended that you don't change your cylinder value every time you change your spherical as this hasn't worked out the best for a lot of people in the past that's it of course though i have another note of caution a very common beginner trap to fall into is reducing diopters too quickly your full strength glasses should let you see the 20 20 line on the snellen eye chart without any blur it should be crisp and clear going 0.25 below this should give you some blur on the eye chart this is the important part don't reduce any more correction until your eye can see the chart just as clearly as you could before with the stronger correction on average it should take three to four months to improve by diopters although it can be faster or slower i will get into expectations for vision improvement later in this video please remember that reducing too much or too quickly will not improve your vision any faster in a lot of people's experiences it just tends to slow down or stop improvement altogether it's a really common beginner's trap so try not to fall into it active focus is this one simple trick that just improves your vision optometrists hate it active focus improves your vision you can literally see better what was blurry in the distance before is now sharp when wearing normalized you should be doing active focus as much as possible if you have low myopia and you don't need to wear normalized then active focus without glasses otherwise you should do active focus whenever you can with both your normalized and differentials with differentials you should be on the edge of blur just slightly further away from your screen and trying to active focus from there when doing active focus there is literally less blur in the distance and your blur horizon is said to be pushed back you'll know if you're doing active focus correctly if you can perform it more or less on command and it makes a significant improvement in your vision active focus is hard and elusive for the beginner and can take a really long time to figure out it's a huge hurdle for beginners in vision improvement i found active focus by staring at price tags at my workspace and doing really weird things with my eyes until eventually it clicked and it just became sharper then i'd found active focus this is just one of many countless ways people have said they've found active focus there really isn't a one-size-fits-all approach for this once you can active focus this part is mostly done forever and you just continue to do it while wearing normalized and getting distance vision the challenge should not be understated though good luck now you have a good pair of normalized and can do active focus all that remains is to give yourself enough opportunities on a regular basis to get distance vision if your main activities remain close-up based with little or no distance vision you won't improve your vision daily walks are a classic for distance vision and audio books and podcasts can really help there anything will work as long as it's fun and something you can stick to consistently there's a great chance that the habit of going outside regularly will improve your life more than just vision improvement it's mostly agreed that two to three hours outside every day is ideal and is all you need to improve your vision in the long term going outside more than this on a given day will not improve your vision by that much more because there are diminishing returns you can also insert distance vision into your day-to-day activity such as walking to work or taking a break some people say that two to three hours outside every day is too much if you can't find even an hour out of your day to go outside then you might want to reconsider what you're doing and whether it's actually so important although you might be excited your expectations should be tempered before starting this it can take many years to get back to 2020 eyesight with a lot of trial and error initial improvements are usually 0.5 to 0.75 diopters within the first 90 days some of this correction may have been over prescription from your optician and as a result you never needed this correction in the first place so you just get rid of it you likely also had a lot of ciliary spasm and eye strain as a result of using distance vision glasses for close-up this will go away within the first 90 days when you wear differentials the final long part of the process is reducing the axial length of your eyeball you can expect to improve a quarter of a diopter every three to four months with some people improving faster and some people improving slower than this to improve faster try sticking closer to the fundamentals of vision improvement [Music] so the right normalized active focus and going outside will be what directly improves your eyesight good close-up habits are what prevents your eyesight from getting any worse now measuring your improvement is a funny one it won't directly improve your vision but it's very helpful in judging whether you should be reducing at the moment or whether you're doing something wrong it's extremely undeniably recommended the best way to reduce is the snow and eye chart in my opinion find a three or six meter eye chart online or buy a more professional one before making a reduction make a note of how clear and sharp the text is on the chart it should be similar to what an optometrist level of correction gets you to to be safe you're looking for a quarter of a diopter below this 2020 clarity you want to go from sharp and clear to somewhat blurry with their quarter of a diopter it's better to focus on the acuity and blurriness of the letters rather than whether you can just read them or not once you reach the same clarity you had with a previously stronger pair of glasses you can look into reducing again centimeter measurements allow you to track your progress over time you get a tape measure and place it against your eyes to a screen and measure the distance before the text becomes blurry it's important to measure the distance at exactly the point your vision gets blurry and not to be generous with your measurements to avoid understating your myopia as of now the best tool for centimeter measurements is varakari's vision log tool with a link in the description a good thing about this tool is that you can measure your myopia with differentials i recommend measuring your myopia with differentials if you have above minus four to five diopters of myopia as the centimeter difference between increments becomes really tiny at high myopia autorefractors are another option such as the ones offered by iq i found them to be really conservative with a tendency to over prescribe above what an optician gives me but they do show a general trend of improvement and the inflated number still goes down over time they're a good option to see a trend going downwards although a wee bit pricey and unnecessary in my opinion you can also go to an optometrist it's important that you don't use active focus when taking an eye exam as your eyes will be better than they are and you won't get an accurate result optometrists aren't foolproof and will often base their results on your previous prescriptions so i recommend seeing a new one for each eye test and taking advantage of the free eye test offers wherever possible this will give you more of an independent objective assessment the best thing about optometrist diet tests is you get to rub your glorious official improvements in the faces of all those doubters who started calling you crazy glasses conspiracy theorists finally looking at an object at a certain distance with a certain level of correction and seeing how the clarity improves over time can be the most motivating sign of improvement i find that active focus becomes easier at long distances when my vision has improved it's a really good idea to use many of these methods together at the same time to see if you're making improvements [Music] there are two schools of thought when it comes to buying glasses you can either buy them online or find a helpful supportive optometrist who will work with you a friendly optometrist will let you use their test lens kit which can help you find out the right correction to use in some circumstances they might also give you a discount if you're going to be bulk buying glasses from them in the future buying online is far more convenient though and a friendly optometrist may be hard to find even if you buy in bulk glasses are often still cheaper online you should do whatever is more convenient for you often depending on your country and how strictly optometry is practiced there [Applause] vegeta what does a scouter say about his power level it's over nine thousand what nine thousand it it all comes down to good close-up habits the right pair of normalized active focus and making sure you go outside or making sure your vision doesn't get any worse due to close-up work and giving your eyes the stimulus they need to improve nearly all mistakes or failure comes from not following one of these four parts correctly the whole thing just falls down like a house of cards if that happens so try to measure as consistently as possible to make sure that everything is working out for you it's basically mandatory that when you go away from this video you read more articles on end myopia you read the wiki you watch other people's youtube videos you go to the forum you see people's experiences you need to have a really strong idea of what to do especially when it comes to finding active focus for yourself i wish you the very best of luck if all of this had failed to improve my vision i wouldn't be making this video it's really gratifying when your vision genuinely improves and you can wear less correction and still see just as clearly as before thanks for watching if you found this video useful feel free to like and subscribe to the channel i'll see you genetic failures next time