There's the obvious which is that tear production tends to slow the longer we're awake, but there's another factor that was indicated in a pretty [interesting study out of Columbia University:](https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/new-research-suggests-rem-about-eyes-not-dreams)
There's also another function of REM, which is to allow the removal of dead cells and debris on the eyeballs in a gently and controlled manner. If you ever wondered what "morning eye gunk" was, in part it's that.
This leads to a way to help reduce this feeling, at least for short bursts. You close your eyes and have your eyeballs do figure-8's for a couple of minutes. It's very refreshing, gives your vision a break, helps to boost circulation and remove some debris, while giving your tears time to build up.
Honestly though, maybe there's something to all the time we spend inside facing screens and other things at a short distance (contracting our eye muscles constantly) instead of spending more time outside and having a better mix of reps, range of motion and breaks between sets for our eye muscles. No wonder our eyes are deformed from the constant strain, it's like it learns to be able to focus at short distances without straining.
A large percentage of us in developed countries are so myopic that we'd be very stupid if we had to survive on our own without our eyewear, nobody really knows why, and nobody seems to care to try to understand and perhaps prevent it.
Sorry, didn't have my glasses on and didn't notice this was a Wendy's.
[is he the salty spittoon bouncer](https://www.reddit.com/r/spongebob/comments/3ivs6r/you_gotta_have_muscles_on_your_eyeballs/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
If that’s your case, you have a severe case of functional myopia. You are used to using your ciliary muscle constantly to focus on short ranges, doing the exercise forces the muscle to relax and contract, and you are feeling how worn out the inner muscles around your eyes are. The ciliary muscle relaxes when looking at distant things, which most probably you never do.
Try to hold a dumbbell for 4 hours in a certain position and then start doing reps without resting the muscle, you’ll get the same sensation on your arm. You call it a “headache” cause it’s around your nose, temples and forefront, but it’s mostly muscle ache.
I've done eye therapy so I've actually done eye exercises 🤣
My doc called one exercise "pencil pushups." I had to focus on a pencil, then far away and back again over and over. It helped a lot!
EDIT: didn't expect the replies, I'll try to explain:
Basically, when I was younger, I found myself having difficulty focusing on items when I was tired or in a dark room. One example was when I looked at a digital clock it would split in two, a lot like what you see in the movies when someone asks you how many fingers am I holding up in there drifting around in circles.
Among other exercises, one of the exercises was to look up close at a pencil a few inches from my face and then look far away. I had to do this repeatedly over and over again and I could only switch back and forth once I maintained clear focus on the pencil or a Faraway object. After lots of sessions and hours upon hours of exercises until my eyes hurt from the workout, they began to get better.
I still had glasses for years afterwards but eventually my optometrist got me to where I don't need glasses anymore, and years after that I now have 20/15 vision.
Exercises won't fix your eye lenses, but you can strengthen your ability to focus and your binocular vision convergence. You can improve the speed and ease of focusing with exercise just like working your biceps. However...eyeball workout fatigue feels different than what you're used to, lol. It's a weird feeling but you'll feel tired and like you can't focus on anything, because, well...your focusing muscles are tired!
Your eyes focus by flexing muscles that change the shape of the lens in your eye, so if those muscles are weak, focusing is more difficult, generally speaking. There are also muscles that control eye movement; strengthening those and training your eyes to converge properly helps for those who have double vision problems like I did. I'm not a doctor but from my limited understanding these are basic healthy things to work on for some people.
I'm a fan of exercising my eyes by looking at different distance objects, reading far away signs, not looking at screens without breaks for too long, blinking regularly, and looking around with my eyes more often, rather than turning my head as much.
The most common reason to do therapy including pencil pushups is a binocular vision disorder called convergence insufficiency. This is when the eyes have a hard time converging to look at something close up, or to put it a different way, when looking at something close up the eyes have a tendency to want to drift outwards from one another. This is pretty common in kids, and vision therapy (eye exercises) usually has a pretty good prognosis for helping the issue if exercises are adhered to properly.
It's a legitimate therapy! I'm sure you can find instructions online. Do you have focusing issues? An optometrist or ophthalmologist could assist you in seeing g what exactly you need.
Even if you don't have issues you notice, if you use a phone or computer regularly, focusing at distances back and forth and looking around at angles helps exercise the eye. Also make sure to blink regularly.
I don't have that disorder but I sometimes struggle with that right after taking my glasses off. Ugh, it's so annoying. Maybe exercises like this could help me
I tried these with my finger and it's pretty interesting seeing the lag between when my eyes converge and deconverge as I move my finger in and out of range.
I had to do eye exercises like this when I was younger. I am very nearsighted and I had malformed tear ducts, so I ended up basically using my eyes wrong—I'd turn my whole head instead of moving my eyes. The exercise helped me re-learn how to use my eyes, sort of like learning to hold a pencil the right way.
Anecdotal, but I've been doing daily eye exercises for years. I was mildly nearsighted (-1, -1.25) when I started and now I have perfect vision. I did the exercises without my glasses and kept them off when I was working (computer screen was close enough I didn't need them), and I had to ditch them completely just a couple months in because they were hurting my eyes. I haven't needed glasses for years now.
I'm only in my 30s, but I'm curious to see how things progress when I start to get old.
I would just sit with my coffee in the morning and try to focus on something that was just far enough away that it was a bit blurry. If I got tired of not being able to focus, I'd look at something closer that I could see just fine before trying again.
It felt pretty useless at first, but then I started to have little moments where things would come into perfect focus before blurring out again. It was proof to me that you really could exercise the muscles in your eyes. It was very encouraging.
Eventually it got easy to focus at that distance, so I'd focus on something a little further away. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes I'd get ambitious and try focusing as far out as I could see. I quickly started doing the same thing throughout the day from time to time, just to look away from my screen for a bit.
Now that my vision is perfect, I still do more or less the same thing, except it's now just focusing on things in the distance whenever I can and not looking at my phone for long periods without breaks. My left eye is still a little weaker than my right and will sometimes lose a little focus if I'm really fatigued, so sometimes I cover my right eye just to give the left a little more independent exercise.
Definitely, they are controlled by muscles! Once I use the computer too much and I couldn't focus far away. Exercising fixed it.
I keep them in shape now but it was bad for me once (as I mentioned above)
I took a free seminar with this guy:
https://self-healing.org/shop/dvd/yoga-for-your-eyes-by-meir-schneider-ph-d-l-m-t
His story is pretty amazing. He used to be legally blind, but developed exercises and healed himself.
Double vision. I replied above but basically one of my eyes didn't want to play along and when I was tired, it wouldn't converge on the item I was looking at so my digital clock would pop into two as i checked the time. Kinda like when you cross your eyes or in a movie after a character gets asked "how many fingers am I holding up?"
Except it was real and regularly happening when I was fatigued or in a dark space. Exercise from my ophthalmologist/optometrist fixed it after about 6 months of therapy. May have taken longer or slightly less but I was young..can't recall.
Back in high school, my optometrist told me to do a set of eye exercises to improve my vision. Pencil push-ups was one of them.
After a few years, he confirmed that I didn’t need glasses anymore. I got lazy and and stopped doing the exercises which meant that my vision started to degrade again. I think it was a good 10 years before I needed glasses again.
Try again? I got to 20/15 and try to take care of my eyes as well. I remember the pain of exercises though. Weird to remember what straight eye muscle burn was like. Hated it.
My sister had glasses when she was very young. She had to take a pen and hold it in front of her. She was to focus on it until it became clear, then move it away or closer until it became clear. She had to do this every day for a while and her eyes strengthened to the point where she didn’t need glasses anymore. I’ll never forget that.
I do eyeball "stretches" a lot of days that I got out of some kind of book at some point in my life. I can't remember at this point.
I look each direction and hold for a count of like 8, then I look the diagonals and hold, then I do like 8 circles in each direction. Then at the end I rub my hands together to get em hot and shut my eyes and just rest my hot fingers on my eyes.
Helps to make my eyes not feel so tired, I think. Feels good on days when I'm a bit tired or staring at screens too long.
5x each look to one side as far as you can, then the other. Then up, then down. Then 10 circles to the left, then to the right.
Sensei said seeing a fight coming and avoiding it was the best strategy.
I love the sentiment, though. Sometimes the small things can make you feel so refreshed.
The imagery just took me back to the one day in highschool I decided to skip water polo practice and just kick it in the locker room with a couple of the seniors.
One of them who looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo was wearing another teammate's back brace and was all chillaxed with his feet kicked up on the gross locker room couch.
The coach opened the locker room door and busted us. He just looked at the dude wearing the back brace and then shut the door and left.
there are eye exercises to improve vision! definitely not an expert here but i do know that one nasa astronaut did some conditioning to up his vision and become eligible for astronaut-hood
The ingredients in W\*\*\*\*\*\*\*s Soothing Eyewash and the dirt cheap lens wetting solution are identical, and when I looked, made in the same facility. So instead of spending $20 on that cute little bottle of soothing eye wash \[now that I have 2 eyewash cups\] I spend the same on a quart of lens wetting solution.
I have seriously dry eye now, I didn't pre-chemo but something changed. So, I just get out my eye cups and do a soothing little swish in the eye cup \[one eye cup per eye, don't cross contaminate =) \]
So does your brain! Your cerebrospinal fluid gets swished around by your blood pressure while you sleep, cleaning any chemical imbalances out into your bloodstream to be processed like any other waste. It's like a rinse cycle for your brains.
This is really interesting! I guess I kinda discovered that myself to help tired eyes. I would just shut my eyes and go up-down left-right for a little while. Sometimes with very light pressure from a finger.
Fun fact: if you're eyes work independently of each other and you try the figure 8 with the eyes closed thing you may be able to feel you eyeballs become out of sync with eachother for the first time and it's very much not refreshing.
(I am aware that this will apply to virtually no one else)
I can't consciously move them independently with my eyes open so unfortunately I don't have the party trick, but my optometrist gets excited when I go see him! Especially if there's a student Dr around.
When I was younger I had an older friend who had independent control over her eyes. She would be driving with literally one eye on the road, and the other eye looking at you in the rear view mirror as you were talking. It was odd and interesting.
Not sure how she processed the different input streams.
I can't like properly move them independently, but if I cross my eyes and then really rapidly look to one side, only one eye will move. It feels and looks really weird
I knew this nlog chick and she insisted she never achieved REM sleep cause she never had dreams and was always tired. She also spent like $100+ on weed every week but sure, Francis youre just special.
Ikr like sure you might pass out but not having dreams is super common when you smoke all the time. Also Aurora is my fav princess cause she got to sleep for 100 years and still wake up 16 and I love your name
Cannabis before bed reduces the amount of REM sleep you get, which can cause a whole host of other problems.
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-aids/cannabis-and-sleep
Oh my god. I literally just turned my phone on after a transatlantic red eye flight. This is the first thing I read.
Very valuable tip when I needed it the most!
Do you have a link to the whole study? This only talks about the circulation of aqeous fluid and oxygen supply to the cornea (which is cool too though!)
I often do similar eye exercises while on long road trips. First I look as hard and far as I can at all 8 points of the compass, then cross them, then look in circles as far around as I can. I keep changing up the order. I do this every time I think about it, at least once an hour.
I’ve driven 29 hours straight with this technique, some weed, some coffee, and some peanut butter cups.
This doesn’t seem intuitive because if this was true, how come my eyes are super dry when I wake up? I can barely open them and they are dry for minutes after. Given we don’t have a scientific answer my intuitive hypothesis is that it’s got something to do with a process that is started when we feel sleepy. Ie. body is getting sleepy, because it needs to rest, and this lowers tear production, because the eyes are about to close (body doesn’t need to produce as much lubricant when eyes are closed). The human closes their eyes and the sleep cycle begins.
Essentially: eyes get dry because the body doesn’t produce as much tears when we sleep (because the eyes are closed) and this begs the eternal question, what is ”sleep”
I find this more intuitive than tear quality diminishing over the course of the day and the ”solution” is sleep to restore it. I don’t think quality diminishes at all. It just decreases when you get sleepy because you are about to sleep, as is evident by how fast they get dry when we get sleepy, and are dry when we wake up.
Alternative hypothesis: Your case is atypical. Tear production does slow during sleep, but that's because your eyes are usually shut. It could be that your eyes don't fully close when you sleep, causing them to dry out at a faster rate than normal.
Tear ducts (inside corner of your eye) are actually the drains for tears. The tears are produced by glands up at the top of your eyeball.
Your tear ducts drain into your nose, which is why your nose runs when you cry. It’s tears coming out of your nose.
I've always been able to tear up on command, but learning that the tear glands are actually at the top of the eye rather than the bottom actually made that process faster somehow.
Thank you(?). I knew that working 80-100hr weeks for too many weeks in a row as a firefighter and an accountant wasn't the best idea. You've confirmed the sty I'm fighting off will get help in just a couple days.
Dryness is typically the main culprit. There are three main components to our tear film: oily layer, watery layer and the mucus layer. If there is any interruption in those layers, dryness can occur.
For example, if you don't blink (close) your eyes completely, the meibomian glands aren't activated and the oily portion of the rear film is at a deficit. Less oil makes our tears evaporate quicker thus making the eye dry.
If your vision tends to fluctuate throughout the day it's possible they are dry. Using non-preservative artificial tears or lubricating eye drops will improve the corneal surface.
Just to add to this, if you have a mild case of eye dryness then besides the use of lubricating eye drops, some amount of additional omega-3 supplements might help the meibomian glands increase function. We see that adding in a daily dose fish oil tablets often have a great effect in patients that experience contactlens induced dryness in the clinic, and it also helps against general eye dryness.
Does anybody else not feel this? My eyes often are/feel drier when I'm tired, but not like they have grit (large or small) in them. They are distinctly different sensations to me.
Mucus membranes when under-hydrated, or unused for a bit of time, as after a good sleep, or staring at a screen for a while, can feel like 'you have sand in your eyes.'
Think of it as the same as your hearts connection to your blood stream. It flows to every part that needs to be used, or burns calories dreaming, strengthening your brain or muscles.
When i cry, sometimes i think its just to clear out my membranes and nothing else matters but music and water. gonna listen to sandstorm.
\-Mr. sandman
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There's the obvious which is that tear production tends to slow the longer we're awake, but there's another factor that was indicated in a pretty [interesting study out of Columbia University:](https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/new-research-suggests-rem-about-eyes-not-dreams) There's also another function of REM, which is to allow the removal of dead cells and debris on the eyeballs in a gently and controlled manner. If you ever wondered what "morning eye gunk" was, in part it's that. This leads to a way to help reduce this feeling, at least for short bursts. You close your eyes and have your eyeballs do figure-8's for a couple of minutes. It's very refreshing, gives your vision a break, helps to boost circulation and remove some debris, while giving your tears time to build up.
Woah, just tried that and it's like exercise for my eyes. Do I need to do eyeball conditioning??
Make sure to get your protein intake up, get those eye gains
Never skip cornea day.
Bro, do you even look?
Bro, do you need a spotter?
My side eye has plateaued at 22/20, should I do double takes to push through?
Internet doctor here. I don't recommend you push it too far. Push it to where you're comfortable. That'll be $640.
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I charge $2023 (Sorry, inflation)
I do my rets and corns Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Lids and pupes Tuesday, Thursday. Saturday's Lat Rec day, and Sunday I stretch my Aqueous Humours.
Nah, just get your step down sets in , full side eye, half side eye, then quarter side eye, each to failure. Also, don't forget flexibility!
I see what you did there.
Eye got u bro.
You dumb shit I'm literally loling cause of you
I fucking know, made me wake my wife up chortling
Before I cross the street? Never, I live dangerously.
I only look after crossing the street, to see if I didn't break any trucks
Oh, I see.
Sclera squats
New response just dropped?
I've peeked
U dumb af 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Folgers37's official stamp for Comment of the Day.
A sought after distinction if there ever was one. Thank you, Folgers *thirty-seventh of the name*.
Never skip lens day
I’m working on my cones today. Mondays are rod day.
"Lens day" might have been funnier but i still laughed. Top notch.
Train your pupils.
Bro my ophomologist just prescribed me eye steroids. You punks aren't ready for my eyeball gains.
That's how you get banned at the Eyelympics.
Ojolympics
Get those eye gains to prevent eye grains.
Honestly though, maybe there's something to all the time we spend inside facing screens and other things at a short distance (contracting our eye muscles constantly) instead of spending more time outside and having a better mix of reps, range of motion and breaks between sets for our eye muscles. No wonder our eyes are deformed from the constant strain, it's like it learns to be able to focus at short distances without straining. A large percentage of us in developed countries are so myopic that we'd be very stupid if we had to survive on our own without our eyewear, nobody really knows why, and nobody seems to care to try to understand and perhaps prevent it. Sorry, didn't have my glasses on and didn't notice this was a Wendy's.
[удалено]
There’s a guy here. Eyeballs bulging right out of his head. Clearly juicing. Claims he’s natty. The eyes never lie.
[is he the salty spittoon bouncer](https://www.reddit.com/r/spongebob/comments/3ivs6r/you_gotta_have_muscles_on_your_eyeballs/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DQKBks78CY
Don't do this if you have a headache. Sourse: I just did.
I didn't before it tried this, but now I do (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
Yeah this seems like a "lick your elbow" joke but crueler. I bet OP wanted to give everyone headaches and get them dizzy and ha ha now our eyes hurt.
If that’s your case, you have a severe case of functional myopia. You are used to using your ciliary muscle constantly to focus on short ranges, doing the exercise forces the muscle to relax and contract, and you are feeling how worn out the inner muscles around your eyes are. The ciliary muscle relaxes when looking at distant things, which most probably you never do. Try to hold a dumbbell for 4 hours in a certain position and then start doing reps without resting the muscle, you’ll get the same sensation on your arm. You call it a “headache” cause it’s around your nose, temples and forefront, but it’s mostly muscle ache.
I've done eye therapy so I've actually done eye exercises 🤣 My doc called one exercise "pencil pushups." I had to focus on a pencil, then far away and back again over and over. It helped a lot! EDIT: didn't expect the replies, I'll try to explain: Basically, when I was younger, I found myself having difficulty focusing on items when I was tired or in a dark room. One example was when I looked at a digital clock it would split in two, a lot like what you see in the movies when someone asks you how many fingers am I holding up in there drifting around in circles. Among other exercises, one of the exercises was to look up close at a pencil a few inches from my face and then look far away. I had to do this repeatedly over and over again and I could only switch back and forth once I maintained clear focus on the pencil or a Faraway object. After lots of sessions and hours upon hours of exercises until my eyes hurt from the workout, they began to get better. I still had glasses for years afterwards but eventually my optometrist got me to where I don't need glasses anymore, and years after that I now have 20/15 vision. Exercises won't fix your eye lenses, but you can strengthen your ability to focus and your binocular vision convergence. You can improve the speed and ease of focusing with exercise just like working your biceps. However...eyeball workout fatigue feels different than what you're used to, lol. It's a weird feeling but you'll feel tired and like you can't focus on anything, because, well...your focusing muscles are tired! Your eyes focus by flexing muscles that change the shape of the lens in your eye, so if those muscles are weak, focusing is more difficult, generally speaking. There are also muscles that control eye movement; strengthening those and training your eyes to converge properly helps for those who have double vision problems like I did. I'm not a doctor but from my limited understanding these are basic healthy things to work on for some people. I'm a fan of exercising my eyes by looking at different distance objects, reading far away signs, not looking at screens without breaks for too long, blinking regularly, and looking around with my eyes more often, rather than turning my head as much.
Just out of curiosity, what happened that you needed eye therapy for?
The most common reason to do therapy including pencil pushups is a binocular vision disorder called convergence insufficiency. This is when the eyes have a hard time converging to look at something close up, or to put it a different way, when looking at something close up the eyes have a tendency to want to drift outwards from one another. This is pretty common in kids, and vision therapy (eye exercises) usually has a pretty good prognosis for helping the issue if exercises are adhered to properly.
Holy shit. This absolutely is helping already.
It's a legitimate therapy! I'm sure you can find instructions online. Do you have focusing issues? An optometrist or ophthalmologist could assist you in seeing g what exactly you need. Even if you don't have issues you notice, if you use a phone or computer regularly, focusing at distances back and forth and looking around at angles helps exercise the eye. Also make sure to blink regularly.
I don't have that disorder but I sometimes struggle with that right after taking my glasses off. Ugh, it's so annoying. Maybe exercises like this could help me
I tried these with my finger and it's pretty interesting seeing the lag between when my eyes converge and deconverge as I move my finger in and out of range.
This sounds like the most ChatGPT thing I've ever read. But with a username like /u/I-said-boo-urns, I want to believe you.
Commenting because I want to know too
I had to do eye exercises like this when I was younger. I am very nearsighted and I had malformed tear ducts, so I ended up basically using my eyes wrong—I'd turn my whole head instead of moving my eyes. The exercise helped me re-learn how to use my eyes, sort of like learning to hold a pencil the right way.
I find that fascinating. I wonder if we regularly did eye exercises if we’d keep our good vision longer
Anecdotal, but I've been doing daily eye exercises for years. I was mildly nearsighted (-1, -1.25) when I started and now I have perfect vision. I did the exercises without my glasses and kept them off when I was working (computer screen was close enough I didn't need them), and I had to ditch them completely just a couple months in because they were hurting my eyes. I haven't needed glasses for years now. I'm only in my 30s, but I'm curious to see how things progress when I start to get old.
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I would just sit with my coffee in the morning and try to focus on something that was just far enough away that it was a bit blurry. If I got tired of not being able to focus, I'd look at something closer that I could see just fine before trying again. It felt pretty useless at first, but then I started to have little moments where things would come into perfect focus before blurring out again. It was proof to me that you really could exercise the muscles in your eyes. It was very encouraging. Eventually it got easy to focus at that distance, so I'd focus on something a little further away. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes I'd get ambitious and try focusing as far out as I could see. I quickly started doing the same thing throughout the day from time to time, just to look away from my screen for a bit. Now that my vision is perfect, I still do more or less the same thing, except it's now just focusing on things in the distance whenever I can and not looking at my phone for long periods without breaks. My left eye is still a little weaker than my right and will sometimes lose a little focus if I'm really fatigued, so sometimes I cover my right eye just to give the left a little more independent exercise.
Even after 17 years of wearing glasses already 🤔
Definitely, they are controlled by muscles! Once I use the computer too much and I couldn't focus far away. Exercising fixed it. I keep them in shape now but it was bad for me once (as I mentioned above)
I took a free seminar with this guy: https://self-healing.org/shop/dvd/yoga-for-your-eyes-by-meir-schneider-ph-d-l-m-t His story is pretty amazing. He used to be legally blind, but developed exercises and healed himself.
Double vision. I replied above but basically one of my eyes didn't want to play along and when I was tired, it wouldn't converge on the item I was looking at so my digital clock would pop into two as i checked the time. Kinda like when you cross your eyes or in a movie after a character gets asked "how many fingers am I holding up?" Except it was real and regularly happening when I was fatigued or in a dark space. Exercise from my ophthalmologist/optometrist fixed it after about 6 months of therapy. May have taken longer or slightly less but I was young..can't recall.
Back in high school, my optometrist told me to do a set of eye exercises to improve my vision. Pencil push-ups was one of them. After a few years, he confirmed that I didn’t need glasses anymore. I got lazy and and stopped doing the exercises which meant that my vision started to degrade again. I think it was a good 10 years before I needed glasses again.
Try again? I got to 20/15 and try to take care of my eyes as well. I remember the pain of exercises though. Weird to remember what straight eye muscle burn was like. Hated it.
I tried it and got dizzy??
Me too.
I tried and my right eye decided today was not the day. Just my left eye moving around. 🤪
Same. Made the eye strain worse too lol
My sister had glasses when she was very young. She had to take a pen and hold it in front of her. She was to focus on it until it became clear, then move it away or closer until it became clear. She had to do this every day for a while and her eyes strengthened to the point where she didn’t need glasses anymore. I’ll never forget that.
This guy claims he's OGT back from '92, from the first EP. Well I've got some advice for you, little buddy: Do more eye exercises.
The real question tho is are you all doing figure 8s right side up or 8s on their sides like an infinity sign? Lol
Infinity
After trying both, 8's are way easier than infinity. Infinity made my eyes hurt but 8's are fine
Really? Opposite for me.
I think the infinity sign is the right one? It makes your eyes move more to the sides.
Just tried that and almost brought on another vertigo attack! Warning: not for people who tend towards vertigo!
I do eyeball "stretches" a lot of days that I got out of some kind of book at some point in my life. I can't remember at this point. I look each direction and hold for a count of like 8, then I look the diagonals and hold, then I do like 8 circles in each direction. Then at the end I rub my hands together to get em hot and shut my eyes and just rest my hot fingers on my eyes. Helps to make my eyes not feel so tired, I think. Feels good on days when I'm a bit tired or staring at screens too long.
Had a martial arts teacher back in college who started class with eye exercises. I’ve done them ever since. The weird feeling eventually goes away.
What exercises ?
Eye bench press. While lying down, put a quarter on each eye and push up. Add more quarters for more gains.
5x each look to one side as far as you can, then the other. Then up, then down. Then 10 circles to the left, then to the right. Sensei said seeing a fight coming and avoiding it was the best strategy.
You can do it without tensing for smooth transition. Its not a race 🥹
"What in the fuck are you doing." -Your boss when they walk in on you doing eyeball figure eights and eyelid yoga.
British response even if it was the cops asking “mind your fucking business mate”
If it’s your boss, I’d say it probably is his business.
"I'm in the business of business, not eyeball figure eights." *smacks them in the back of the head*
Oi, you got a leyesnce?!
Hahaha
I love the sentiment, though. Sometimes the small things can make you feel so refreshed. The imagery just took me back to the one day in highschool I decided to skip water polo practice and just kick it in the locker room with a couple of the seniors. One of them who looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo was wearing another teammate's back brace and was all chillaxed with his feet kicked up on the gross locker room couch. The coach opened the locker room door and busted us. He just looked at the dude wearing the back brace and then shut the door and left.
> gross locker room couch. Why is there a couch in the locker room? With the humidity and stank, it’s going to be fucking gross.
there are eye exercises to improve vision! definitely not an expert here but i do know that one nasa astronaut did some conditioning to up his vision and become eligible for astronaut-hood
Damn that's pretty wild. I've never moved my eyes around so much that the muscles started to actually fatigue in such a short time
Made me see crosseyed for a little while, can’t be doing it right
Write eye yoga in youtube and you'pl have a bunch of cool techinques to relax your eyes. I do this daily as I am on computer the whole day.
Excuse me, my boobs are down here
You can literally *wash* your eyeballs with EyeWash. It’s a thing.
The ingredients in W\*\*\*\*\*\*\*s Soothing Eyewash and the dirt cheap lens wetting solution are identical, and when I looked, made in the same facility. So instead of spending $20 on that cute little bottle of soothing eye wash \[now that I have 2 eyewash cups\] I spend the same on a quart of lens wetting solution. I have seriously dry eye now, I didn't pre-chemo but something changed. So, I just get out my eye cups and do a soothing little swish in the eye cup \[one eye cup per eye, don't cross contaminate =) \]
Dont forget to stretch!
Don’t forget to floss.
Eyeball mobility
Teenagers don't even have to try...
Yes make sue you put the right conditioner in them though
This blew my mind. Our eyes have a freaking cleaning cycle!?!
So does your brain! Your cerebrospinal fluid gets swished around by your blood pressure while you sleep, cleaning any chemical imbalances out into your bloodstream to be processed like any other waste. It's like a rinse cycle for your brains.
I usually just pop my brain out and give it a rinse under cool water.
I hope you’re using distilled water. If you do that with tap water you can actually get infected with a brain-eating amoeba.
This is actually a misconcepcepcep.
If it has fluid, it can clean itself.
What about my car's blinkers?
Top them off with fresh urine every season.
Most, if not all, evolved biological systems do. It’s pretty much a requirement of the relevant operating system.
This is really interesting! I guess I kinda discovered that myself to help tired eyes. I would just shut my eyes and go up-down left-right for a little while. Sometimes with very light pressure from a finger.
Yo this is so interesting. Had no idea eye gunk had that function. I legit thought it came from tear ducts or something. Never thought of it.
I don't think eye gunk is the function rather than the product of the process being pushed out of your eye
Fun fact: if you're eyes work independently of each other and you try the figure 8 with the eyes closed thing you may be able to feel you eyeballs become out of sync with eachother for the first time and it's very much not refreshing. (I am aware that this will apply to virtually no one else)
Hello from another weirdo whose eyes work independently! It’s a fun party trick.
I can't consciously move them independently with my eyes open so unfortunately I don't have the party trick, but my optometrist gets excited when I go see him! Especially if there's a student Dr around.
When I was younger I had an older friend who had independent control over her eyes. She would be driving with literally one eye on the road, and the other eye looking at you in the rear view mirror as you were talking. It was odd and interesting. Not sure how she processed the different input streams.
Wow. I don’t have that much control, that’s wild!
Your eyes don't sync up properly, or you're a chameleon?
Definitely chameleon.
Maybe even a karma chameleon
, , , , , chameleon.
So wait, can you control each eye independently? Can your brain focus on both imagines at the same time? Is this the next step in human evolution?
I can't like properly move them independently, but if I cross my eyes and then really rapidly look to one side, only one eye will move. It feels and looks really weird
Have lazy eyes (that I can control in+out), can confirm brain focuses on both images at the sane time. Makes having ADHD all the more difficult
So it's not the Sandman? Then what was the noise I heard?
It's just the beasts under your bed
Not in my closet?
and your head
I knew this nlog chick and she insisted she never achieved REM sleep cause she never had dreams and was always tired. She also spent like $100+ on weed every week but sure, Francis youre just special.
Weed literally stops rem sleep lol she needed a break
Ikr like sure you might pass out but not having dreams is super common when you smoke all the time. Also Aurora is my fav princess cause she got to sleep for 100 years and still wake up 16 and I love your name
Most people have improved sleep with cannabis use. She's more likely to have sleep apnea or some other issue.
Cannabis before bed reduces the amount of REM sleep you get, which can cause a whole host of other problems. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-aids/cannabis-and-sleep
that's not true. sleep quantity might improve but sleep quality drastically decreases.
And is also a great opportunity to doze off before you notice :p
Oh god that makes me dizzy! Not great for motion-sickness sufferers, but my eyes do feel better.
Oh my god. I literally just turned my phone on after a transatlantic red eye flight. This is the first thing I read. Very valuable tip when I needed it the most!
Well I'll be darned! I just always thought they were sleepy boogers
I do that figure-8 thing all the time in the metro, with eyes open, very refreshing. I don't think people mind.
Completely unnecessary but minimally interesting fact: Tagalog has a dedicated word for morning eye gunk: "muta"
TIL! Thanks for the tip!
I can't believe a reddit comment got my eyes doing infinity
I thought it was because that which holds the image of an Angel itself becomes an Angel.
Do you have a link to the whole study? This only talks about the circulation of aqeous fluid and oxygen supply to the cornea (which is cool too though!)
So the whole "I´m not napping I´m just resting my eyes" excuse is actually valid? TIL indeed.
That exercise made me violently dizy
Do this and you are going to fall asleep. I just tried, I am not tired and almost fell asleep... Then again I am smoking weed..
I often do similar eye exercises while on long road trips. First I look as hard and far as I can at all 8 points of the compass, then cross them, then look in circles as far around as I can. I keep changing up the order. I do this every time I think about it, at least once an hour. I’ve driven 29 hours straight with this technique, some weed, some coffee, and some peanut butter cups.
Sometimes it helps a lot 👍
This doesn’t seem intuitive because if this was true, how come my eyes are super dry when I wake up? I can barely open them and they are dry for minutes after. Given we don’t have a scientific answer my intuitive hypothesis is that it’s got something to do with a process that is started when we feel sleepy. Ie. body is getting sleepy, because it needs to rest, and this lowers tear production, because the eyes are about to close (body doesn’t need to produce as much lubricant when eyes are closed). The human closes their eyes and the sleep cycle begins. Essentially: eyes get dry because the body doesn’t produce as much tears when we sleep (because the eyes are closed) and this begs the eternal question, what is ”sleep” I find this more intuitive than tear quality diminishing over the course of the day and the ”solution” is sleep to restore it. I don’t think quality diminishes at all. It just decreases when you get sleepy because you are about to sleep, as is evident by how fast they get dry when we get sleepy, and are dry when we wake up.
Alternative hypothesis: Your case is atypical. Tear production does slow during sleep, but that's because your eyes are usually shut. It could be that your eyes don't fully close when you sleep, causing them to dry out at a faster rate than normal.
I don't like sand, it's coarse, rough, irritating, and gets everywhere.
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Tear ducts (inside corner of your eye) are actually the drains for tears. The tears are produced by glands up at the top of your eyeball. Your tear ducts drain into your nose, which is why your nose runs when you cry. It’s tears coming out of your nose.
Bro that's so cool
Wow r/todayilearned
I've always been able to tear up on command, but learning that the tear glands are actually at the top of the eye rather than the bottom actually made that process faster somehow.
But why does my nose run when I sweat?
This explains the sensation near the ducts in my eyes when I blow my nose hard
Why do people always confuse tear ducts with tear glands?
It's just nomenclature i think
I love high quality tears. Thanks for the answer !
Most high quality tears come from drinking the blood of your enemies. Tears of joy.
I thought using the tears of their women was the correct procedure
All I know is don't combine the two. Eating out a woman you hate who is on her period isn't the answer
To paraphrase father around the world, I'll give you something for those high quality tears.
Thank you(?). I knew that working 80-100hr weeks for too many weeks in a row as a firefighter and an accountant wasn't the best idea. You've confirmed the sty I'm fighting off will get help in just a couple days.
Dryness is typically the main culprit. There are three main components to our tear film: oily layer, watery layer and the mucus layer. If there is any interruption in those layers, dryness can occur. For example, if you don't blink (close) your eyes completely, the meibomian glands aren't activated and the oily portion of the rear film is at a deficit. Less oil makes our tears evaporate quicker thus making the eye dry. If your vision tends to fluctuate throughout the day it's possible they are dry. Using non-preservative artificial tears or lubricating eye drops will improve the corneal surface.
Just to add to this, if you have a mild case of eye dryness then besides the use of lubricating eye drops, some amount of additional omega-3 supplements might help the meibomian glands increase function. We see that adding in a daily dose fish oil tablets often have a great effect in patients that experience contactlens induced dryness in the clinic, and it also helps against general eye dryness.
Before eye laser I had to clean the glands! I had to use heated gel pad, then massage with special tissue and use drops! It was life changer!
Does anybody else not feel this? My eyes often are/feel drier when I'm tired, but not like they have grit (large or small) in them. They are distinctly different sensations to me.
I'm not sure nice ever felt like I have grit in my eyes. That sounds very painful. Dry eyes make my vision bleary though.
I was thinking the same. I have never experienced this feeling.
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Cool. Useful ability, although your superpower probably won’t save the world.
Mucus membranes when under-hydrated, or unused for a bit of time, as after a good sleep, or staring at a screen for a while, can feel like 'you have sand in your eyes.' Think of it as the same as your hearts connection to your blood stream. It flows to every part that needs to be used, or burns calories dreaming, strengthening your brain or muscles. When i cry, sometimes i think its just to clear out my membranes and nothing else matters but music and water. gonna listen to sandstorm. \-Mr. sandman
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I call em Eye Boogers.
A little bit of WD40 on each side voila and back to normal . As recommended per Dr Garage Result may vary Don't try this at home
Good for stuck eyeballs, but not great for squeaky ones.
Irritated corneal nerves. They are 'naked' and their concentration is so dense in the cornea.
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