Hi [s2Get user_field=”first_name” /]!
I would love to be able to get your feedback today and find out what you’ve gotten out of this experience so far.
Alas, it’s the Internet.
If you’d like to, you can drop me a line in the forum anytime. I really do enjoy hearing from you.
So far we’ve opened up on quite a few big topics. My goal is to give you plenty to work with without overloading you. If you do feel overwhelmed, just take the sessions in slower intervals. Many participants do 3-4 per week. All that’s important is that you do them consistently to make sure you get into a groove of learning and habit-building.
What often works best is to plan the sessions out in your calendar. Consistency really does help.
Let’s talk a bit more about measuring eyesight today.
So far you learned a lot about the centimeter .
For those of you who prefer to use the formula instead of the calculator and haven’t figured it out yet, here it is:
The diopter scale is simple math based on a scale of 100. Just divide your CM distance to find the Diopter value.
Example: 100 / 25CM = 4 Diopters
Easy as pie. Alternatively use the centimeter calculator or my diopter tape.
We’ll soon be using this measuring system to address your close-up prescription use. That’s potentially a big, bad one and we’ll want to fix that soon.
To get there, you’ll need no fewer than three centimeter averages taken on three separate days. One in the morning, one at mid day and another late in the day. Average those out over three days. Do both eyes together and each eye separately as well. That’s the numbers you want to collect, to start thinking of a much healthier close-up prescription.
I’ll help you with this in an upcoming session.
For today, let’s look at that eye chart. Hopefully it has already arrived (if not, bookmark this session for when it does).
We’ll want to start evaluating your eyesight at the true distance as well as using our close-up (centimeter) tool. Think of these things as the “training wheels”; you need them to start to understand your eyesight, to relate to prescriptions, and to quantify progress. There will come a time when you won’t need any of this. Merely looking at a license plate across the street will tell you how your eyes are doing. Just looking at your monitor will let you know where you’re at. In fact, just waking up and feeling your eyes before opening them will tip you off as to whether you overstrained the day before.
But we’re not there yet. For now you really want to take advantage of these simple tools to start making sense of your vision.
The eye chart is going to answer a few questions for you today.
1. How accurate is my current prescription?
Put the eye chart up somewhere handy at home (or in the office, if that’s accessible). Measure out the 3 meter or 6 meter distance (depending on which chart you got). Mark the distance so you can easily get back to it.
Now look at the eye chart with your glasses on.
Which lines can you read?
That answers question number one.
2. How is lighting affecting my eyes?
Try the chart in shaded natural daylight. Take your time with it.
And then try it again in indoor fluorescent lighting. Same result? Different result?
The stronger your prescription (i.e.. you can see 20/13 vs. barely make out 20/20), the harder it is to tell the difference your eyesight experiences with different lighting sources. That’s deliberate from the optometrist, they basically want your vision to be something superhuman (but not in a good way when it comes to the side effects).
I want you to start noticing how brightness and the quality of light affects your distance vision.
3. How does the optometrist measurement differ from your own?
Replicate the optometrist setup if you like. Dark room, light shining on the chart. Keep a log of each result. The daylight, the artificial light, the optometrist setup.
It’s a simple experiment. Try to have a bit of fun with it.
We could rush the process and jump straight into prescriptions and activities. I’ve found that you’re much more likely to have a great experience and stick with improvements when we start from here, though.
That’s what makes us different from the optometrist. The optometrist’s approach conditions you to think of the eyes as a “problem”. They are very, very much stuck on this idea that the eyes are a helpless, static, ailing, dysfunctional body part that needs their help. That’s how they run their tests, and that’s how they treat the numbers they find.
We don’t want to do that.
If you’re a math teacher and you yell at a little kid in math class, you forever block that young brain from wanting to understand math. And, to a lesser degree, that’s what happens with your relationship to your eyes. “Bad eyes! Glasses for you!”.
Not a brilliant strategy that. So instead, we look at some centimeter measurements to find the happy number, and look at some eye charts in different light conditions.
And I know. You’re probably busy. I get that. But this is temporary, and it’s worth bearing with me.
Action Item
See if you can do that today. One simple thing. Just hang up that chart (get it printed if you don’t have one yet, it’s just two sheets of “letter” or “A4” paper). Try it in various lighting conditions. Record and save the results.
Don’t have a chart? Pick one from our chart page!
Tomorrow we’ll do something much trickier (and interesting) with that chart. So stay caught up!
Cheers,
– Jake
Session: Audio Track
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Session: Video Stream
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