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  • Treatments, desensitization, pills, exercises - solutions

martin

Personally I endorse this claim. Whenever i release the sternocleidomastoid (I am doing Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais for a couple of years) my breathing is more free, this improves my chronic rhinitis issue and in turn my tolerance to some of the new led displays.
This has not "cured" me, but it does improve things which is of course important. In fact there are devices that whatever i do they keep causing me headaches.

    Peter Maybe it takes some time to stretch the muscle well enough for it to completely cure us. At least hopefully.

      Peter I was testing my migraine tolerance in apple store. I must say its not much improved, but I have a feeling that what is going on is that the trigger - led, flicker etc... causes cramps in the scm muscle, which in turn causes the symptoms.

        martin

        From the Alexander lessons i have understood that for some people when the neck carries excessive tension the eyes under-perform. Below some articles that explain the connection of proper body use and eye sight.
        https://www.alexandertechnique.com/articles/eyesight/
        https://www.alexandertechnique.com/resources/BatesandAT.pdf

        Intuitively I believe that my eyes are not flexible enough to accommodate this strange flicker of led displays / new graphics cards and this is may have as the root cause the excess neck tension. There are signs that this maybe the case since for me there is an increase in tolerance to the new displays when i release neck tension.

        Does anyone also find that - inexplicably - they seem to be less symptomatic on days when they've had low sleep (e.g. work days), and seem to be more symptomatic when they've slept in a lot or had lots of sleep (e.g. weekends)? I can't understand why this seems to be the case for me.

        Maybe my brain literally operates slower when I haven't slept as much, as it can't notice flicker as much! 😛

          MagnuM I'm not a good example because I go to bed 9 or 10 every night and get up at 5 or 6 am. I am always getting 7 - 8 hours of sleep every night. I do find that going to sleep after midnight makes you feel worse.

          Working a desk job, I go for regular routine massages about once every six weeks or so. I would strongly recommend it to anyone else with similar working conditions, and you would not believe some of the muscle knots worked out that build up that you may not have even been aware of! Working out these knots can definitely help improve blood flow, plus it's really good for stress relief!

          During my last appointment this week, I asked if my massage therapist could focus on the SCM muscle above. I don't see how it could connect to the eyes, but with all the connection points and trigger points that muscles could have, you never know! It is interesting how it connects up to behind the ear and maybe even the sides of the head, because I've had a lot of tension headaches here (temples, sides of head, etc) that come from reading on the screen too much.

          However, after my last massage appointment, I've been really good! For the first time in 3 weeks, I'm not getting those aching tension headaches on the sides of my head, and even my eyes feel better. I'm not sure if these headaches were going away on their own already, or if the general massage was mostly the benefit, or perhaps even more hopeful working this SCM muscle seemed to do something!

          I will definitely look more into it and monitor how things go moving forward. Thanks to martin for sharing the idea!

            MagnuM

            By releasing your SCM muscle the skull stops compressing the spine down and it allows the head to "float" on the top of the spine. This in turn allows the jaw, face and eye muscles to also release (the release of the SCM muscle was studied extensively in Tufts by Dr Frank Pierce Jones, i think back in the 70s).

            For me the more I release the SCM muscle the more i feel my eyes to become more flexible. It may worth to test this hypothesis over time relevant to display strain. Even if we can not cure ourselves, at least we will increase our tolerance.

            I have done trigger point therapy with great success for years.

            Trigger points in the SCM do cause the orbicularis occuli muscles surrounding the eye (and other muscles in the face) to become more reactive and is linked to conditions like blepharospasm.

            The official medical text is Travell and Simons' Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual (of which I am a proud owner), and the best laybook is The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook by Clair Davies (also very good).

            I uploaded part of the SCM chapter here:

            https://1drv.ms/f/s!AsI_-fifnML2hwlp8YqsakkROaBx

            3-4 years ago I attended vision-training sessions by Leo Angart

            https://www.vision-training.com/e/index.html
            https://www.facebook.com/angartleo/

            I went to seek advice with regard to my electronics device-induced eyestrain, which was not the focus of his training at all. But the exercises he showed were still helpful, especially the "Tibetan Wheel" to soothe astigmatism.

            https://www.vision-training.com/e/assets/Astigmatism/Tibetan%20wheel.pdf

            Maybe you find something useful...

              AGI can you describe the exercises? what do you do with that wheel?

              • AGI replied to this.

                SCM fits with our TMJ connection maybe..

                reaganry check this out

                https://youtu.be/wAakgY2fdbE

                I bought his books of exercises but I left them overseas :-(
                I will see later / on the weekend if there are other videos on youtube.

                I have only a very minor astigmatism on the left eye and I do not wear spectacles. However, there were about 20 people with me at the training and some had really thick-thick glasses and poor sight. Sessions were on Saturday and Sunday. Well, I can tell you that, as Leo anticipated on Saturday morning, some guys had to go to the next drugstore to buy lower grade glasses on the same day because they could not tolerate theirs anymore. This was after a few exercises. I am a scientist and a quite skeptic person. I need to see and measure to believe. Unless everyone was faking, that showed me that muscles around eyes are fundamental. Since 2010 apart from a short break I have been only using laptops. I am in an unpleasant position the whole day and my eyes are always focusing on a little display a few cm from me. The exercises do not eliminate the cause of my eyestrain but certainly produce relief. Now, to be honest I have not been doing them for long cause I am a bit depressed at not finding a way out with all these electronics, but I want to restart. I wonder whether we can sort of train ourselves to tolerate flicker, dithering or whatever it is that bothers us...

                AGI wow, this is so interesting. i was recently noticing it was more difficult to look in certain directions than others. i also have been watching these emdr videos where you follow a bouncing ball left and right with your eyes..

                • AGI replied to this.

                  reaganry yeah, Mate, exercises may not cancel out flicker but are very helpful. Not surprising though. Think of being immobilized for months. Do you expect to get out of bed and run a marathon? My eyes are stuck on a laptop display or on a phone the whole day. Not very healthy.

                  I hope to find videos but besides the Tibetan wheel I use a pen, focus on its tip and move it away from my nose and towards my nose, rhythmically and slowly. Controlling breathing is also important. The first days I would see the pen tip blurry and feel discomfort when the pen was still quite far from my nose on its way back. Then I could get it closer and closer (it does not have to get past the focal point in any case).
                  You can also move the pen left and right, top and bottom, or draw circles clockwise and anti-clockwise, and follow with your eyes without moving your head.

                  But the one that I struggled with the most at the start was the exercise with two pens. You hold them one behind the other. When you focus on the first you must see the farther pen double. Hold your focus for a bit. Then switch focus to the second pen. You must now see the first pen double. Do that back and forth. My little astigmatic left eye is also a bit lazy, and at the beginning I had problems seeing the pens double.
                  Once you have trained a bit, you can also do three objects. You hold two pens and you use something like a candle on a desk as third object in the distance, so you switch between three objects. When you look at the farthest away item, you will see the first two pens double. For me it works best if the environment is "clean", like white walls, no clutter, not too much light, nothing that distracts you but the two pens or the three objects. It is quite weary the first times and this is the proof of how little trained my eyes are.

                    dev