Take Off Your Glasses and See by Jacob Liberman

Author:Jacob Liberman [Liberman, Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-79536-6
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

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How to Avoid “Terminal” Illness

Working at a computer screen is rapidly becoming a major contributor to visual stress in the emerging communications age. If you regularly work or play in front of a computer terminal, you are already aware how quickly your eyes become fatigued and strained. Have you also noticed that when you get up from the screen, you can’t see as clearly as you could before?

Although a wide range of health hazards have begun to be associated with visual display terminals, the visual aspect of what I call “terminal” illness is simply a new version of near-point stress. Our eyes operate most effortlessly when their lines of sight are parallel or slightly diverged, as they do naturally when we are viewing a distant scene. As soon as we try to focus on anything much closer than twenty feet, our eyes must begin to converge, which takes effort to maintain.

At the distance of the typical computer screen, the resulting convergence (and effort) is quite strong. When this short-range focus is maintained for hours without a break, it creates stress throughout the mind/body—our muscles tighten, our breath becomes shallow, our attention wanders, our vision weakens … we feel mentally, emotionally, and physically drained. The more time we spend at the computer, the more this short-range view tends to become imprinted in our system, making it difficult to reexpand our focus to resume distance vision—and as our lines of sight fall inward, so does our entire being.

This constriction is further aggravated by the unnaturally fast pace and high stress of many video display terminal jobs. Yet even those who must use a computer all day long can begin to counteract its effects with a few basic steps:

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