I'm sharing this because way too many of
my friends have come to me to ask me how to help them improve their deteriorating
eyesight. And they dread the thought of someday wearing glasses. When
I tell them that I healed my eyesight in about two weeks, from 20/40 to 20/25,
that's around a two lines improvement in an eye chart, they want to know my
secret. So I created this video to help my friends and to help you guys on the
Mindvalley channel understand how you too could improve your eyesight. Basically,
I was able to go from wearing glasses 40% of the time to 4% of the time. So, my
issue with eyesight started when I was 9 years old. I started wearing glasses and
my eyesight rapidly deteriorated to the point where my myopia or shortsightedness
was -7.00. That basically means I couldn't recognize a face this close to me. Now,
when I was around 28, I finally had LASIK, and LASIK restored me to 20/20 eyesight.
But as you know, when you go for surgery, sometimes things go wrong.
That's what happened with my LASIK surgery. Basically, it went
awry in my left eye and this left me with astigmatism.
Over the next 12 years, my left eye started getting worse and
worse, and then my right eye decided that it too had to deteriorate to catch up with
my left eye. And 12 years after my LASIK, I found that I needed glasses once again.
And so I had to go back to the doctor and figure out what to do. Now,
the doctor told me that as a man in my 40s, LASIK would no longer be an
option, so I was faced with two choices. Deal with wearing glasses,
which I totally disliked, or try to heal my eyesight myself.
Now, what happened then was, I was in a conversation with my friend
Dave Asprey, the famous biohacker, the founder of Bulletproof coffee. And
Dave told me how working with a vision coach for one hour a week for 12 weeks
totally got rid of his bad eyesight and allowed him to function without glasses.
I was intrigued, so I started researching the natural healing of eyesight. What
I'm going to share with you is what I found and what I'm going to share with you
is my advice for what you can do to help restore your eyesight so you can,
if not get rid of your glasses, reduce the amount of time
you do have to wear glasses. Now, I'm still experimenting. I've
been doing this now for over a year and although it's not perfect yet,
I want to share with you what I know because I believe this is going to
help a lot of people. So, in this video, I'm going to cover a number of different
things, but if you're looking to prevent bad eyesight developing in your kids,
or if you're looking to heal your vision, or if you're looking to prevent the
onset of age-related vision problems like farsightedness, or if you're
looking to reduce your use of glasses, pay attention because I'm
going to share with you everything I've just learned. So the first big mistake
people make is that they go get their eyes checked at a store that sells
glasses. This is never a good idea. The machines at that store are not
accurate. I did a simple experiment. I had my eyes checked at one of these
stores and then I went to a real clinic, a real doctor, and the difference was
almost 40%. I decided to take the doctor's prescription, as should you. You see,
your eyesight varies from day to day, from year to year. Some studies on
children found that a child could naturally move from shortsightedness
to farsightedness year over year, but here's what happens,
if you picked that particular slice of time where your eyesight is, say, 0.25,
and you go to an optician and you get glasses for that, it locks you in.
The glasses become a crutch. So what you want to do is go to a real
doctor. A true vision checkup could take up to an hour. In an eyeglass shop, right,
they'll do it in around 15 minutes because they want to move you through and sell
you glasses. Go to a doctor and get your vision properly checked.
Now, the second tip is this, after you get your actual prescription
from the doctor, get a lens that is one step lower because like I said,
your eyesight actually fluctuates. You could be at 0.5 in one day when
you're really stressed out and after a relaxing weekend, your eyesight could
actually improve. Studies are now finding that emotional states, that
stress influences your vision. So if your doctor tells you that
your eyesight is, say, 0.5 myopia, shortsightedness, don't get
a 0.5 lens. Get a lens that's 0.25, that will still give you an adjustment,
but it gives you room for your vision to improve. If you get 0.5,
your vision cannot go below 0.5, it has to get worse. So, what's
happened is you've effectively created a crutch. You've created a
barrier to your vision getting better. So always go one step below. So
this was the first thing that many vision therapists recommend. And
this was one of the tools I used to get my shortsightedness from 0.75 to
0.25, which pretty much means I don't need glasses most of the time. Now, the
next thing you want to do is that you want to install a basic eye chart in your
home. So I have something like this on the door of my study. William Horatio
Bates, who lived in the early part of the 20th century, did a study on school
classrooms. He would hang an eye chart on a pillar in school classrooms and what
he found is that in classrooms where kids had that eye chart, and the teachers were
trained to get the kids to go and just look at the chart and see how far
they could read once a week, the amount of cases of nearsightedness
was dramatically reduced. At the beginning of that period,
6% of the children were nearsighted. By the end of the year,
only 1% were nearsighted. Now because of the success in this one
school, the system of using an eye chart in classrooms was introduced to all
schools in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where Bates worked. These schools
used charts continuously for eight years with as many as 2,000 schoolchildren.
And there was an unexpected result. The kids actually began to see better than
normal. Children who already had normal sight, 20/20, were now able to read
at 20/15 or 20/10. It was nuts. You must have an eye chart installed
in your home for you and your kids. Adults can do the same thing. Now,
here's another really important tip. Studies on kids found that if you allow
your children to sleep in a room that is absolutely dark, that means no
nightlight, no door ajar with a light out in the corridor, your kids
are less likely to develop vision problems in the future.
Now, this study blew me away. It was done by the University of
Pennsylvania on around 479 kids. Now, what they found is that sleeping in
a dark room, if you have your kids sleep in a pure dark room, they
are less likely to develop bad eyesight. So here's what happened.
They divided these kids into three groups. Kids that slept in a dark room,
kids that slept in a room with a nightlight on, and kids that slept
in a room with the lights turned on. And then they traced these kids to see
what type of vision problems these kids would develop. Now, they found this.
Of the kids who slept in a darkened room, only 10% developed nearsightedness.
Of the kids who slept in a room with a nightlight on, 34% developed
nearsightedness. And of the kids who slept with the lights on, 55% developed
nearsightedness. So this is an important conversation you've got to have with your
children if they are afraid of sleeping in the dark. The dark is phenomenal for
sleep and science is showing that it has a correlation with helping kids retain
good vision. Now, the final tip is this. Hire a vision coach or take an online
vision course. There are numerous vision courses out there. I've been experimenting
with many of them. I even have a vision coach who has helped me. We've
spent around five hours together and the results have been
really, really, really promising. Now, a course means you got to
have the discipline to do it yourself. Typically, you've got to do these courses
every day. If you do a vision coach, you'd spend an hour with them a week and
then you'd spend around five minutes a day going through the exercises that they
prescribe. Whereas on a course, you typically are spending between 10 to
20 minutes a day watching a video and doing the eye exercises which are
being prescribed. Now my tip is don't get obsessed with the Bates
Method. The Bates Method was popular in like the 1930s, and a lot of people
talk about the Bates Method because it was the first method to really heal vision.
So much more research has happened. It's been almost 90 years since
that book was released. And today, modern vision therapists and newer
courses on vision know so much more. So, avoid the Bates Method. It works,
but it works slow. There are much faster ways to improve your vision that have
been developed in the last 90 years. So I hope these tips helped you.
Go ahead and share this video with other people whom you feel need to
hear this to improve their vision and good luck on your vision quest
Formerly worked in visual neuroscience, specialising in recovery of visual function. This is complete garbage.