Use Your Eyes To Reduce Stress
By: Brad Buzzard
Tags: Life Hacking, Personal Development, Self Improvement, Health, Stress Management

Use Your Eyes To Reduce Stress

By Pixabay on Pexels

Those who know me know that I’m not the type who can sit still for long. Hell, I even wrote a lengthy guide on how an active person like myself can meditate without sitting still.

The exercises I outlined in that article work well for me. In place of a 20-minute meditation, the article explores a dozen or so activities (emphasis on the active part) that have helped me achieve a meditative-like state.

But what if I need to calm down quickly when the circumstances call for it? Like if I need to steady my nerves before a presentation? Or if I want to try a sitting meditation, but need a way to ease my overactive mind into a calmer state before attempting to sit?

In usual fashion, I looked for hacks. Not because I’m a biohacker, but because I’m a bit lazy. Well, to be kinder to myself, you could say I like to take baby steps, and then expand from there.

When I say baby steps, I really mean it.

Many of the exercises in this article don’t take much effort at all (like the central fixation release exercise described below). They are simple activities you can do almost anywhere, without much exertion and in some cases without really interrupting what you’re already doing.

The parasympathetic nervous system

All of these hacks trick your body into thinking you’re out of danger and that you can now safely relax. Most of us are actually out of danger most of the time, but our bodies don’t always know that in this fast-paced, maxed-out, information-overloaded, oft-polarized world we live in today.

The key here is your body. The exercises don’t require you to change your thinking in any way. When you use these techniques, you are activating your parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your autonomic nervous system responsible for calming you down (as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system, which kicks in when we’re in danger and/or stressed).

So without further delay, let’s start learning about how you can use your eyes to trick your body into a relaxed state of being.

Relax your eyes: peripheral vs foveal vision

The way we use our eye sits in direct relationship to the state of our nervous system. When we’re in fight-or-flight mode, our sympathetic nervous system takes over. One action the sympathetic nervous system takes is to focus our eyes and our attention on the threat in front of us, like when you’re face-to-face with a tiger — or your child who is throwing a tantrum.

When your eyes are actively fixated like this, it’s called sharp central, or foveal, vision. It’s when eye’s fovea lines up with your eye’s lens, which lines up with the object you’re viewing.

It’s the opposite of peripheral vision, where your eyes are relaxed and taking in large swaths of your environment, like:

the trees, stars and clouds

the sand, waves, horizon and ships

a city skyline with all the human stories boxed into all those little compartments as far as the eye can see

Peripheral vision kicks in when you are are more relaxed, like when you’re taking in all the sites just described.

But even better, peripheral vision can be useful for situations where danger could be lurking anywhere, yet you need to remain calm and relaxed so that you‘re prepared when and if disaster strikes.

To take it back to a much earlier time, imagine you’re in the Savannah hunting game. At any moment, you could encounter venomous snakes, poisonous plants, hungry tigers, a hidden cliff, members of a hostile tribe.

You can’t be fixated on any one thing. You need to be calmly aware of these potential threats, and of potential prey, and of the other members of your hunting party.

In other words, you need to be in a parasympathetic state of being at all times, until you finally don’t.

Flexible autonomic states

Think of it this way, when we’re out on the Savannah, we want to be calmly and quietly aware of everything around us. We don’t want to startle our prey and we want our eyes and ears to pick up on any threat.

Than BAM!

We’re face-to-face with opportunity or a threat. We need focus our spear (and our eyes’ fovea and their lenses, and our target) on that antelope, or tiger, or cliff that we’re about to tumble over.

When the prey is killed or the threat is out of the way, we want to quickly get back to out calm, yet alert state of being.

That’s what we need to achieve: the flexibly transition from one state of nervous activity to another, and back again with minimal disruption to our state of well-being.

Learning to be flexible

To cultivate a more flexible autonomic nervous system — and to balance out the sympathetic response our always-on culture promotes — we need to find more and more ways to encourage parasympathetic responses throughout the day.

We need to not get suckered in by a clickbait headline, but instead learn to calmly scan host of headlines for stories that will enhance our lives. And then focus intently on those stories that we’ve consciously decided to spend more time on.

We need to not give the evil-eye to the toddler throwing a tantrum, but learn to widen our perception, gaze into their eyes with openness and pick up on subtle opportunities to soften the situation. And then focus intently on a more mind-expanding activity like helping them learn to read, or draw.

The effect of visual awareness on stress

A group of scientists out of of a number of schools in California decided to test the effect of vision on what some might rightly call a modern-day hunting tribe: US Division 1 soccer players.

Players who, to perform their best, need the ability to:

perceive the entire playing field

visualize where they are in relation to everyone else in on the field

know exactly where the ball is and everywhere it might go

be ready to make an important play at any moment

oh, and try not to get blindsided by a dirty hit

It sounds like a stressful situation, but the players need to be anything but stressed. They need the stress-reduction qualities of parasympathetic activity in order to take all of these factors into play.

Then, when needed, they need to shift seamlessly into sympathetic activity: to avoid that collision, or better yet, to line up their eyes.. their foot.. the ball.. and the net.. into sharp central focus — as the goalie stands despondent on the periphery.

The researchers conducted a series of vision tests on these players twice: once without adding a stressor, and once with a stressor introduced.

They demonstrated that peripheral vision narrowed, or became more sharply and centrally focused, when a stressor was introduced.

The players became more focused. As they probably should.

The researchers then tested whether vision training and relaxation techniques could reduce this peripheral narrowing - in other words help the players maintain peripheral awareness while under stress. And they found that under some circumstances they could.

The researchers admit that more research needs to happen, but it opens the door to the possibility that we can learn to strengthen our peripheral awareness and maintain a parasympathetic state while under stress.

Visual training techniques

What follows are descriptions of the visual techniques the researchers taught to the about half of the athletes. The relaxation techniques they taught to the other half of the athletes are described in the following section.

McDonald Form Field Recognition Cards

This is like one of those eye exam charts with all the letters, except in the McDonald version, there is a circle in the middle, four smallish letters surrounding that, and then larger and larger letters expanding out from the small letters to the edge of the page.

You can buy one here, or better yet, just draw once yourself based on what you see in the picture.

This is how you do the exercise, once you’ve drawn your chart:

Hang the chart on a wall so that the circle in the middle is at eye level. Stand 3 feet away from the chart. Rest your gaze on the circle in the center, trying not to focus too hard. Without letting your gaze wander from the circle, speak out loud the small letters around the circle in alphabetical order. Continue with the next ring of letters, and so on — while keeping your gaze rested upon the center circle.

To get better at this, you need to get better at relaxing your eyes as you gaze upon the center circle, so your periphery can widen to take in the outer rings of letters.

Central-peripheral saccades

This one really brings out the hunter in us all. You’re literally trying to poke items in your periphery with a stick!

Here’s how to do it:

Put a post-it note an a wall at eye-level. Take differently colored post-it notes and place them as targets all around the original post-it note in different locations. Stand 3 feet back from the wall. Take a 3-foot long stick with both hands. Gazing at the center post-it note, take the stick with both hands and try to touch the other post-its.

Apart from teaching you about the strength of your peripheral awareness, you can also learn if your peripheral awareness is more or less affected by different colors and different distances from the center.

Again, a relaxed gaze is key to expanding your periphery on tests like this, and in general.

Central fixation release using the Padula Transformation Cube

No, the Padula Transformation Cube is not a teleportation device. In fact, it’s literally one of those 3D cubes you drew as a kid, but with red and green lines (I changed them to blue and orange for the benefit of you red/green colorblind people out there).

My version of the Padula Transformation Cube.

Here’s how you use the cube:

Look at the cube as if the orange portion is facing the front. Adjust your perspective so that the blue portion emerges as the front of the cube. Then switch to orange again, then blue, and so on.

Adjusting your perspective in this way requires strong peripheral awareness and visual flexibility, since shifting your focus from orange to blue requires you to:

Momentarily withdraw the sharp central focus that shows orange as being the front of the cube.

Then expand your perspective, mentally and optically, to consider the other possibilities.

And then refocus your attention on a cube with blue as the front.

Relaxation techniques

In the study of the soccer players, the researchers took half of the players through two relaxation exercises — in addition to the vision training exercises.

This article focuses on the more novel vision exercises, so I won’t go into the detail about relaxation exercises here, but will point you in the direction of some good videos.

The first was a diaphragmatic breathing, or belly breathing, exercise and the second was a guided imagery exercise in which the players were asked to imagine themselves in a positive safe environment in which they were performing at their best.

Unfortunately, the researchers couldn’t determine if it was the peripheral vision techniques or the relaxation techniques that allowed the players to maintain peripheral awareness under stress, but when they pooled the groups together, they found that some form of intervention helped.

I’d like to think of it as a virtuous cycle. Relaxation exercises help you maintain peripheral awareness, while peripheral vision exercises help you relax.

Bottom Line

You undoubtedly have a quiver of relaxation techniques involving breathing, mediation and other traditional exercises you’ve collected over the years, but there are other ways you can achieve a parasympathetic state of being. I urge you to add these to your repertoire. In today’s always-on world, you need to attack the constant sympathetic state from all possible angles.