Part 7: Wearing Glasses

Glasses and contacts may inhibit your progress in improving your vision. See my post The Problem with Glasses.

The methods that I describe are meant to be done without glasses. Glasses are unnatural and will screw up your process of relearning to see. If you want to learn to see without glasses, take off your glasses while first practicing the method. As you start to understand the ideas, you might want to stop wearing your glasses altogether. In some cases you might legally need them to drive a car, so it’s up to you what to do in your situation. Remember you’re only planning short-term here. If you can do so safely, try wearing your glasses less often for a few weeks.

Some people opt for reduced prescription glasses. These included lenses with a reduced focusing power of the lenses, so that you would be wearing glasses prescribed for someone with a less severe refractive error. The idea is that by doing this the harmful effects of glasses are reduced. For example, if your prescription is -3.00 for myopia, or 3 diopters, you could reduce it to -2.75, -2.50, or any other number. If you have myopia, your eye doctor may be willing to prescribe you glasses for reading or computer use, which will reduce the power of the lenses by a similar amount. If you have presbyopia or hyperopia, drug stores have whole racks of reading glasses that you can buy cheaply. You can also buy glasses at various online stores, although keep in mind they might contact your eye doctor to verify your prescription. I’m unclear as to whether they do this as a courtesy or if they think there’s a legal issue with it, but the stores will be willing to fulfill your order regardless of what your eye doctor tells them.

You won’t likely improve your vision just by wearing your glasses less frequently, or by throwing them away. You will improve your vision by improving its functioning. By not wearing glasses as often you will take the potentially harmful effects of glasses out of the equation. A reduced prescription might be marginally or significantly better than wearing your regular glasses. It’s hard to say. I just don’t have a big enough organized sample size to know what’s best here.

As for contact lenses, all of the above applies. One disadvantage of contacts is you can’t take them off as easily at a moment’s notice to see if you can see something with a moment’s practice of my method with your naked eyes, so you’re stuck wearing the contacts all the time. They also can irritate your eyes, and that irritation can make things confusing or give you misleading feedback as your eyes and visual system change while you improve your vision. More irritation may be good, because it may indicate that your brain is reconnecting fully with your eyes and you’re more conscious of pain signals. And you won’t know whether the irritation has anything to do with your contacts.