Anxiety: The Vision-Connection
Vision therapy that improves magnocellular vision or your seeing fast skills and your binocular vision skills can lower your symptoms of anxiety.
Fundamentally we want to feel safe. In fact, its paramount we do. Without that we can't access learning attention because we're constantly in survival attention. When we don’t feel safe, we experience stress and anxiety. Every waking second our subconscious asks, “Am I safe?” The majority of this feedback comes from the visual system. There's estimated to be 1.2 millions neurons per eye and only 30,000 auditory neurons per ear. because of our anatomy: 2½ - 3 million neurons feed information to the brain.
“Seeing fast” is one of the ways we maintain a sense of calm and safety. Without conscious effort, we glance around our environment and subconsciously answer the question, “Yep, all good here. I’m safe.” And the question never bubbles up into your conscious awareness. But if you can’t see fast and / or use your two eyes as a well-integrated team, when your subconscious asks the question your brain launches into DEFCON (defense readiness condition) One.
Your subconscious mind: “Are we really safe here?”
Your conscious mind: “You know what, when you asked me for a second opinion. I completely lost confidence in you. So in order for me to really feel safe I'm going to start paying attention to whether or not I actually feel safe.”
Boom! Your anxiety just leveled up!
Now you're more sensitive to movement in your periphery, right? Because danger is going to come from out of your peripheral vision. While other people are calmly and subconsciously using their “see fast” skills to maintain a sense of safety, you are keyed up and on high alert. Movement in your periphery will distract you at the least and pain or frighten you at worst. Consider the consequences of that. You are burning more energy to compete mundane tasks, you can’t focus as readily on your work, it is difficult to process information because a portion of your RAM is tied up in work that should be happening in the background, your body is tense from staying in fight-or-flight mode, etc. Furthermore, it amps up all of your spidey senses: you're now more sound sensitive, touch sensitive, taste sensitive, and smell sensitive. You're likely to get diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder or an attention problem.
Vision therapy that improves magnocellular vision or your seeing fast skills and your binocular vision skills can lower your symptoms of anxiety. If you are experiencing anxiety, you may have an undiagnosed or untreated vision problem.
Yep, anxiety can have a vision connection.