Fatigue – Yep, there’s a vision connection!

Your fatigue may have an underlying vision connection

I’m constantly educating my patients. I want them to learn how their eyes and brains must work together as an integrated team. In order to function appropriately, your eyes must see fast, see accurately, see effortlessly, and see sustainably over the course of the whole day, every day. If you can’t do those things there will be consequences. Many of which you probably don’t connect to your vision.

Patients whose eyes don’t work as an integrated team will either experience a perpetual state of fight or flight or they learn not to pay attention as a way to reduce the fight or flight response. Some patients will exert so much energy working against their ineffective visual systems doing tasks that should require minimal effort (like looking from near to far or combining the two separate images each eye sees into one image) that they’re chronically fatigued. By the end of the day, these people feel like they’re walking around on their last nerve because they’re wrecked by normal daily life activities. So if you’re battling fatigue on a regular basis, you may have an undiagnosed, under-assessed or untreated vision problem even if you’ve had a recent eye exam or decades of them. Remember there’s more to vision than 20/20 and eye health.