While it might seem counter-intuitive, screen time is actually the most, I guess, convenient? way to get back your 20/20 vision. You might ask — “but isn’t excessive screen time what got me here in the first place?” — and I’d have to answer “yes.” And that’s the kind of the point, staring at a fixed length for hours on end seems to make your eyes adapt. So how do we get the positive stimulus instead of the negative one? Well, first you need myopia. Second, you need a little blur.
By staying in the slight-blur zone your eyes are able to actively try to focus. You will notice that as you work normally some of the blur in the text will begin to clear — this is exactly the stimulus we want! — the eyes are working to focus themselves.
All you need to do is get the correct differentials glasses (jargon for close up glasses), be it with positive or negative lenses. By the way, there is such a thing as positive lenses, plus lenses, that move thing farther away instead of closer. Glasses with positive diopters are for people with hyperopia and negative diopters are for myopes. However, if you are already under about 1.5D to 2.0D and can see the screen clearly, these can be used to add a little bit of blur so you can keep correcting on your way to 20/20.
Let’s say you have 3.0D or more, at this level of myopia, using a laptop without glasses is quite difficult. If you remember the formula from the last post (Diopter = 1/Distance to blur in meters), you can estimate that 3.0D is about 33cm of vision. That’s not much, you need to have your face above your keyboard just to read. So beyond that point you might want some reading glasses, but just enough so that you can read without slouching and have at the same time a little bit of blur when standing straight. About 1.0D should be enough of a correction, given that at 2.0D you can read a bit more comfortably.
Basically, instead of using slightly under-prescribed glasses for distance vision and a pair of differentials that allows you to see just enough of the screen, I’m turning it around by using 20/20 correction for my distance glasses and plus lenses for close up.
Since I’ve gotten rid of my ciliar myopia, I’m now at 2.0D, down from 3.0D, which allows me to read at a slight blur without glasses and without slouching either (just perfect). This has allowed me to keep correcting my myopia just fine. The only issue is that I have to keep wary of ciliar spasm, if I spend too much time at my laptop, I’ll start getting blurry vision again. So far, I’m trying to apply Jake Steiner’s (endmyopia.org) 3 hour rule: never go longer that 3 hours in sitting and try to get one hour of distance vision for every 3 hours of close up.
Hope that clears things up.
(pun intended)