vision

Vision and headaches

We know that challenges with our vision can cause headaches. Squinting in bright light or straining the eyes to bring hazy text into focus can easily result in strain or pain in the eyes, temples, top of the head, or elsewhere. 

What is less widely acknowledged is that wearing prescription glasses can also cause headaches. An overlooked cause of headaches—and other pains too—is the poor posture we often adopt when wearing glasses. In this post I will be looking at the posture traps to avoid with eyewear—and how to turn wearing glasses to your postural advantage. 

Wearing glasses can solve headaches—or cause them if they lock you into poor posture. Pexels

The eye test

Let’s start with the eye test. Your optician or ophthalmologist uses various machines to measure eye pressure and light refraction, and to look at the cornea, iris, lens, and retina of the eye in microscopic detail. During these examinations you want to bring the apparatus as close to you as possible, and/or hinge at the hips to angle yourself forward. Apply the “spoon to your mouth, not your mouth to the spoon” principle; rather than jut your neck out for extended periods, minimize distortion to its delicate structures.

Various types of eye examination will require you to crane your neck forward to rest your chin
and forehead against supports. Wikimedia

Getting fitted for your glasses

Always be in your best possible position when you get your glasses fitted. Your optician or optometrist is an expert in eye care, but not in posture. They will likely overlook any degree of slump (or sway) in your back, and the resulting compensatory chin lift, and fit your glasses accordingly. In this way, they will unwittingly build in a bias that compresses your neck.

You want your head “back home," as it was when you were a young child. Let your chin angle down, your neck be tall, and your head be back, aligned over your body. You can learn how to lengthen your neck and restore healthy alignment here. This will direct your gaze more down your nose. Maintaining healthy posture while choosing and wearing your glasses will avoid compression and the wear and tear and headaches it brings.

Avoid both letting your head drift forward (left) and lifting your chin (center), both of which compress the nerves, discs, bones, and tissues in the back of the neck and are a common cause of headaches and degenerative changes in the cervical spine. 

Progressive lenses call for progressive posture

Progressive lenses are a great boon for many wearers. These lenses can combine several prescriptions in one, allowing you to focus on things near, far, and in between, regardless of what distance your eyes do best. For example, a progressive prescription for farsightedness, a common condition as we get older that makes close work like reading difficult, will have a stronger magnification at the bottom of the lens which makes it perfect for close-up tasks such as reading phones and books—or laptops and tablets—or, a little further away, working at the kitchen counter. However, there are particular posture considerations when it comes to progressive lenses:

1. If you have your chin up when you are measured for a progressive prescription, then you will be obliged to hold this compressed, chin up position whenever you need to see things up close—which could be for hours at a time. Additionally, you are training yourself to compress your neck as a baseline position. 
2. If you use progressive lenses for close-up work ahead of you, such as looking at a desktop computer screen or reading sheet music (or conducting an eye test!), you will be obliged to lift your chin to peer through the “sweet spot.” We strongly recommend having a pair of “computer glasses” which enable you to position your head in a healthy position.
3. If your vision deteriorates further and you do not update your prescription, you will be obliged to increasingly lift your chin to peer through the greater magnification lower in the lenses. It is therefore important to have your eyes tested regularly. 

Progressive lenses can work well for looking down at books, tablets, and laptops. Pexels

Relying on the reading area at the bottom of a progressive lens will lock you into poor posture at a desktop computer. Pexels

Bending forward or down

You want your frames to fit your head and the bridge of your nose perfectly, so that you won’t tip your nose up to keep them from sliding off. Test the glasses properly for size and grip when you buy them. A good optician will be able to make adjustments to most frames to fit you optimally.

  
Don’t let poorly fitting glasses compromise your bending, making you round your back and crunch your neck. 

You want to hip-hinge as well as you know how, maintaining length through your spine. 

Choose larger lenses 

Habitually seeing the world through lenses, even sunglasses, tends to somewhat limit the movement of the eye and increases our reliance on turning the neck. Infants and people in traditional societies show a preference for bigger eye movements rather than bigger neck movements. 

This young girl at school in Otavalo, Ecuador, moves her neck a little—and her eyes a lot. You can read more about eye tracking here.

We recommend you choose good-sized lenses that lessen the tendency to “tunnel vision," and avoid thick frames that block your peripheral vision. Contact lenses can go a long way to restoring this freedom, so you may want to consider them too.

A well-fitted pair of glasses can even be a reminder to find your best head, neck, and body alignment. Muster all the elegance you might bring to wearing a crown. 

Audrey Hepburn knew how to use both her eyes and her sunglasses to good effect—and with strikingly good posture! (from Breakfast at Tiffany's). Wikimedia

Best next action steps for newcomers

If you would like insight on your posture, consider scheduling an Initial Consultation, online, or in person.

We are offering a Posture Remedies for Text Neck Free Online Workshop on June 1 at 4 p.m. PST. You can sign up below to join any of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops.

My passion for researching posture has taken me far and wide. I was in a village in Burkina Faso in western Africa when I first noticed how people there would track the conversation from speaker to speaker mainly by using their eyes, rather than by turning their heads. Along with their excellent body posture it contributed to a strikingly well-centered, dignified bearing.

This young man in Burkina Faso demonstrates the dignified bearing that comes with an appropriate amount of eye tracking.

Comparing what I saw in Burkina Faso with what I was used to seeing back home, I realized that in the US, and the wider industrialized world, we move our eyes a good deal less and our necks a good deal more. Why such a difference, I wondered, and what is its significance for our well-being?

In Paul Gauguin’s 1893 painting from one of his Tahiti trips, Woman Holding a Fruit, the unnamed subject shifts her gaze with her eyes, rather than by turning or twisting her neck. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Babies and infants in all cultures track actively with their eyes, both when they are still, and when they turn or reach. One possibility why this changes for children of school age in the industrialized world is due to the amount of reading, writing, and screen time they experience. It seems we grow into a more restrictive, “ahead only” habit.

Infants in all cultures track very actively with their eyes, as my daughter Maya demonstrates here.

My son Nathan tracks with his eyes while reaching for a toy.

As adults, this trend can continue with desk jobs and other prolonged, forward-oriented activities, such as driving. Perhaps this is why, as we age, we develop a more fixed “tunnel vision,” which results in moving our necks rather than our eyes.

Computer and desk work are possible factors in reducing our range of eye movement. Original image courtesy Studio Republic on Unsplash.

Excessive dependence upon neck movement to reorient our visual field often contributes to soft tissue strain and wear and tear on the delicate discs and joints of the cervical vertebrae. Far better, then, to try to reduce this dependence and reintroduce eye tracking now and then.

Time spent in nature provides us a chance to practice our eye tracking. Follow that movement! Photo courtesy Nathan Anderson on Unsplash.

How can we reintroduce this ancient technique into our industrialized-world lives? I am a great advocate for getting out into nature whenever possible to literally expand our horizons. Time spent with young children, especially babies and toddlers, can give us an opportunity to mimic and mirror them — to their frequent delight!

This dancer in San Diego demonstrates beautiful eye tracking. Image courtesy Avnish Choudhary on Unsplash.

Many dance forms, including, but certainly not limited to, classical Indian Bharatnatyam and Kathak, also offer us ample opportunities to practice eye tracking, which lends our dance gestures and movements a depth of emotion. By allowing our eyes to track while on a walk or hike — perhaps while watching a darting squirrel or rabbit cross our path — or while watching a sports game from the stands, or while trying out a new dance style, we can provide ourselves a chance to relearn this method of respecting the neck and maintaining an especially dignified composure.

These elegant dancers in Trinidad and Tobago show the gravitas and depth that can come from skillfully-employed eye tracking. Image courtesy Isaiah McClean on Unsplash.

Is there a relationship between your eyeglasses/sunglasses and your posture? In the years I have been teaching people to restore their primal posture, I have discovered that glasses can hurt – or help - your posture, especially your neck posture. Here are some Gokhale Method guidelines to help you maintain, and even improve, your structure as you aid your vision.

1. Fit your glasses to you rather than fit yourself to your glasses. Begin by choosing the best posture you know, and then fit the glasses to your face. Is there enough glass to cover all the directions in which you are likely to look? Often glasses do not extend enough above the level of the eye, thus encouraging you to raise your chin just so you can see through your glasses. The problem with raising your chin for long periods is this compresses the tissues in your neck including your discs, nerves, edges of the vertebrae and blood vessels. It also sets an unhealthy baseline of shortened neck muscles and can lead to chronic neck pain and discomfort. Instead, by selecting your frame carefully, you could use your glasses like a training device.  Even if you have some postural distortion and compression in your neck, a carefully chosen pair of glasses could augment not only your vision, but also your posture.

2. Remember that your ophthalmologist, the frame manufacturers, and the vision testing setup are subject to the modern distorted posture paradigm.  Don’t count on optimal feedback on this aspect of your fitting. Go in to your appointment with a clear understanding of how you would like your neck aligned and hold your ground on this. The structure used to stabilize your head to do your vision testing usually forces you to crane your neck uncomfortably. Do your best to maintain good posture during this and all other parts of your eye exam, not only for the sake of your neck, but also because it’s a normal line of vision that you will give the most relevant readings.

3. Choose glasses that have a reasonably secure fit. A loose fit might tempt you to lift your chin to keep your glasses balanced on the bridge of your nose.

4. Choose lightweight frames. Heavy frames have more of a tendency to slide off your nose in actions like hiphinging and could induce you to raise your chin.

5. Choose a larger, thinner frame to allow for more peripheral vision.  Wearing glasses and sunglasses inevitably reduces peripheral vision somewhat, but you want to minimize this and keep your eyes mobile and your eye muscles working. Our hunter gatherer ancestors had to have excellent peripheral vision to survive. In modern times, we don’t usually need peripheral vision to survive, but cultivating peripheral vision is known to help with myopia and calm the parasympathetic system. It also relieves overusing the neck. Most people in modern society underuse their eye muscles and over use their neck muscles. Minimize how much your glasses feed into this pattern. If you are in the market for sunglasses, consider a ‘wrap around’ style.  

6. Invest in a second pair of reading glasses. If you wear glasses with progressive lenses then you can probably read pretty well for short periods by looking down through the bottom third or so of your lens. This works well if you can look downward at the text –to read a product label in the supermarket, browse a magazine on your lap, or work with a tablet on your kitchen work surface. However, looking at a desktop or laptop computer screen will oblige you to lift your chin up and look down your nose to get the text in focus through that bottom, near vision part of the progressive lens. For this reason I strongly recommend investing in a second pair of glasses specifically for reading and/or screen work.

7. Learn to turn your head well. Negotiating the world through lenses, you may notice that you can see most accurately straight ahead, and that distortion increases towards the edges. This is especially true of progressive lenses, although higher quality modern lenses do reduce this effect, and to some extent the brain does learn to compensate for it. Nevertheless, if you wear glasses you are more likely to turn your head frequently to keep looking through the central ‘sweet spot’.  You may also need to catch something peripheral that would otherwise be obscured by the frames. This makes it doubly important to know how to position and turn your head well, with the neck back, tall and long, so that your head and neck vertebrae can pivot smoothly around your spinal cord.

As a reminder of how best to position your neck, here is a recap from 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back:

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