Exercises for eye pain/strain when looking at screens (vision therapy)

This post is to help people who suffer from eye pain/strain when looking at screens. Doing vision therapy is helping me greatly so I wanted to share my experience and information on exercises that help me. Maybe others can post exercises they have been doing on their vision therapy as well, to compare and to gather more information.

Exercises:

a) Look and lock your sight onto an object at a distance of at least 5 meters. Don't push to hard to make that spot you are locked on appear clear. While concentrating in keeping your sight locked onto that spot, try to see what objects are around and name them. Do this as much as you can during the day. If you use screens, take a 5 min break after each hour of work to do this.

b) Spend as much time as you can in open spaces and try to carry out one hour of symmetric exercise (for example walking, running, swimming, riding a bicycle).

c) MARSDEN BALL: Tie a small but heavy ball (for example a baseball or a tennis ball) to a rope or go online and buy a Marsden Ball (the one I got was white with letters all around). I have also seen them be called pendulum balls, but googling it as Marsden ball works. The exercise, as the name suggests, is to find a spot and/or a mechanism that allows the ball to swing like a pendulum. Now, there are many exercises you can do with this, and they increase in difficulty, but to me, the first stage and one that helped me the most, was lying down on the floor and looking at the ball from the bottom. From there you make it swing vertically, horizontally, diagonally (both diagonal lines) and in circle (clockwise and counter-clockwise).

d) VISION CONVERGENCE TRAINING BALL: this one you will have to buy online because is a little more complex. Google it and you will see how it is configured. You will have to tie one end somewhere you can then have like 3 meters of distance to the other end, where you will be holding it. The exercise works like this: hold the non-tied end of the rope at the height of the tip of your nose. Put one ball across the rope at a 35 cm distance from you. Focus on the ball and try to see two ropes going in the ball and two ropes going out the ball. You should see the parts of the rope doubled. Move the ball further and do this again. Keep doing it until you can't see the ropes (front and back from the ball) doubled. Then come back to the first position of the ball. This increases in difficulty. Then you can do this with more balls, tie the end higher so you are looking a little upwards the rope, a little down, move it a little but to one side so the end you are holding it closer to one eye, then the other.

e) Computer Based Vision Therapy: there is software designed to create specific vision conditions to train and exercise your eye and "teach" how to improve your vision capabilities. I used the software HTS. It is costly, but this helped improve the most. It contains many different exercises to train convergence and divergence, focusing from a far, from up close, eye movement, etc.

I realize now that is is harder to explain in writing and there is too much to explain, so I'll be stopping here. If you can contact an optometrist who specializes in this kind of therapy, and is affordable to you, my recommendation is to do it.

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