[thick]

Maybe some of you will find this beneficial if you have slight vision issues. It’s anecdotal, I don’t have scientific backing here. It worked for me, and I think it’s harmless to try. What I’m about to describe is what I think is the Active Focus method.

I’ve always had perfect vision but my dominant eye degraded slightly over the years so I looked into how to bring it back to full. No one in family wears glasses or anything like that, although the elderly use reading glasses of course.

Practicing reading on both monitor and in front of a book with the good eye palmed and trying to shift the focus back and forth while gunning for more clarity for a longer period of time, it took me very little to get rid of the issue - I must have practiced probably 30 times of a few minutes each over the span of a few months, so maybe once every 2nd or 3rd day as I felt like it. I went from having a hard time reading the numbers and letters to very carefully observing the edges of fonts rendered by ClearType antialiasing on Windows.

At first the eye muscles got strained from me forcing it to focus, but then it got better. Minor soreness and redness at first is nothing to be concerned about IMHO. I still practice but not as often, since I’ve trained the ability to focus at will which is really what active focus is about from my understanding - intentional focusing with enough speed.

I’m not a big fan of EndMyopia but the subreddit has people claiming they fixed far worse problems than I have (if slight blurryness is even worthy being called a problem).

I highly recommend Todd Becker’s presentation on Active Focus for anyone wanting a breakdown of the approach. Some people seem to have a hard time with being able to finely control where their focal plane is. It gets easier with practice is about all I can say.

The full “method” that Todd Becker and EM recommend is to try to keep distance to whatever that you’re reading so that it’s just slightly out of focus, but I haven’t had that severe of a myopia. From time to time I read sites like HN from slightly further away than usual just to provide a bit of a challenge to the focus practice, but I think long term it probably isn’t healthy to try to read HN at normal font size from across the room.

[emberfiend]

I summarized the EndMyopia/Todd Becker stuff at losetheglasses.org if anyone wants a short, readable version. The method continues to work for me, albeit slowly.

[thick]

Excellent summary. Thank you for this.

One thing I forgot to mention is that when I started, I didn’t even have actual blurriness for the most part (unless it’s really far away). I had double vision along the vertical axis, and I did what Becker recommended to do which is to try to focus on the actual object (in my case mostly text), and ignore the ghosted copy so that two of them can converge. I would then intentionally defocus by looking in front or behind the text, and then try to refocus again. It keeps it slightly interesting/amusing.

There’s way more stuff out there on this topic today then there was when I first started practicing it, but it doesn’t seem to have changed all that much. People are still very skeptical about it and I guess optometrists still don’t talk about it.

[dannyw]

Endmyopia is real. It works, and I’m not a shill. I went from severe myopia to 20/20 vision; although you need to put the effort in (took me 2 years to get to 20/20, but improvements have been steady).

I genuinely believe that optometrists are either evil, or horribly misguided with hubris.

[benibela]

My mother believes that stuff, so I did not have glasses as kid and could not see much

It worked well enough that my myopia did not progress. However, I got bad astigmatism

Optometrists are really bad at measuring anything. Endmyopia probably works best for people who never had myopia, but the optometrists just measured some temporary accommodation as myopia. They always kept measuring my astigmatism as myopia for years. Only now that they have modern wavefront aberrometers, the device could tell them that they have measured the cylinder as 2 diopters too weak

[ComodoHacker]

You are talking about hyperopia (farsightedness), not myopia (nearsightedness) in your case, right?

[thick]

I’m talking about nearsightedness. But in all honesty I don’t know what the underlying causes are as I haven’t been to an optometrist about it. I think my last check up was when I was in grade 6. Horrible, I know. I noticed it a few years ago and it bothered me enough to do some late night googling to see what snake oil I come across, but I decided to give it a try as a “I doubt I’ll permanently injure my eye trying to get it to focus”. I’ve been staring at a computer screen for well over 25 years, almost every day. I think that at this point it’s more of a genetic lottery that I’m not wearing glasses for severe myopia more than anything.

It’s not perfect like it was when I was younger, I don’t know if it’ll ever be to that level of clarity but I did develop the ability to rapidly focus which for me is “good enough.” I don’t always have to force the focusing - relaxing the eye and not blinking also does the trick, but I combine both of them since I think of it as stretching the muscle out slightly, making it more elastic by ping ponging between focal planes a little bit. Either way, as long as I can impress the plebs by being able to read road signs at a distance that they can’t, I’ll be alright.

I wanted to make the original post because, HN being inquisitive into longevity and health research, I’m very surprised that over the years very few people discussed active focus or other “alternative” vision correction methods. I’m sure there must be lots of people who wear vision correction here. I’d rather not, so I decided to try the weird stuff first and see how things go.

[dannyw]

I’ve tried it and it worked perfectly for me. I went from -4 and -3.5 to perfect 20/20 vision over 1.5 years.

Other than vision, the second big change to me is I no longer trust science as much as I used to.