Today we’re going to talk about utilizing reading glasses to help with your neck pain and potentially your headaches. Now, that may sound a little bit weird, but I want to go through this with you very quickly so you understand the rationale. I’m Dr. Eric Cobb of Z-Health Performance. If you are new to us, we are a brain-based education company. We work with coaches, doctors, and therapists from around the world. So if that’s you and you’re interested in blending integrating neuroscience into movement, subscribe to the channel and check out all of our other free stuff.
Now, one of the things that’s really interesting, back in 2010, some studies came out looking at what was fairly obvious to most people, which was, if I spend all day looking at the computer, and I’m doing a lot of what’s called near work with my eyes, and I’m trying to focus and focus and focus over hours, people would often complain about increased tension in their head and neck, particularly their shoulders, their trapezius muscle, and headaches. So some researchers started looking into this, and they said, well, is there actually a connection? Well, now, here we are about 14 years later, and we know now that definitively there is a functional connection between what are called the ciliary muscles, which are muscles within our eyes that adjust the shape of our lens, and trapezius muscle activity.
Basically, it kind of works like this. Whenever we are looking at something up close, particularly for a prolonged period of time, and we’re not taking all of our vision breaks and doing our 20 20 20, all the stuff that we talk about in a lot of our other videos over time, the contraction, the ongoing contraction of the ciliary muscles to allow us to keep an up close focus, or a near focus, causes tension in the trapezius muscle.
Because as we fatigue, our brain says, you know what? The most important thing is making sure that my eyes don’t bounce around. It’s called gaze stabilization. And so what will happen is that increased tension in the trapezius will begin to occur reflexively in order to keep your eyes stable on the target and hopefully make things not blurry. Now, why that’s really important to know is a lot of us spend a lot of time in front of the computer.
And in fact, over the last couple months, I’ve been doing a ton of computer work because we had our fall prevention course that came up, and we just did a webinar. So I spent a lot of time working on slides and other stuff to update some material. And what I noticed was that the combination of the computer work combined with a bunch of other training stuff I’ve been doing, I was waking up with some ongoing, like, oh, my upper trap on my right side is really starting to bug me, which is interesting because I’m right handed.
And in fact, what they found in the studies is that the ciliary of the muscle spasm or contraction will often cause tension on the side that you use the most, typically your mouse hand. So it all kind of fit. And I realized that I was doing some of the rehab on myself and it’s something I never really talked about. Now, what I’m going to tell you to try is going to require you to either dig into your drawer and find them, or go to someone’s house and steal them, or go to the pharmacy and buy them.
But you’re going to need some reading glasses. Now, what we’re going to do with the reading glasses. Reading glasses are typically designated with a plus sign in front of them. The plus means that if I have something up close, I’m going to get a little bit of help to focus on that up close. Now, what we’re going to use them for is the opposite, because what we really want to do is we want to take those ciliary muscles that are currently working really hard to focus on something up close and we want them to relax.
And so what I have found this is, again, there is not a single study I’ve ever been able to find on this approach. This is just something we’ve experimented with for about seven or eight years. Based off the neurophysiology of this is, I’m going to put the plus lenses on, but instead of utilizing them to read something, right, I’m back on my computer or whatever.
The idea is not to use these to make the image here more clear. Instead it is to be able to, within your house, put them on and then look at something far away. Maybe I’m looking at my television or I’m looking at a window, something that’s maybe 20, 30ft away. But what happens is when I use plus lenses and I focus then on something further away, it has the potential to disrupt or break what they call an accommodative spasm. The accommodative spasm is basically the ciliary muscle getting really, really tight and kind of getting stuck in that position due to overuse.
So what I would have you do is, first of all, get an idea of your neck range of motion. You know, your lateral tilting. Lateral tilting is usually problematic in rotation whenever the trap is a problem. You can also press into the side that’s bugging you. Then you’re going to take your plus lenses, you’re going to put them on and you’re going to look in the distance and it should be blurry.
That’s the whole point. We’re trying to actually look into the distance and cause these muscles to relax so that we can hopefully start to break that accommodative spasm to some degree. Spend 20 to 30 seconds just relaxing, breathing, looking at the distance through the lenses, leave them on and then go back and repalpate. Number one. Okay, does that tension feel better? Does that little pain spot feel any different?
Then you can recheck your range of motion and notice that if you’re, if you’re able to go further or with less discomfort. This is something I’ve done again for a number of years and I found it to be really effective. Now, I will tell you a couple things here. Number one, I usually would tell people to test for 30 seconds to a minute. If you’ve spent 8 hours or 10 hours or 12 hours on the computer, that 1 minute may be insufficient.
If I spend a lot of time on the computer, I will put these on often for 20 to 30 minutes at a time and use them as I move through the house or I’m, you know, sitting, maybe watching tv. And again, it’s weird because it’s blurry, but it’s blurry intentionally. So this is something that you have to play with in terms of time. But if you do it somewhat regularly, it can often be incredibly powerful for counteracting all that tension that builds up in your neck and shoulders and even potentially the headaches that occur from prolonged computer use.
This does not negate all the other stuff that we talk about. You need to take frequent breaks, you need to blink, you need to look in the distance. You know, this is really a little bit of a substitute for getting outside and taking a walk for an hour and letting your eyes relax. But it is fast and it is often extremely effective for a lot of people. If you have astigmatism or you have other issues with your eyes that can disrupt this effect to some degree.
So if you have eye issues, obviously we’re talking about using lenses. So you need to run this past your eye care professional. But it is something, as I said, we’ve seen a lot of success with over time, and since I’ve been using it on myself, I thought it would make a good reminder for you for the week. Alright, so again, plus lenses in general, when you look at the research, they’ve, they typically will have lenses that are about plus three.
I usually use plus 1.5 or plus 1.75, which is what these are. If you really get into this, you can, you know, buy a set of them for about, you know, $3 on Amazon, and you can just test the different ones to see how they affect you. But those are going to be your general guidelines. As I said, make sure to run it past your eye doctor. But if you again find yourself, day after day, fatigued, fatigued and in pain after a lot of time on the computer or a lot of time spent reading reports or whatever it is that you have to do, give us a shot.
It may really, really help you out and help you stay out of pain throughout the week. Alright. So enjoy and let us know how it goes for you.
