Staring Is Making Your Myopia Worse, And What To Do About It
Have you ever had someone look at you with a hard stare? One of our members shared that was staring look her mother gave her as a kid, making her feel she’d done something wrong.
When she said her mom was very nearsighted, it all made sense. Very likely her mom didn’t mean to give her the “evil eye” but had the myopic staring habit. It’s the number one way a nearsighted person makes a huge effort to see, creating more blur.
Here is a simple test to see if you have this unconscious habit: When you walk across a room, do the stationary objects around you appear to move?
People with naturally clear, relaxed eyesight always say, “Well, of course!” For them the apparent movement of the world is so normal that they have never once thought that others wouldn’t notice it.
But when I ask nearsighted people, or anyone living with a vision challenge, the answer changes. They hesitate. Many have spent years trying to hold the world still, to pin everything down and make it sharp all at once. That single habit, more than almost anything else, is what keeps their vision locked in blur.
The habit has a name. It is called staring, and once you understand it, you cannot unsee it. The good news is that staring is learned, which means it can also be unlearned.
What Staring Really Is
When you move your body, or even just your eyes, your position relative to the objects around you changes. Step to the left of your desk, and the computer is now to your right. As your perspective shifts, the objects appear to glide gently in the opposite direction. They are not actually moving, but your brain registers a soft sensation of fluidity. That sensation is present in everyone who sees naturally and effortlessly.
Staring is the habit that takes it away, and it comes in three forms. The first is trying to see very clearly with the center of your vision, that “I am trying so hard” effort where you tense up and bear down on a single point. The second is trying to see a large picture sharp all at once, which is anatomically impossible. The third is what I call zoning out. Your eyes are open and pointed somewhere, but your mind has wandered off, and you are not really looking at anything at all.
Dr. William Bates, the ophthalmologist who is the forefather of natural vision improvement, said it best: “The failure to imagine that stationary objects are moving is always due to a stare or a strain.”
I see staring everywhere once you know what to look for. Recently I met a woman at a yoga studio. We had just shared an invigoration class, and yet when she approached me to talk, there it was. A hard, cold stare. No blinking. Wide open eyes.
After a little conversation I gently asked if she was nearsighted. She said yes, and asked how I knew. She had no awareness of the stare at all. That is the thing about staring. It is so unconscious that we simply do not know we are doing it.
Why Staring Goes Against Your Eye’s Design
Light entering your eye converges on one tiny point at the back of the retina called the fovea. This is the only place in the retina capable of producing an absolutely sharp, high resolution image. That sharpness is what we call visual acuity, the thing you measure when you read letters on an eye chart.
Here is what surprises most people. That tiny point of ultimate clarity is roughly the size of a pinhead. The fovea makes up only about 1 percent of the retina, yet it commands about 50 percent of your brain’s visual processing. Half of all that processing power goes to the single point you are aiming your eyes at.
The rest of your retina handles your peripheral field. It is wide and wonderful, but not sharp in the same way. So if you try to see an entire scene perfectly sharp all at once, you are asking your eye to do something it was never designed to do. That impossible effort is staring, and it creates strain.
Nature solved this with movement. Central clear vision, plus a relaxed peripheral field, plus easy, effortless eye movements equals perfect eyesight. Take away the movement, which is exactly what staring does, and the whole system stalls.
Saccades: The Antidote to Staring
Your eyes are capable of four kinds of movement:
– Saccades are the rapid jumps that shift your gaze from point to point.
– Smooth pursuit is the steady tracking you use to follow a bird across the sky.
– Vergence is when the two eyes move in opposite directions, coming together for close up or spreading apart for distance.
– Vestibulo-ocular movement is the automatic reflex that stabilizes your vision when your head moves.
To stop staring, fall in love with is the saccade. They are the heartbeat of the eyes and you want them as fast as possible. Saccades are the fastest voluntary muscle movements in the entire human body, and I call them the heartbeat of the eyes. The faster and freer these little jumps are, the better your vision tends to be.
Between each saccadic jump there is a brief pause of about 190 milliseconds, and during that pause your vision is not clear. You move, you stop, you move, you stop, ultra fast. In a relaxed eye this happens so quickly that you never notice. But staring slows the whole rhythm down, and that produces more blur.
Staring: I filmed myself to show this. When I held my eyes frozen while turning my head, the strain was so intense I could only manage a brief moment. That frozen, locked look is exactly what so many people do without realizing it.
Saccadic eye movements (Anti-Staring): When I stopped staring and straining, my eyes made little quick jumps, and I blinked often. People with naturally clear vision blink a great deal.
Why Stationary Objects Should Appear to Move
When your eyes move freely, even by a tiny amount, the world appears to drift in the opposite direction. This is oppositional movement, the natural companion of relaxed, mobile eyes.
You have probably felt this in a train station. You glance down at your phone and suddenly feel certain your train is pulling away, only to look up and find it still sitting there. It was the train beside you that left. Your brain registered movement even though you never moved at all.
When your vision is relaxed, that gentle sense of fluidity is with you all day. People who stare lose it entirely. Their world feels stuck, and so does their eyesight.
How to Stop Staring: The Swing
The first technique I teach for stopping the staring habit is called swinging. Swinging trains you to see stationary objects moving in the opposite direction to your own movement, which increases the vibrating frequency of your saccadic eye movements and retrains the brain to see effortlessly.
The long swing is a whole body movement. You turn your head and body gently from side to side, through roughly a half circle, pivoting softly from one foot to the other so you never twist your knees. The most important thing is to go slowly, not a frantic side to side whip. I imagine the body and head are a car moving slowly, and the eyes are the headlights, following along. You are not trying to move your eyes at all.
The head swing is the same idea on a smaller scale. You can do it at your desk, keeping your torso still and turning your head from side to side while your eyes follow. Think of it as softly brushing across your environment. It helps to swing in a space with interesting things to look at, because a blank wall gives your brain nothing to engage with.
As you swing, notice how the world appears to drift the other way. With these larger movements, that oppositional motion is usually much easier to feel, which is why we start here.
The Optical or Short Swing
Once the long swing feels natural, we move toward something far more delicate, the optical or short swing. Here only the eyes move, and the movement is tiny. Not inches, but a single millimeter, the kind of small shift your eyes make when they travel from one letter to the next in small print. Most people cannot move their eyes by half a millimeter and notice anything moving at all. I could not, for years.
Dr. Bates described this beautifully. He wrote that when the sight is normal, one can demonstrate the short swing, and when it is imperfect, one can demonstrate only the longer swing. The imagination of a shorter swing always improves the sight. Some patients can imagine it better with the eyes closed than with them open. By alternating the imagination of the swing with the eyes closed and then open, vision improves, at first in flashes and later more continuously.
We call those moments clear flashes, and they are very real. If we cannot imagine something in our mind, we genuinely cannot see it clearly. That sits at the very center of natural vision improvement.
Shifting: A Gentle Bridge to Reading
Because the short swing is so subtle, I love using a technique called shifting to bridge the gap. Shifting uses a simple tool called a shifter, which is just a high contrast pattern of bold black and white bars.
You do not need anything fancy. You can make one with a Sharpie on a plain piece of paper, and the lines do not need to be straight. What matters is the contrast. These black and white bars give your eyes the highest contrast, around 21:1, that the human eye can perceive, which makes the movement easier to notice.
Think of the shifter as a precursor to reading. Glide your finger along the bars and let your eyes follow your finger from side to side, moving your head along as you go. You will likely sense that the lines are now in front of you, now behind you, drifting in opposition to your movement.
If you do not notice any movement at first, move the shifter in one direction while you turn your head in the other. Almost everyone feels the sensation that way. From there you can work down to smaller and smaller shifts.
Try it in different directions too, horizontally, vertically and diagonally, which helps relax all six of the muscles that move each eye. In Western cultures we read left to right, so horizontal movement often carries the most strain. Many people who notice nothing on the horizontal suddenly feel the room move when they try the vertical direction.
As you grow more comfortable, do this with your eyes closed, imagining your gaze gliding across the bold black lines. Most people find it easier to feel the gentle illusion of movement with the eyes closed, because there is less effort involved.
Blink More
If you take only one small thing from this, let it be this. When you catch yourself staring, just blink more.
Blinking is a tiny micro restart for your eyes, a moment of movement and release, and it almost lifts you out of the stare. Staring and not blinking go hand in hand, so simply blinking more often is one of the easiest ways, particularly for nearsighted people, to relax the eyes and notice the strain you have been quietly creating.
Many people confuse focus with effort. They think that to look at something properly, they must try very hard, when in truth clear seeing is the opposite of effort.
Why Glasses Lock In the Staring Habit
People often ask whether they have to do these practices forever. I prefer not to think of them as exercises at all. They are relaxations, a way of retraining the brain to return to what it naturally does when the eyes are at ease. It is a bit like breathing. We all breathe, but most of us do not breathe especially well, which is why we turn to yoga and breathwork. The same is true of saccadic eye movements.
Now I want to be direct with you. Glasses, contacts and LASIK make your vision worse. Long terrm, they do not make it better. So often, glasses keep people locked into the staring habit, and I think of it like wearing a cast on your arm. While the cast is on, you cannot really move the arm, and over time it weakens. Many people come to me after wearing glasses for decades, or after a LASIK procedure that helped for a few years and then faded, leaving them back in glasses again.
There is another path. Across the years, my students have worked with conditions from nearsightedness and farsightedness to astigmatism, lazy eye, night driving difficulty, dry eyes and floaters. Many have set their glasses aside. Early-stage cataracts can reverse, and advanced cataracts can improve, when you understand and apply these simple principles. It is not as quick as a pill, but then, there is no pill that resolves your vision. What there is, at any age, is the genuine ability to do something about it.
All of this lives inside my Naturally Clear Vision® program, where we build these foundations, step by step, into relaxed and natural seeing.
So the next time you move through a room, pay attention. Notice whether the world moves softly in the opposite direction. If it feels stuck, you now know what to do. Blink a little more, swing a little slower, and let the world begin to move again.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is staring, and how is it different from focusing?
Staring is the habit of trying to see with effort, whether by straining at one point, trying to see everything sharp at once, or zoning out with wide, unmoving eyes. Real focusing is effortless. When you confuse focus with effort, you create the very strain that blurs your vision. Find a few 2 second vision techniques here
Is it normal to see stationary objects appear to move?
Yes. For people with naturally clear eyesight, stationary objects gently appear to drift in the opposite direction as their body, head or just the eyes move. This oppositional movement is a healthy sign of mobile, effortless vision, and is quite different from vertigo.
How do I stop staring at things?
Notice when you are staring, then blink more often to reset. Practice a technique called swinging, slowly turning your head or your body from side to side (pivoting on your feet) while your eyes follow along. Or explore shifting, moving your attention across a high contrast striped shifter tool. The goal is to let the world appear to move again. You can find all of these techniques explained in detail with videos and instructions in my Naturally Clear Vision® program.
What are saccadic eye movements?
Saccades are the rapid little jumps your eyes make to shift your gaze from point to point. They are the fastest voluntary muscle movements in the human body, with a pause of about 190 milliseconds between each jump. Quick, free saccades support sharp, relaxed vision.
Why is only a small part of the eye sharp?
The fovea, the point of sharpest vision, makes up only about 1 percent of the retina yet uses roughly 50 percent of your brain’s visual processing. Your eyes must move quickly from point to point to build a clear picture. Trying to see everything sharp at once is anatomically impossible and is the very heart of staring.
Do glasses make your eyesight worse?
Yes. Glasses, contacts and LASIK make your vision worse, not better. They lock people into the staring habit rather than resolve the underlying root cause of strain. That’s why the Naturally Clear Vision® Method focuses instead on relaxing and then retraining the brain and the eyes.
Please make your own eye care decisions in collaboration with a qualified eye care professional. If you want some recommendations, just email us at support @ naturallyclearvision.com.
