Tension: Could Your Blurry Vision Be Linked to Tight Muscles?
Try this right now. Look at your screen and stare really hard. Don’t blink. Just make a huge effort to see.
Notice what happens. Do your eyes feel strained? Dry? Your vision blurrier?
That’s tension and strain at work. And it’s making your vision worse every day.
Why Tension Makes Everything Blurry
Most people think they need to strengthen weak eye muscles. That’s backwards.
The real problem is tension and overly tight muscle, not weakness due to a lack of exercise. However, tight muscles don’t move properly which actually makes them “weak” and your vision blurrier. Those tight muscles aren’t just in and around your eyes but also in your neck, shoulders, jaw, eyelids, abdomen. The whole body really.
You might have gotten so used to this strain and tension that it just feels “normal”. I was in the exact same boat until a bodyworker pointed out that my jaw felt like concrete.
Here’s the strain cycle:
- You notice some blur
- You try harder to see by squinting or staring
- Eye muscles get more tense
- Your sympathetic nervous system kicks in
- Blood flow decreases
- Cortisol levels rise
- Vision gets blurrier
Working harder is not the solution.
People with perfect vision allow their vision to happen through relaxed awareness, movement, and trust.
The Science Behind Tension and Vision
A 2025 study in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology found that visual effort creates contraction of the ciliary muscle around your lens. But it also increases tension in the neck and shoulder muscles. This cervical tension (upper spine area) compounds the problem.
When I recently picked up my mom’s medication I watched the pharmacist. She was tilting her chin up, straining to see her computer. I asked if she wore progressive lenses. She said yes. Her shoulders where shrugged up towards the ears and she was so tense. When I pointed this out she said “I guess this is just normal for me”. Just like it was for me back then.
This tension becomes your new normal.
Myopia and Resting Muscle Tension
Research published in Nature shows people with myopia have higher resting muscle tension. Even when the muscle is supposedly at rest, there’s already more contraction.
They found higher muscle tenderness in the jaw and cervical muscles. You often see nearsighted people inching their head forward in the car, as if that one inch helps them see clearly 30 feet away. These unconscious postural adaptations to visual strain lead to a whole cascade of muscle tension in the body, along with postural changes.
How Stress Creates Eye Tension
The American Institute of Stress did a 2022 study showing how stress affects vision. When cortisol goes up, it disrupts blood flow from the eyes to the brain.
I had a client who was very farsighted and couldn’t read, despite her strong progressive glasses with prisms with +8.00 diopters for reading. After one year of weekly vision therapy with a neuro optometrist, she still couldn’t read for even one minute.
When she took my Naturally Clear Vision® program and learned to connect the dots of her blurry vision to her stress, tension and strain with her nervous system, she could read for 15-20 minutes in one go.
She never understood the connection to cortisol and these tension-causing problems. Releasing this accumulated tension was the key.
The Blinking Problem
Studies in the 1990s and 2010s in Optometry and Vision Science found a five-fold drop in blink rate when people look at screens. From about 18 blinks per minute down to 3.6.
I used to be very good at staring and not blinking. Observe people with perfect vision and notice how much they blink naturally. According to Andrew Huberman, blinking slows down the perception of time. Who doesn’t like that extra benefit in our busy times?
Tip: Put a sticker on your computer to remind yourself to blink. I talk about easy butterfly blinking, not the hard blinks that look like your eyelids are your garage door you have to manually lift up with a lot of effort.
Astigmatism and Unequal Muscle Tension
Astigmatism is basically a cornea shaped more like a football than a perfect dome. If your eye muscles have unequal tension, that affects the cornea shape. It’s all soft tissue in one unit.
Optometrist Elliot Forrest found functional astigmatism related to posture in 85% of his patients in his longitudinal studies. Norwegian researchers looked at orchestra musicians. A violinist always has a head tilt. If you’re sharing a music stand and always on the left side, your left eye is always further away. That eye develops stronger astigmatism due to different muscle use.
Ways to Release Tension and See Clearly
1. Do the Stare Test
If your vision is blurry, make it worse by staring really hard. You’ll teach your body that effort doesn’t feel good.
A few years back I observed gamers playing video games. One guy went 70 seconds between blinks. He was so focused he didn’t realize it. His vision was still ok in his early 30s but this habit will make his vision blurry. I have seen this with kids too that play a lot of games in the dark, often becoming myopic over time.
2. Try the Eyebrow Lift
When you squint, you compress everything. Lift your eyebrows instead. Every time you catch yourself squinting, lift your eyebrows. It might clear things up and train you not to squint.
3. Read Between the Lines
With presbyopia, I teach something called “Read Between The Lines”. Instead of focusing on the black text, move your gaze along the white spaces between the lines of text.
This relaxes your eyes. You can hold it close, very close, not making any effort. Or hold the text upside down so you’re just moving through the white spaces.
That will relax you so much that things might suddenly get sharp because you weren’t trying to see.
4. Yawn to Release Jaw Tension
The first thing I learned about vision improvement in 1978 was yawning. I was like, yawning? Where’s the exercise?
Yawning relaxes the whole body and tells your nervous system to let go of effort. You stretch the jaw, which is often tight. It lubricates the eyes and resets everything.
Every animal yawns. Dogs and cats just drop that tension easily.
5. Warm Compresses and Massage
Warmth is good for very tight neck and shoulders. Sauna can be really helpful for muscle tension. Imagine the muscles really relaxing and letting go.
Even Tai Chi or Qigong, those things that move energy where you tap and you move, will all be helpful.
The balls are really great for myofascial release.
What People with Perfect Vision Do
I interviewed many people with perfect vision. They:
- Blink 15 to 20 times per minute
- Allow relaxed attention
- Move their eyes, head, and body in fluid motion
- Take visual micro breaks automatically
- Don’t squint or strain
These are natural vision habits. When you start wearing glasses, you don’t engage your own visual sense. You lose that ability.
The Truth About Eye Exercises
There’s nothing wrong with eye exercises and they can be very beneficial for some people with neurological imbalances connected to the extra ocular muscles and movements.
My approach is based on learning to see from the brain (where we actually perceive) by relaxing the whole visual sense, the orbital muscles along with the whole body.
In addition replace poor vision habits with good ones. The foundation is always the nervous system. When we are stressed we cannot add more layers of challenges or we will make it worse.
Give your eyes time to adjust like a camera with autofocus instead of immediately putting your glasses on when things are a bit blurry.
If you have children, tell them to remind you when you’re doing weird head postures. Put little stickers around the computer. Drop your shoulders. Write reminders like move my head.
Join the Free 4-Day Vision Course
I invite you to a free course called See Better in Just 4 Days.
We’re doing it one last time with live coaching every day. You get short daily pre-recorded videos plus daily activities ranging from 10 seconds to a couple of minutes.
I help you. I answer your questions. The live coaching starts Tuesday, February 17th at 12 pm Pacific.
You have nothing to lose but your blurry vision and your glasses. It’s not just rolling your eyes in circles or pencil push-ups. I’m teaching you how to use your eyes well in daily life.
That’s how I got out of glasses myself and helped tens of thousands of people do the same.
Whatever you do when you’re young has big ripple effects when you’re older. The best time to start is in your 20s. But if you’re already in your 60s like me, it’s never too late.
I attended my mom’s 90th birthday recently. The difference in how people in the 80s and 90s see and function makes it clear: your need to train your brain from a relaxed point of view. No perfection, no stress, no pressure but joy, curiosity and fun.
Watch the episode of Could Your Blurry Vision Be Linked to Tight Muscles?
