I can’t stress enough how common it is for your vision to be affected with anxiety. I remember constantly worried about losing my vision. Such fear gave me so many panic attacks and intensified my anxiety symptoms. I ended up seeing 4 different optometrists, 2 different ophthalmologists. All tests came back negative. Just a lot of time and money wasted. Once I got my anxiety under control, all symptoms and issues with my vision went away.
Sensitivity to light
When you’re anxious, your pupils would dilate as an innate response to stress. Once under stress, our body prepares us to fight or to run away. Nerves got activated and sensitized. Our eyes would react by dilating our pupils to receive more light. The purpose of this mechanism is to help us see better. But in reality, we’re not in any danger so the extra amount of light, instead of helping us, now scaring us.
I remember there were times I can’t even go outside without feeling like the sun light is piercing through my eyes. Even the lighting inside a store seemed too much for me. My sunglasses were my best friend whenever I had to go outside.
What are those things in my field of vision?
I also noticed a lot of floaters in my vision. Even being told many times by my doctors that floaters are harmless and quite common, my anxiety still made me doubt that it could be a sign of something much more dangerous. I would try to look for floaters in my vision and of course, the more I looked, the more I found.
Floaters don’t come and go with your anxiety. They are always there. But with sensitivity caused by anxiety, we just notice them more than a “normal” person would. Remember anxiety sufferers are on alert on the time, so they are aware of even the littlest sensation.
I saw flashing lights, I saw halos, I saw heatwave movement under and around my field of vision. One thing that antagonized me the most is a blinking spot on the top right of my view. It was there all day every day. No matter what I tried, it was there even when I closed my eyes.
My eyes were always blood shot red. They were dried one day and teary the next. They were heavy. They were itchy. They were painful at times. The pain was constant and dull but sometimes it came as a sudden zap.
I switched my prescription glasses at least 5 times in that one year. None of them seemed to be a correct prescription for me. My stress hormone causes my eyes to be all over the place so every eye exam would give a slightly different reading.
To a person who doesn’t have anxiety and panic attacks, a slight deviation on their prescription wouldn’t cause any issue or wouldn’t even be noticeable. But with us anxiety sufferers, WE NOTICE EVERYTHING.
This is the end of what we can do for you
Frustrated and scared, I jumped from one doctor to the next. I had all kinds of tests and exams done to my eyes. One time they had to use a very strong dilating agent and it took days for my eyes to return to a normal state. You can guess how much stress and fear that added onto my already tired nerves.
I remember my ophthalmologist, in a genuine and calm manner, told me “I’m very sorry, this is the end of what we can do for you. According to our tests, your eyes and vision are fine. Maybe you want to look into something that help you relax.”
I came home that day, heartbroken and defeated. “Even my doctors gave up on me”, I said to myself. But since they basically denied seeing me, I didn’t have a choice but to just accept whatever that I was experiencing.
And at that moment, the effect of A.C.E.R. inadvertently kicked in. By surrendering to my issues, I stopped searching, fighting and struggling with them. Then my vision symptoms, one by one, started to fade away and disappeared completely.
By no mean this is the end of my anxiety. I just started to focus on other parts of my body. I started to worry about other symptoms, other “diseases” that I might have. And one day, just by a random thought, I asked myself: “wait, what happened to the blinking spot in my vision? It’s gone! My glasses haven’t bothered me lately anymore.”
You see. I spent over a year fighting with my vision issues, wasted so much money and energy trying to find the answer. Not only did I not find any answer, but my problems also got worse. Until the day I had no choice but to surrender and gave up the fight, my problem then took care of itself. And I never had any anxiety related vision issues since.