Why Start a Routine?
Establishing a routine can seem like a pain, but it’s no more difficult than taking a shower, or brushing your teeth everyday. Today I’m going to delve into the importance of having an eyesight routine, how to set yours up, and why having just a routine alone is probably not enough.
Setting up a routine is important because it gears you up for success throughout the day. A good routine incorporates movement, which relaxes your mind, aiding in the loosening of your strained eye muscles. These techniques can include the sway, the long swing, the slow shift, etc. (If you don’t know about any of these techniques, don’t worry about them right now. I’ll come back to specific techniques in another post.)
It’s best to start with either a morning or evening routine, but better if you can do both. Doing some practices to stimulate relaxation early in the morning will heighten the success of any other techniques you do throughout the day. In my experience, on days that I skipped some type of morning routine it was harder to get much success with any techniques I used throughout the day. An evening routine is also useful because when you carry the relaxation from the routine into your sleep you can get an extra 8 hours of practice! After I would do my evening routine before bed, it wasn’t long before I noticed that the chart was much clearer in the morning after I would wake up. When I stopped doing my evening routine, this stopped happening as frequently. So, I highly recommend doing both.
Setting up a routine isn’t that difficult and it doesn’t need to be for too long. One very simple routine is to simply do 100 long swings in the morning and 100 before bed. You can also listen to relaxing music while you swing, and finish swinging when the song stops. If you’re short on time in the morning, you can do some habit pairing like pair swinging with brushing your teeth or waiting for coffee to brew. 100 swings is probably one of the shortest and most simple routines to do, but if you have more time to dedicate to a routine you can pick and choose different techniques such as shifting palming, sunning, and nose drawing.
“If you’re short on time in the morning, you can do some habit pairing.”
The important thing is getting into a relaxed state of mind so your eye muscles can loosen up. After doing a week of 6 minutes of swinging in the morning and before bed, I started feeling a much looser sensation in my eyes as I would do the swing, instead of the stiff, stuck feeling I had before. A more relaxed feeling is progress and means you are heading in the right direction. My current routine takes me about 40 minutes to complete since I add in about 20 minutes of palming in the morning and before bed, but do what works best for your schedule. Remember that it is more important to spend less time doing something consistently than to spend more time doing something infrequently. Maybe you can do a routine every day for an hour, but is that something you can keep up consistently? If you can only squeeze in two minutes, then just do the two minutes, but make sure to do it every day. Since we have such unconscious patterns of strain, our current natural state is to go back to a strained way of seeing. When you start to relax, it loosens this strain up. However, when you stop your practices or routines, that strain starts to build back up again. This is why consistency is more important than doing lengthy practices every now and then. (I’ll talk more about my experience with this in more detail later.)
“it is more important to spend less time doing something consistently than to spend more time doing something infrequently.”
After you get a routine set up some might notice they are getting some progress, but not much. They see more clearly after doing a routine, and feel that rush of excitement at getting a clear flash, but then go back to seeing fuzzy all day long. So what happened? Well, a routine is just a way to prep you for what you need to be doing all day long. Doing a few swings in the morning and then straining all day long while you stare at a computer screen is not going to get you any results. What if you had a friend who told you she was trying to eat healthier. She would drink one fruit smoothie in the morning and then spend the rest of the day gorging on sugary drinks, pizza and sweets. You might scratch your head when she complains to you about how she doesn’t feel she is getting any healthier. “Well, one fruit smoothie in the morning isn’t going to cut it!” You would say to her. “What do you mean?” She responds. “How many more fruit smoothies do I need to drink to get healthy?” Confusing right? It should be common sense that if your goal is to be more healthy you need to emphasize eating a lot more of the healthy stuff, being more active and keeping the sweets to a minimum. It’s a lifestyle change, not a quick fix. And the same goes for eyesight improvement. You need to change to healthier more relaxed habits throughout the day and catch yourself when you strain so that it happens less and less frequently until your new relaxed habits replaced the strained ones.
“It’s a lifestyle change, not a quick fix.”