Yoga is one of the few tools available that can help you keep your mind and body healthy together. As the country that has invented yoga and shared it with the world, there is still a lot we don’t know about it. Did you know simple yoga exercises performed every day can help you maintain your vision and protect against common eye problems like dry eye and straining? So, let’s take a look at the yoga exercises that can help you reap these benefits, and also at the importance and benefits of yoga for your eye health in general.

 

 

Importance of Eye Exercises for Eye Health

Eye exercises can have varying levels of success based on the severity of your condition. If you don’t have any eye problems, doing them will help you improve your peripheral vision. It will also help you improve the strength of your eye muscles, which are important to maintain your vision. 

On the contrary, if you have existing eye conditions, doctors will suggest that you try certain exercises daily as a part of your treatment process. These exercises will help you improve your vision in some ways. But, they are not enough to correct your vision if you have eye problems. 

There are various eye conditions that greatly benefit from eye exercises, while there are other conditions where exercises have limited success in treating the symptoms. Let’s take a look at some of the eye conditions that can benefit from eye exercises.

Myopia

Myopia commonly known as nearsightedness is a common eye condition that affects your ability to see things close to you. There are certain eye exercises that can help you improve the strength of your eye muscles, which will help with myopia symptoms. However, for the exercises to work best, your condition needs to be diagnosed early.

Astigmatism

Astigmatism is a condition that can affect both the ability to see things near and far. As it is a condition that affects children, eye exercises are great at helping you reduce the severity of the symptoms. Focus shifting exercises can help you deal with the symptoms of this condition when practiced daily.

These are just a few examples of conditions that can be helped with eye exercises. Before you learn more about eye exercises in general, it’s important to learn the type of patients for whom these exercises are the most important.

  1. The patient is young. Even if they are affected by conditions like astigmatism or strabismus.
  2. The patient has been able to get an early diagnosis of their eye problems.

Now that you know why these exercises are important and who they can work for best, let’s look at the best eye exercises and yoga poses for eye health.

 

 

Yoga Poses for Eye Health

Yoga exercises are a great way to take control of your health both mentally and physically. These exercises offer holistic improvement of your physical condition while helping you become calmer and reduce stress and anxiety. Eye health is one of the things that is crucial for your well-being and as such, there are various yoga poses that you can perform to improve and maintain your eye health.

Bharmari Pranayama

Pranayama exercises put a focus on your breathing. For this particular type of pranayama exercise, here are the steps.

  • Sit with your legs crossed
  • Close your eyes and put your thumbs over your ears
  • Put the tip of your index fingers between your eyebrows in a way that the finger covers your eyes
  • Put your ring and little finger at the base of your nostrils.
  • Now breathe in slowly and hold your breath for 2-3 seconds.
  • Then exhale using your nose while making a low humming sound.
  • Rest for a few seconds and repeat the process for as long as you like.

This exercise is great at lowering your stress levels both mental and physical. It also helps lower your blood pressure and can help you sleep better at night. There are no dedicated times at which you need to perform this exercise. You can do it anytime and get the benefits.

Palming

A great way to follow up after bharmari pranayama is to perform palming. This exercise aims to lower the tension in your eye muscles helping them relax. Here are the steps to perform this exercise.

  • Sit with your legs crossed
  • Rub your palms together vigorously until they become relatively warm
  • Close your eyes and press your warm palms and fingers over your eyes
  • Keep your hands over your eyes as long as they remain warm and feel the warmth entering your eyes from your palm.
  • This will help reduce the stress on your eye muscles and relax them.
  • Repeat this exercise for a few minutes at least for the best results.

Palming can be a great way for you to rest your eyes between exercises, it is also a great exercise to be performed at the end of your yoga session.

 

Eye Exercises for Eye Strain

Eye strain is one of those symptoms that are common for both those with or without eye conditions. For people with eye conditions that restrict their central vision, visual stress is common due to that. For people without such conditions, eye strain is common due to long hours of working in front of computer screens and not spending enough time outside. 

So, given that this problem is faced by practically everyone, here are some eye exercises that will help you relieve your eye strain. However, if you don’t have eye conditions, the best way to relieve your eye strain would be to lower your screen time.

Zooming

Zooming is a very easy eye exercise that can help you improve the muscle strength of your eyes and reduce eye strain. Here are the steps to performing this exercise.

  • Make sure you are in a well-lit area.
  • Stretch your arm out and do a thumbs-up sign.
  • Focus on your thumb (if you want to make it more effective, you can draw a mark on your thumb nail with a marker before you start)
  • Bring your arm closer to your eyes slowly up until it is barely 3 inches away from your eyes.
  • Make sure your eyes are focused on your thumb this entire time
  • Repeat the exercise a few times and then rest your eyes before every new set

Flexing

Well, you must have heard the term flexing your muscles, this is exactly that but for your eye muscles. It is perhaps one of the easiest eye exercises, here are the steps.

  • Sit comfortably and look forward with your chin up
  • Look up, down, right, and left without moving your head, just move your eyeball
  • That’s it. Rest for a while and do it again.

 

Eye Exercises for Dry Eye

Dry eyes are a symptom that can be brought on by something as simple as the weather or something complicated like underlying eye conditions. Regardless of the reason, there are a lot of eye exercises that you can try to keep your eyes moisturised.

Blinking

Yes, it’s that simple, however, it is not blinking the way you are doing it right now. For dealing with dry eyes, you need to blink in a coordinated manner. Here are the steps.

  • Sit comfortably
  • Blink as many times as you can in under 10 seconds
  • Rest your eyes for a while and repeat the exercise again
  • If you want, you can put gently massage your eyeballs over your closed eyes while you are resting

Eye Squeeze

Similar to the previous blinking exercise, eye squeeze is great at helping you moisturise your eyeballs by activating your tear ducts. Here are the steps for this exercise.

  • Sit comfortably
  • Close your eyes 
  • Squeeze your eyes while they are closed (gently)
  • Keep them squeezed for a few seconds
  • Open your eyes and repeat this exercise a few times

 

Benefits of Eye Exercises for Eye Health

Eye exercises are great at helping you maintain your eye health. The different muscles and parts of your greatly benefit from these exercises and often they work as diagnostic tools, which can inform you about any problems you are having with your vision. Even if you don’t have any eye conditions and have limited screen time, these exercises can help you prevent certain eye conditions. So, let’s list out all the benefits you can get from regularly practicing these eye exercises.

  • Helps strengthen your eye muscles
  • Reduces any stress inside your eyes
  • Helps reduce eye strain
  • Can help treat problems like dry eye

 

Conclusion

That’s all you need to know about yoga and eye exercises for eye health. For more information, you feel free to check out our website. If you find any difficulty while performing any of these exercises, feel free to reach out to us or visit our clinic. We will be able to help you understand your problems and treat any underlying conditions with our special non-invasive and holistic treatment processes.