The Eye Project

So, in my last post I said that my eyesight has deteriorated. My left eye is -0.75D and my right eye is -0.25D, and although I know it’s still considered OK, I’m afraid that it’ll get even worse, and I don’t want that to happen. An optometrist prescribed me specs, and I bought them, but I’ve heard that your vision will get worse if you wear your glasses all the time. After searching this internet, I found out that this was actually because:

Minus glasses make objects far away look closer to you, and so, if you wear glasses all the time, your eyes will adjust to your specs and will be unable to view objects far away. I also heard that your eyesight deteriorates because you look at close objects too long, and so, your eyes become unable to focus on objects far away. Eyes are like the rest of our body. If you haven’t gone jogging in a long time, it will take some time for your body to be able to jog faster and for a longer distance. Actually, some websites say that the saying ‘Wearing glasses all the time will cause your vision to worsen’ is totally wrong, because if doctors give you prescriptions for specs, then why would it hurt our eyes? Technically, this is logical. But maybe, it’s because doctors or researchers or whoever it is haven’t found out a way to really support that statement, and so, they have to go with the saying that ‘You should wear glasses all the time’. Anyway, I haven’t found any really definite statistics on whether glasses worsen your eyesight or not.

I kind of agree and support with the statement that minus glasses worsen your eyesight. The thing is, my parents wore specs when they were in university. Probably only around -1.00D each eye. After that, they never wore glasses anymore, and up to now, their eyes haven’t got worse. My theory behind this is that in university, you are required to read and study a lot, which means that there’s gonna be a lot of short-distance eye focusing and stuff. And so, your eyes become focused to looking at close objects and hence, the minus glasses. I’m kind of going through the same condition now. Although I’m not in university, the current education system I’m going through also requires me to study a lot. Moreover, I like to spend my time browsing the internet, so I guess I should have expected the glasses anytime soon considering that sometimes I like to read at really close distances.

Another example is my friend in Pei Hwa. She’s supposed to wear glasses as her eyes are around -1.00D or more, and she started having a blurry vision around 4 years ago. I asked her, and she said that she only wears specs when she really can’t see, and her vision hasn’t gotten worse since then. So this is another example to support my stand.

However… There are cases whereby people who used to have perfect eyesight suddenly don’t, and because they don’t do anything about it (meaning: wear specs), their eyesight gets worse. Take for example my cousin. His vision started to get blurry but he didn’t ask his parents to buy him specs. As a result, his eyes got worse. So I’m kind of in a dilemma right now. But I guess I’m still gonna support my stand. Anyway, I don’t think my eyesight will get to -2.00D any time soon. It’ll probably take a year (I guess) or so until it gets that worse right? So… I’m gonna try a couple of eye exercises to improve my vision. I’m gonna do this as a sort of research, so I’ll be posting blog posts on this project.

So here are the eye exercises I’m gonna do:

Palming

§ Rub your hands together until warm (approximately 15 to 30 seconds). Cup your hands and then place them over your closed eyes, ensuring to make sure your nose stays uncovered. Your fingers should overlap and rest gently on the center of your forehead.

§ Make sure no light is able to enter your eyes, you may still see lingering traces of colors.

§ After two or three minutes you should see nothing but blackness, remove your palms from your eyes. Repeat the above steps if necessary.

Near-Far Focus

§ Hold your thumb six inches (15 centimeters) from your nose.

§ Use your eyes to focus on the tip of your thumb.

§ Take one or two deep breaths and exhale slowly.

§ Focus on any object approximately 10 feet (3 meters) away.

§ Take another one or two deep breaths and slowly exhale.

§ Repeat the above steps 10-20 times.

Closing the Eyes

§ Close your eyes tightly for 3-5 seconds

§ Open your eyes for 3-5 seconds

§ Repeat 8-12 times

Massage Your Eyes

§ Wash your hands.

§ Close your eyes.

§ Massage your eyes using circular motions, ensuring you press very gently to avoid any damage.

§ Continue for 1-2 minutes, repeat the above steps after a five or ten minute break.

Roll Your Eyes

§ Sit down and relax.

§ Roll your eyes clockwise and then counter clockwise.

§ Blink

§ Repeat 5-10 times

Hold the Pencil

§ Hold a pencil arms length in front of you.

§ Move your arm slowly towards your nose.

§ Follow the tip of the pencil with your eyes until you can no longer keep it in focus.

§ Repeat up to 10 times.

Up-Down Eye Movements

§ Face forwards.

§ Without moving your head focus your eyes as high as they can go.

§ Then slowly move your eye line down to as low as they can go, without moving your head.

§ Repeat above 8-10 times.

§ Do the same exercise, but instead of the up/down movement instead do a side to side movement.

Focus on Distance

§ Focus on an object in the distance (more than150 feet or 50 meters away) for several seconds.

§ Refocus your eyes on a closer object (within 30 feet or 10 meters away) for several seconds. It’s important that this closer object is in the same eyeline as the distance object.

§ Then slowly focus again on the distance object.

§ Repeat this 5 times.

Imagine a Sausage

§ Hold your two index fingers around 15cm from your face so that they are pointing at each other.

§ Focus on an object in the distance and slowly move your index fingers closer to each other. You’ll see a sausage in the middle of your two fingers.

§ Focus on your fingers.

§ Repeat this 5 times.

So basically, I'm gonna do these exercises every day, whenever my eyes are sore, and if my eyes never feel sore, I'll just do it minimum 3 times. There's another person who did this experiment too, you can click this link. It's really interesting.

OK, so I hope this'll work. Byebye!

Beware! ‘O’ Level May Accelerate the Growth of Pimples on Your Skin and Damage Your Eyesight!

Written on Friday, 30^th August 2011, 2300.

I’ve actually wanted to post a new blog post for such a long time but just haven’t had the time to do so. I don’t really think now is the right time either actually, considering that it’s nearly the middle of the night, I just arrived home from school an hour ago, and I’ve still got an enrichment class tomorrow morning at 0830. As Mr Adam Khoo said, sleep is precious. People actually need 7 hours of sleep a day. Fortunately, that’s exactly the number of hours I’ve been sleeping (on average). If you sleep to little, you won’t have a really good memory (if I’m not mistaken). So for those of you who might be taking your end of year examinations soon, make sure you get an adequate number of hours of sleep.

So, the Preliminary Examinations (or Prelims) have ended. My results are still OK, but it wasn’t as good as during the Mid Year Exam. Especially for Humanities. I managed to get an A2 for my Humans during the MYE but now… I only managed to get a C5. I don’t really know why. Well, for SS… SS is just difficult. Not the SEQ though, because for SEQ you can just memorize and understand the content, and then just twist it a little bit to match the question during the exam. But for SBQ, you really can’t tell what’s gonna come out, and I just think it’s difficult! I’m not trying to look down on myself or anything, because I know I can do well. It’s just that sometimes I manage to score well for my SBQ and then the next time I don’t do well. Maybe the problem is with me though. I do understand that sometimes my answers are just plain rubbish. Like for last week’s assignment, I wrote an inference and then gave evidence to support it. However, the mistake was that I didn’t explain how the evidence supported my claim. As a result, my Social Studies teacher wrote this:

“WOW! Evidence but no explanation!”

I understand that it isn’t funny, but I nearly cracked up while reading this. The sarcasm. However, for that assignment, there’s something that I’m really proud of. I got full marks for the first and last question (there are only four questions). And that, is already a big achievement for me. :D

Now, Geography Elective. For the past 2 tests I’ve been acing my Geography tests. I got 88% for my MYE (I was the top scorer for Geog!) and I got 80% for one of the practice papers. That was an extremely big achievement for me. I really didn’t think I would get 88% for my MYE. I just studied as per normal, and BOOM! I got 88. I don’t really know how I got 88. Luck maybe? I hope not.

For the other test, I also studied as per normal. And yet, I got an 80! So for Prelims, I also studied as per normal. However, I only got 54% for this test. Actually, I was one of the 10 people that passed in my class, so I was already quite contented. The top score wasn’t far either, it was only 60%. Now, you might be wondering why the results are so poor. There are several theories that can explain this. First of all, the questions were mixed, and they are usually not. So usually, you can just learn 2 out of 4 themes and do well for the exam. But for this exam, you need to learn all 4 themes because even though you’ll only be required to choose 2 out of 4 questions, all of the questions are mixed: from theme 1 to 4. So that was one of the challenges. Another challenge was that for the previous tests, we weren’t required to apply our map skills. I really did badly in those questions. For the first map question, I got 1 mark out of 5. The one mark was obtained from stating that the speed of the river is slow, all my explanation was wrong. For the second question, I got 4 out of 7 marks. This isn’t so bad, but 4/7 isn’t pretty to look at either. Another theory behind my failure is that maybe I was becoming too complacent. Maybe. I don’t know though. I hope not. I try to be as humble as ever. If I am becoming complacent, please tell me. U don’t think complacency will help at all.

Anyway, next week will be the last week of school. And guess what? I’ve already graduated from Pei Hwa. HAHAHA. OK, just kidding. Well, technically, I have graduated. Sort of. On Wednesday, 28^th September 2011, we had our Graduation Ceremony. I know. It’s weird right? Graduation ceremony before you even take your national exams. I’m not really sure why they did it before the exams either. Maybe because there won’t be any time next year? :\ Anyway, it was quite a fun day. 4E4’s video made me really LOL. The part about Mr Ho Fu Chew’s hair was hilarious. Everybody in the room was cracking up just like me. Their video made my day J

OK, so you must have noticed that in the title bar, I wrote that ‘O’ Levels can accelerate the growth of pimples and damage your eyesight. This is slightly true. At least, according to my theory.

I am a person with a relatively clean face. I rarely have pimples. And when I say ‘rarely’, I mean ‘nearly never’. However, there are like 4 pimples on my face right now. You know how people say that stress causes pimples right? Well, the Os are starting to take its toll on me (is this the correct expression?) and I am starting to get a bit stressed. Teachers give me piles of homework to do, and most of my time is taken up by homework. I won’t really complain though. I know this is for the best, so I’ll do it anyway. Even if it means hell for the next 1 month.

The second thing I’ve realized is that the Os have damaged my kind of perfect eyesight. Before I came to Singapore, my eyes were relatively healthy. I could see objects fare away clearly, and I didn’t wear specs. And now… I WEAR SPECS. Well, actually the degree of my specs isn’t that severe. Only 0.75 in my left eye and 0.25 in my right. About 3 months ago, I sat at the back of the classroom. I could see and read the whiteboard clearly. But now, three months later, I can only see a slightly blurred whiteboard. I can still kind of guess what word it is, but I’ve really noticed that I can’t see far objects clearly.

Now, the dilemma I’m facing is whether I should wear specs everyday or not. Or should I just wear it only when I’m studying, using my computer and reading? People say that if your eyesight is still quite OK, don’t wear specs. It will worsen your eyesight. But is that really true? Some people refuse to wear specs and now their eyesight worsens. If anybody can give me some tips, I’d be glad to take them in with open arms.