Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Can spectacles affect our posture?
Chatting with a colleague yesterday, she expressed her view that wearing glasses was detrimentally affecting her posture and she was now opting for laser surgery to correct her vision. I agreed with her concerns about glasses affecting posture having worn them most of my life and worked professionally with many spectacle wearers. Glasses may help us see better, but depending on how well they are adjusted, they can be a cause of headaches, stiff neck, aching shoulders and stress. They can affect our whole posture.
Wearing glasses can severely restrict our peripheral vision; the amount we can see to the extreme left and right of our normal central gaze. Glasses with frames create a border that can dramatically reduce the area we see clearly as we look through the centre of the lens and not beyond the edge of the frames. So to look around, we are likely to turn our heads a lot, or if we've got stiffness in our neck, we'll turn bodily far more than non-spectacle wearers or young children who more freely move their eyes. Frameless glasses can cause less of a problem and a larger lens size may also help increase our range of clear vision.
Our eyes play an important role in helping us maintain balance, along with the vestibular mechanism of the inner ear and the cerebellum. Visual awareness helps us know where we are in space and the peripheral vision is an important part of that. Professional soccer players are trained to use their peripheral vision 100% of the time so they always know the position of the ball and other players.
