Mental stress can affect your eyes, and lead to visual distortions and even vision loss. Fortunately, most stress-related vision problems are temporary and will disappear as soon as you begin to relax.
When we are severely stressed and anxious, high levels of adrenaline in the body can cause pressure on the eyes, resulting in blurred vision. People with long-term anxiety can suffer from eye strain throughout the day on a regular basis.
Eye and vision anxiety symptoms common descriptions include:
Experiencing visual irregularities, such as seeing stars, shimmers, blurs, halos, shadows, “ghosted images,” “heat wave-like images,” fogginess, flashes, and double-vision. See things out of the corner of your eye that aren't there.
Try to make it a habit to blink more often when looking at a monitor. Take eye breaks. Throughout the day, give your eyes a break by looking away from your monitor. Try the 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds.
Fluctuating vision may be a sign of diabetes or hypertension (high blood pressure), which are chronic conditions that can damage the blood vessels in the retina. Any damage to the retina can cause permanent vision loss, and so a patient with fluctuating vision should seek immediate medial attention.
A problem with any of the components of your eye, such as the cornea, retina, or optic nerve, can cause sudden blurred vision. Slowly progressing blurred vision is usually caused by long-term medical conditions. Sudden blurring is most often caused by a single event.
Blurred vision can be caused by eye conditions, including: difficulty focusing your eyesight, such as with near-sightedness or far-sightedness. astigmatism (when the surface of the eye isn't curved properly) presbyopia (when your eyes find it harder to focus as you age)
Oscillopsia is a vision problem in which objects appear to jump, jiggle, or vibrate when they're actually still. The condition stems from a problem with the alignment of your eyes, or with the systems in your brain and inner ears that control your body alignment and balance.
Common physical symptoms of anxiety include changes in your heart rate, breathing, and even vision. This includes, in some cases, developing blurred vision.
Anxiety can cause blurry vision, tunnel vision, light sensitivity, visual snow, and potentially seeing flashes of light. Each of these has a different cause and may need to be addressed in specific ways to each visual problem. Only a comprehensive, long-term anxiety treatment will prevent future vision problems.
Depression and Vision
Clinically depressed individuals or people going through periods of intense stress are more likely to experience the following vision problems: Blurred vision: Individuals may experience a lack of sharpness in their vision, preventing them from seeing fine details clearly.
Get emergency medical care if you have sudden changes in vision or an injury to your eye. Specific factors that may accompany urgent vision-related medical conditions include sudden onset of: Severe eye pain or irritation. Vision loss or double vision.
It's usually caused by refractive errors like farsightedness or nearsightedness. It can also be an indication that something is going on that needs addressed by a medical professional. Many conditions can cause blurry vision.
Fluctuating vision is a key, but not-so-obvious symptom that dry-eye experts look for. "Patients often say their vision fluctuates throughout the day without other symptoms. This is often a symptom of ocular surface problems, such as dry eye or blepharitis," Dr. Rapuano says.
People with existing mental health conditions are more likely to develop vision issues. People with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia are more likely to develop glaucoma later in life. People with major depressive disorder have a greater risk for glaucoma and dry-eye syndrome and age-related macular degeneration.
As a result, elevated stress and depression are common. In turn, depression can also increase the odds for worsening vision impairment and vision loss, as people who are depressed are less likely to seek medical care for physical health conditions, many of which can impact vision.
Results: Individuals with mental illness frequently exhibited uncorrected refractive error, strabismus, blepharitis, pigmentary retinopathy, and cataracts. Those with mental retardation and mental illness (dual diagnosis) demonstrated similar findings with the exception of cataracts.
Visual stress is also called Meares-Irlen Syndrome or Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome. Simply explained, Visual Stress is a sensitivity to visual patterns, particularly stripes. In some individuals this condition can cause visual perceptual problems, which interfere with reading.
Known as a type of migraine aura, kaleidoscope vision is just one type, as it appears when there is a sudden increase in neuro activity such as stress or strain. Sometimes, if you haven't been stressed and these colors appear, it may mean a more serious problem such as a stroke, retinal/eye damage, or a brain injury.
Kaleidoscopic vision is most often a result of a visual migraine. The symptoms will usually pass within 30 minutes, and you may experience no headache pain at all. But it can be a sign of something more serious, including an impending stroke or serious brain injury.
Something that looks like heat waves shimmering in your peripheral vision? If you have, you may have been experiencing what is known as an ocular migraine. Ocular migraines occur when blood vessels spasm in the visual center of the brain (the occipital lobe) or the retina.
Choroidopathy: When fluid builds up under the retina due to high blood pressure, your vision may become distorted or impaired.
Seeing occasional flashing lights in your eyes usually isn't an issue. But repeated flashes in the forms of bright spots, streaks of lightening, or shooting stars in the corner of your eye can indicate a serious medical condition.