Eye Exercises Can Improve Your Eyesight

A Simple Method to Improve Reading

One way in which the pressure of our machine age and our growing admiration for speed for its own sake affect our eyes is in the contemporary attitude toward reading and eye exercises. We are taught not how to read better but how to read faster. People take an inordinate amount of pride in the fact that they can read a book in an hour, or go through two or three books in the course of an evening. It is part of contemporary nerve tension and the feverish rush of our days that we pride ourselves on doing things fast rather than doing them well. To improve reading we need to acquire new reading habits.

Rapid reading means skimming, which in turn means the loss of central fixation. The person who boasts that he can read a book in an hour-and people who do things fast almost always boast of it-overlooks the fact that he is subjecting his eyes to a severe strain, often resulting in headache and impairment of vision, to say nothing of the fact that the speed of his hasty reading gives him no time in which to absorb the real savor of the book or the inner value of the author’s thought.

Stop to think that when the normal eye looks at a printed letter, four separate and minute shifts of vision are required in order to see the letter in its entirety. If you look at a line of fourteen letters the eye makes some seventy shifts in the fraction of a second.

Now when you try to take in a whole block of words at a time, you are endeavoring to cover a larger area than the center of the retina can cope with and you lose the normal shifting which begins to slow down as a result of eye strain. When you read at great speed, glancing swiftly down the page, there is no central fixation, the eye does not shift, and strain is the result.

It is always difficult to develop the lost central fixation in the rapid reader, and one reason is the reluctance with which the reader approaches the idea of acquiring new reading habits. Doing things fast is so fine an achievement in itself!

READING PROCEDURE

Read through a slot.

An excellent way to regain central fixation and improve reading by keeping the eyes focused on a small area, and to curb the rapid skimming of pages which always causes strain, is to cut a long, narrow slot in a rectangular piece of black cardboard or paper, making the slot slightly longer than the average line of print, and just wide enough so that the line of type and the white space below it is visible. 
Train the eyes to follow this white space with an easy, flowing movement.

Now, holding the piece of cardboard over the printed page, slide it along the line, or down from line to line, so that your eyes are compelled to take in only a limited area at a time and the reckless spreading of your eye vision is checked.

Certainly, this is a more intelligent system than to resort to squinting, frowning and trying to look through narrowed lids, which causes a continuous muscular effort, in an attempt to force the eyes to see. 
Squinting does not create better vision. It merely creates tension, impairs vision, and causes wrinkles around your eyes.

Practice this method and you will have much more relaxed eyes and greatly improved reading.