Anxiety can affect your body in multiple ways, including causing temporary changes in your vision. While anxiety can interfere with your vision at any time, problems often occur during anxiety attacks. When you are overly stressed, muscle tension, fatigue, and your body pumping extra adrenaline can lead to oversensitivity, a rise in blood pressure, and shortness of breath -- all conditions that can lead to temporary changes in your vision.
Hyperventilation
Anxiety can cause blurry vision, especially during severe anxiety attacks that can cause you to hyperventilate. You begin to breathe deeper and faster as you breathe in too much air and breathe out too much carbon dioxide. While hyperventilating doesn't directly involve the eyes, changes in your breathing can cause your vision to blur temporarily.
A feeling of tightness in the chest, dizziness, sweating, a pounding heartbeat, and vision changes, which may include blurry vision or tunnel vision (loss of peripheral vision), are symptoms of hyperventilation.
Oversensitivity
Even if your vision blurs only a little, anxiety can make you more sensitive to changes in your body. When your vision blurs and makes objects appear out of focus, your anxiety may get worse and make your vision blur even more. You may find it helpful to close your eyes for a few minutes until your vision clears.
Breathing slowly through your nose and practicing relaxation techniques are methods you can use to reduce stress. Exercise also helps by releasing chemicals in your body that improve your mood. Engaging in activities you enjoy is another way to distract your mind away from stressful thoughts that may be contributing to your anxiety symptoms.
Eye Pain
Pain in one or both eyes can occur when anxiety causes the muscles around your eyes to tense. Trouble focusing if your vision blurs while you are having an anxiety attack can lead to eye strain, which can make your eyes burn and hurt. Stress can also cause migraines, symptoms of which include eye pain, visual aura (seeing bright spots or squiggly lines), and sometimes temporary vision loss.
Other Eye Symptoms
Other vision and eye symptoms that anxiety can bring on include light sensitivity when the pupils of the eyes enlarge, spots floating across your eye (floaters), and flashes of light caused by an increase in your heart rate. Since many of these symptoms are natural responses to stress, a clue that anxiety may be causing your problems is if symptoms appear when you are feeling anxious or stressed. An eye doctor from a clinic like Bethany Vision Clinic can do tests to rule out other underlying causes before determining that anxiety is causing your eye symptoms.
Share11 August 2015
If your vision isn't as good as it used to be, you need to see an optometrist. I developed an uncontrollable twitch in both eyes. The problem became so bad that it interfered with my sleep at night. I became cranky, irritable and extremely self-conscience about my problem. At times, I couldn't see anything, even if it was close to my face. But after speaking to my regular doctor about my twitchy eyes, they referred me to an optometrist for an eye exam. The optometrist diagnosed me with poor nerve function. If I didn't do something about it, I'd lose my vision. My eye doctor prescribed eyeglasses to help me see better until I underwent surgery to repair the damaged nerves in my eyes. Now, I see just fine. If you want to know more about protecting your vision, keep reading my blog.
