Weekly Q&A: Can Anxiety Affect Vision?

Obviously I'm not a doctor so please talk to your doctor if you've noticed a change in your vision.  That said anxiety can affect vision because of the stress response and body wide changes that happens when we go into fight or flight. In the words of my brilliant mentor Dr. Bill Pettit, the stress response a.k.a. fight or flight response is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack or threat to survival (or ego, or happiness invested thought). 

There are a lot of body wides changes that happen to enhance our ability to deal with a stressor or threat. With the stress response we might have heightened senses so that we can detect danger more readily; tightening muscles to protect internal organs and so that the body is more resilient to injury; and increasing fear center of the brain so we're more sensitive to danger. 

Stress responses affect vision by dilating pupils to take in more visual information, narrowing field of vision (peripheral vision) to focus solely on the threat. This can make us experience tunnel vision. Our blink rate can be reduced so we don’t miss important visual information. This might make our eyes dry. The eyes tense and increase blood flow to the eye muscles so that they are more reactive and this can cause our eye muscles to feel strained. These vision changes subside and normal vision returns as the body recovers from the active stress response.

Remember that symptoms are friendly alarms/with information/from love. Feelings and symptoms are the body’s way of sending us signals that we are off, like distress signals. Understanding the nature of them and not getting  frightened can be very helpful.

Watch the video below and let me know your thoughts and questions. 

*Anxietycentre.com has an anxiety symptoms list that is great and where I got a lot of this information.