The eyes are often referred to as the “windows to the soul”. We interact with reality and learn life lessons through our five senses. Vision is the sense we rely on the most, but certainly, all of our senses have a role to play.
Due to the deep connection between mental health and spiritual growth, a previous post explores how one can address unresolved trauma to be more attuned to one's path in life. Ultimately, this heightened sense of connection to yourself and your spirituality can be your path to healing and transformation.
But besides trauma resolution through evidence-based interventions like therapy, counseling, and spiritual guidance, you can also manage your mental health and, by extension, your spirituality by tapping into the mind-body connection. Specifically, you can focus on physical aspects of your well-being, such as your eyesight to boost your mental health. So, this article explores how eye health, mental wellness, and spirituality are linked and what you can do to achieve healthy eyes and a healthy mind.
The connection between eye health and mental wellness
Since sight is one of the five major senses that help you navigate and interact with your surroundings, optimal eye health is essential to your quality of life. Spiritually speaking, your sight is the primary tool that enables you to perceive the world with greater clarity, awareness, and understanding. Many spiritual practitioners tend to neglect physical wellness in pursuit of higher spiritual goals. However, it is important to remember that our body is the vehicle for our soul in this world. If our body, especially our main sense of sight, does not function well, our mental and spiritual progress may be hindered.
When vision loss and impairments affect your ability to see, the new challenges you encounter in daily life can compromise your mental health and coping mechanisms, not to speak about spiritual growth. Research shows that one in four adults with eye disorders such as cataracts, glaucoma, and partial or full vision loss are more likely to experience mental illnesses like anxiety and depression than their normal-vision counterparts. The psychological challenges of losing or impairing one’s eyesight can also range from loss of confidence and frustration to trauma and isolation.
Furthermore, the relationship between eye health and mental wellness can be reciprocal. Mental health conditions are typically associated with high levels of stress, which in turn is a risk factor in the development and progression of eye disorders like cataracts and diabetic retinopathy. Overall, this complex connection urges individuals to adopt the eye care tips in the following section for better eye and mental health.
Ways to take better care of your eyes
Schedule routine eye exams
Proper eye care starts with seeing a qualified optometrist who can monitor your vision health and detect potential problems like refractive errors, cataracts, or age-related macular degeneration. However, some miss out on eye exams every one or two years due to busy schedules and lack of access to optical clinics.
Fortunately, I have found that there are alternatives to this problem, such as in the U.S., where the FDA has approved a platform called IbisVision that enables remote visual field testing to make various eye exams, such as vision and prescription testing, more accessible to patients.
The great benefit I see is that you don’t need to leave your home to get an eye prescription.
Use proper eyewear
If the eye exam reveals refractive errors like myopia and astigmatism, the doctor may advise you to get prescription glasses for vision correction. Whether or not it’s your first-time wearing eyeglasses, it’s crucial to use them daily to prevent your vision impairment from worsening and ultimately affecting your mental health. Buying prescription glasses from a trustworthy brand will ensure that the eyewear is long-lasting and of high quality.
Make healthy lifestyle changes
Lastly, it is helpful to combine eye care practices with healthy lifestyle changes. Start with a balanced diet that prioritizes nutrients for eye health, such as vitamin A sources like leafy greens, carrots, and squash. In general, using a food vibration chart as a guide and consuming high-vibration foods can boost your mental health and aid spiritual practitioners in achieving greater awareness.
Eye-healthy habits also include quitting cigarette smoking, as tobacco has been found to affect the eyes by damaging the retina, reducing your field of vision, and even contributing to vision loss through cataracts and macular degeneration. Interestingly, these lifestyle transformations can also feed into your mental health by lowering stress levels and improving your mood.
Your eyesight may just be one aspect of your physical health, but the broader mind-body connection highlights the importance of eye care for holistic health and wellness.
Conclusions
Taking care of your body is essential because it is the tool your soul uses to experience life. In a previous article, I explained how our body's vibration reflects our life journey and how our diet and perception of the world affect it. In this context, our sight is a crucial tool for our daily tasks.
