How panoramic vision helps you destress in real-time

As captured in the proverb “out of sight, out of mind”, our mental focus follows our visual focus. 

The reason is fascinating (and a bit weird, too): Our eyes are actually a part of our brains – the only one located outside the skull, that is.

Having the eyes outside our skull has two major purposes: First, they can tell the rest of the brain whether it’s day or night, which makes light the major synchronizer of our circadian rhythm. Second, it allows us to register events at a distance and adjust our alertness and behavior accordingly. Whenever we’re stressed, it’s not only our heart rate and breathing that increase.

As Stanford Professor Andrew Huberman explained in an interview with Scientific American, our vision changes in significant ways, too. Our pupils dilate, our field of vision narrows, and we see things in sharper relief, while everything else becomes blurry – like in portrait mode on a smartphone.

This is called “focal vision”. It’s associated with a high activation of our sympathetic nervous system (read: stress). As it turns out, we can use that association the other way around: By shifting ourselves to “panoramic vision” or “optic flow”, we can activate our parasympathetic nervous system (read: calm) and thus destress in real-time.

Here are two highly effective ways to pull that off, depending on how much time you have:

1. Stare at something 20 feet away for at least 20 to 60 seconds
   This simple practice will reliably and quickly get you into “panoramic vision”. It was inspired by Drs Gazzaley and Rosen, who recommend something similar for alleviating eye strain and fatigue in their excellent book The Distracted Mind.
   

2. Take a walk around the block for a minute or two
   Walking outside gets you into self-generated forward motion and puts you into what researchers call “optic flow” – meaning visual images passing you by as you wander along. The associated eye movements, in turn, produce “panoramic vision”.

So the next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, get into “panoramic vision” or “optic flow” for a minute or two – and see what happens to your stress level.

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Until next week,
Christian