I’m J. J. Virgin, Ph. D. dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times best selling author. I’m a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I’m driven, most of all, by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover.

with as many people as I can. And that’s where you come in. That’s why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to powerful aging and prescriptions.

Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe now at subscribetojj. com to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. If you’ve been wondering if it’s possible to ditch the glasses, even if you’ve been using them for years, You are going to be super excited about my guest today, Claudia Mullenweg.

Claudia actually has ditched her glasses twice in her life, and she is going to share how she’s done it. She’s the founder of Naturally Clear Vision Institute and the creator of the Naturally Clear Vision method, where she helps her clients see clearly, naturally, by addressing the root cause of their blurry vision.

Hint, hint. It’s not because you need glasses. Instead of using symptomatic treatments like glasses, like contacts, or surgery, which can actually, as I always suspected and she confirmed, make your eyesight worse for the long term. So we’re going to be digging into what are those factors that could be contributing to your poor vision and what you can do to turn this around in as little as five days.

Yes, it’s true. You are going to want to follow Claudia on her different channels. I’m going to put that in her free guide at jjvirgin. com forward slash claudia spelled c l a u d i a and I’ll be right back with Claudia Mullenweg. Stay with me. All right,

Claudia, I know we’ve been waiting a 📍 long time to do this show because you are determined to get me out of my glasses and hopefully today will be the inspiration. So, I am thrilled to have you here and I’m going to see if I can pronounce your last name correctly. All these years, I just put M. Claudia Mullenweg, veg.

Oh, you did

it in German,

JJ.

There, getting there. Okay, I should be able to do this. I’ve got a bunch of German in me.

I didn’t even know that. Well, thank you for having me today. I’m super excited about this.

Well, this is such an important episode for every woman over 40, because what, like, what, um, is the, uh, percentage of women over 40 that end up having to wear readers or something like that?

Do you know?

Yeah, in the developed world, about 80 percent of not just women, but men too, right? Over people over 45 need some kind of help with near vision.

Wow. 80%. Incredible. You’ve got a great market. All right. Well, let’s, let’s talk about you first because this all started. Because you were wearing glasses in school.

I was too. For you, it led you down a career path. It just made me kind of a bully in school because all the boys would tease me. So you’ve gotten out of glasses though twice in your life. So how did you do that?

Well, I got my first prayer at age three and I was bullied and teased in school too. So I was already determined as a teenager.

To get out of glasses, right. And I tasted this freedom briefly, um, in my, when I was about 15 and the boys would be like, you have pretty eyes. And I used to be teased, like, you know, whatever the bad words are, and, um, and I got a book on this method and I used it and I was out of glasses for almost basically my twenties.

And then basically till my mid thirties, when I was in a really challenging marriage that ended in divorce. And after a few years of doing this and realizing how quickly my vision got worse, I was like, wait a moment. I’ve done this before. I can do it again, even though I’m over 40 now. And I did. So it’s, there’s a lot of things that go into that.

And I think we can talk about it today, but both times in my life, I was under severe stress. And I, when my vision, um, I missed one part, sorry, one part I didn’t talk about. So I was 15, I was out of classes and then high school exams, right? Studying. I was not good in school. Study, study, study. Vision got really blurry.

And that got me determined to do something about it because I never wanted to be back in glasses again.

So you said, so I think back to school when I was getting teased, I got teased for all sorts of stuff. Being, you know, the tallest kid in class, wearing glasses, it was just like game on. But, um, I went and got contact lenses, you did something else.

So like, you know, what did you find that helped you get rid of these glasses?

What I found is that I had to relax. I really noticed immediately the more stressed I was, the worse my vision got. So I basically got this idea that vision changes, just like our blood pressure, our blood sugar levels, everything in the body constantly changes, right?

So I got that connection to when I was stressed, I was staring. I was like staring at this, like not the screen back then, it was books. Like the deer in the headlight. And when I relaxed and learned to relax my eyes and move my eyes, vision was clear. So I immediately got the difference, that kind of sensation of what I was doing, how my stress levels were, how was I feeling?

Did I feel confident? Did I feel scared? All these things had a big impact. Um, that was basically what I learned and also peripheral vision, which was a big thing for me because I started playing handball. Um, and that’s really helped me also get my vision better. You’re outside, you’re moving, you know, you have to look at your peripheral field, not just that tunnel vision that you get when you are like in that stress mode.

So those were the things that I really realized. And then I just had to do specific practices for near vision because I was farsighted. So my, I always had trouble with the near point and how the eyes work together as a team. I had like a missing depth perception. So I got hit in the head a lot with a ball initially.

Because I, yeah, catching and throwing I was really bad at, but they still wanted me on the team because they didn’t have enough girls back then. Yeah.

Remember that? I never, I was always on the boys team because I was so tall, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t catch well because I couldn’t see. So same thing, um, you said a couple of important things and like, I’d love to unpack, but the first big question around that is, you know, You said 45 80 percent of us need some type of corrective, um, something to correct our nearsighted vision.

What? Is it, and you said both men and women, so I know it’s not just straight, I would think it’s an estrogen problem, but what, what is the magical thing that happens in, at that time period that starts to shift our vision?

Well, the eye doctors tell you the lens is getting thicker or more, less flexible, and that causes all the problems, but we know that the eyeball is a soft tissue, it has very strong muscles around it, six extraocular muscles, and then the, um, the lens has a muscle too, so basically, We need to also practice our eyes at different distances, right?

When we just, when we don’t, like we lose a little bit of flexibility. I mean, you work with strength, right? You work with fitness. Our bodies change. We get wrinkles. There’s no, we can’t pretend nothing changes. That’s not the case. No, we’re not getting

wrinkles.

My point is, we do change, right? We have to work, you know, with fit, we have to work harder to keep the strength, you know?

So, so same with vision, like we do lose some flexibility in our eyeball, but again, we can keep that up. Just like we can keep our strength up, right? And you’re the master of teaching that.

Yeah. And yet this is never even talked about. And I am convinced, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. So I still remember I was in my mid forties and I was on a plane going to Italy and I was holding a book way out in front of me, reading the book.

And the person I was going to Italy with looked over and said, try these. And gave me his readers. And it was like, wow, but it also was like, wow, I felt like from the moment I put those readers on, my eyesight just went downhill. Now, I’ve tried to find proof everywhere because they’re like, no, that’s a myth, eyeglasses don’t make your eyesight worse, but how, it seems like it would make you lazier anyway.

So is there any truth to that idea that when you start to wear these reading glasses, it makes your eyesight worse? I

think the science goes back and forth, but what I, when I talk to like my clients, right, they all get frustrated because exactly what happens, you start with a plus one, and then you get to the point where you need a plus one and a half, and then you need a plus two, and eventually here’s the bad thing that happens, and that’s why I call read as a gateway drug.

You always had great distance vision, maybe you had 20 20 vision, 20 15, maybe not us, right? But most people are like, I always said eagle eye, and then all of a sudden, Couple years into work or maybe three, four, five years depends on how quickly you use the readers. All of a sudden your distance vision is bad and now you need glasses for driving and you don’t even have 20 40 clarity anymore, which is the legal limit for driving.

And then you’re stuck in bifocals or progressives and you have no clarity at any distance. To me that is super scary. It just, yeah, you’re really handicapped at that point, right?

Yeah, I will tell you, you know, it was interesting. I grew up with glasses and my doctor told me that when I got my period, my eyesight would be 20 20.

It didn’t happen. And I always wore contact lenses. And then I had babies. And I remember my contact lenses after I had Grant would not work. And I just thought, I didn’t really give any thought to the fact that maybe I didn’t need them. And I go to the doctor, he goes, you have perfect vision. Why are you getting these contact lenses?

And so up until the time on the plane. I was fine. And then from the moment on the plane down, it’s just another reason to blame that, blame that guy. Another thing he did. Um, it just feels like my eyesight has declined. And this is the big question for someone listening who’s been wearing readers for maybe a decade or more.

Is it just, is there anything we can do? Is it just too late? You hear about things like LASIK, I will share with you that our buddy Dr. Ronnie Bonick’s like, I would never do LASIK and, and I go to these big eye doctor conferences and none of the eye doctors do LASIK for themselves. And I’m like, that’s all I needed to hear.

So is there really something you can do now? Is there really hope to be able to get out of glasses or is it just kind of, you know, managing it so you don’t have to get thick ones?

Two things. The earlier you start, right, the better it is. Then you can prevent them. I got out of glasses twice. There is a level of how, you know, nearsighted or farsighted you are, right?

There is a level of where you, like somebody with a really strong prescription, but you can always improve. I mean, I give you an example. I worked with a woman. She was in her seventies. And we, I always teach people to read prescriptions, first of all, to understand what do all these numbers mean on your eyeglasses prescription, right?

And she had those progressives and she had about plus two and a half for distance and about 5. 75 for reading. And I said, well, just try it out. Go to the drugstore, get some like, whatever the strongest thing is they have, like 3. 25. She did that. She’s like, you know what? That works. I can read everything.

So basically diopters is the measurement of the strength of the glasses, right? Just like pounds of weight, for instance, and they only work for a specific distance. And when you start with readers, you wouldn’t have looked up in the distance with those readers. Everything would have been blurry, right? You, you understand.

So basically only use glasses when you absolutely need them and use the weakest, Classes you can, that’s number one. And you know, you teach meditation and you teach all these things, but really mindset is also so important. Do I do a task that I hate? Is it something, you know, something I love to do?

Because that has an impact on what I call the strains and gains. Like when I noticed already as a teenager that my vision varied, like what makes it better? What makes it worse? Like what are the things, the tasks, you know, whatever the, the light levels, whatever all these things are, like makes my vision worse.

And what makes it better, right? Because we know you teach the parasympathetic nervous system. All these things are really important to understand what upsets me. And we might not notice that because we’re so used to having that stress, right? We have so used to having chronic stress that we’re not even in tune with how our eyes are affected by that.

And everybody that takes my course is like, wow. Now I understand the things, the habits I have. Like blinking is one of those simple things. People with poor vision don’t blink. They stare at the camera. Like, you know, like I used to do, I used to be really good at that.

Hasn’t tech, I want to get back into some of the things that can make your eyesight get worse, but I would think tech is not helping it.

It’s not. And here’s, but here’s the interesting part. I was teaching a three day event last fall for three days. We did like 28 hours on the computer, right? Every one of the 200 participants improved their vision, but you need to know what you’re doing. Wait, how do you,

like, how do you know they improved their vision?

Well, if they post that post in the chat, like I read this book, I can, I don’t need my readers for instance. People told us. In three days? Yeah. After the first day, the second day. And even my team who worked really hard behind the scenes, one of them is nearsighted, one of them is farsighted. And they’re like, oh, my vision, like the guy with the readers, he’s like, I don’t need my reading glasses.

And when I read the chat, it was really interesting.

Wow.

But. The simple thing is the blinking. Like, when we look at screens, studies have shown that we blink maybe two to three times per minute. Like, we literally Stare at the screen, right? Versus when we look at somebody, if you have ever done eye gazing with somebody, right, at the events, you look into each other’s eyes.

Oh, don’t you hate that exercise more than anything?

No, I love it. But I always

feel

like this and then it feels, you feel like really intimidated. And so, and then I start blinking and then everybody relaxes because blinking also slows down time, the sensation, not really, and it lubricates our eyes and it prevents staring.

So it keeps your eyes loose and relaxed. Um, so blinking is one of those simple things that people with normal vision always do a lot of, but they don’t think about it, right? It’s like

How would you be able to You know, because the minute you’re aware of blinking, then you’re aware of blinking. Like, it would be great to go back and maybe it’s watching an interview or something, and go, how much do I actually blink per minute?

Because I heard you talking about this, and I’m like, how the heck? Like, the minute you were aware of it, I’m like, now I’m aware I’m blinking. So, I’m gonna blink. And you say that the average person is blinking two to three times a minute, and how much should they be blinking?

Every two to three seconds, but I’m saying when they look at screens.

So when we look at another, when we like, you know, when we like with a friendly person that we like, right, we automatically blink more because again, it’s creepy. If you look at somebody, it’s just like you get immediately goosebumps. I actually got goosebumps just saying that it says, you know what I mean?

It’s that hard stare when we have like serial I always have this hard stare. It’s like, it’s. It feels very scary.

Well, and I would think if you’re even doing video and stuff, it would be creepy to watch someone not blinking. Like it’d be better. So, so first thing is to pay attention to how much you’re blinking and blink more.

Yes. Right. So that’s the first one which I would think you’d need to become aware of because it’s, it’s, it’s, An autonomic move so you wouldn’t know that you were doing it unless you paid attention to it. So that’s the first thing. Um, now the stress piece of it, and it’s amazing to me that you figured out at 15, like I didn’t even know what stress was at 15, right?

Although nowadays kids are under major amounts of stress, which is really concerning. But, um, You know, what is that role that stress has in your eyesight? And how quickly, I mean, are you just putting in some things like meditation practices or what are you doing to help correct that?

So I put the dots together because again, I was out of glasses, 15, 16, right?

Like for two years. And then all of a sudden I was, You know, taught the high school exams. And I remember sitting in a train and having that, like you were in the plane, right? I was in the train, take, and I looked at the book and everything was super blurry. And at that moment I had that total panic attack, like, Oh my God, I’m losing my vision again.

I’m going to be back in glasses. And then I found this book and that was back in the day. That was in the seventies. I, we had to like, so I went to the library and I bought this book, which But written by a woman in California, which is the funniest thing. Anyway, I was doing those, I call them relaxercises now, but I would be sitting in the train, like moving my eyes along the lines, you know, basically you learn how to relax your eyes.

Movement is one of those things, right? Not mechanical, just like, but like, like looking at things and moving your head along and noticing these versus trying, when we stare, we try to see a big picture clear at once. When the eye anatomy, we have a tiny spot in the retina called the fovea. Well, we have perfectly clear vision and the, right, the further away things are, like, if I look at you right now, I see my room, my house, I see, but I don’t see that clearly.

I see, I’m aware of those things. So when I did these practices, also sunlight exposure, I, you know, wouldn’t wear sunglasses anymore other than like skiing, but learning some of these things, peripheral vision movement, It just immediately, my vision would clear up when I did these things.

So, okay, but back to stress before we go to those things.

So first thing you did was connect the dots. Did you do something specific to manage the stress or did you go after other things to improve the eyesight or did you do both?

I don’t think I was, like you said, I wasn’t aware that much of stress in a way, like right back then we didn’t talk about stress, but I realized in that moment when I did those.

Relaxercises that my vision got better. So I realized I was focusing, I wasn’t meditating back then. I wasn’t doing any of that, but I was reading book about Zen Buddhism and the art of archery. I was like in the book, I think it’s called the Zen and archery or something, but it was all about letting go of the effort.

And when I realized, you know, like effort, we say a lot of times, you know, no pain, no gain. Like we have to work hard. It wasn’t, I was preparing for school. I was reading, I was studying. I wasn’t like saying, Oh, I’m just going to wing it. That wasn’t the case. But I also realized that I had to let go. I had to prepare, but then I had to let go and trust that things work out.

That was a big thing for me as a control freak.

I wonder if they looked at 80 percent if, if the control freaks were, you know, if the 20 percent were people that just were like, ah, you know, be interesting. You’d kind of look and go, are the 20 percent Zen Buddhist meditating? Like, you know, People versus the 80 percent are like drivers.

I don’t know that. I know that they looked at people in developed and the, and the third world countries, and they only had 60 percent of Presbyopia, but which is that old age site where you lose that near vision, right? It’s called Presbyopia versus the developed world. So I think there is also a connection with studying education, doing a lot of near work and our eyes can look up near, but we are not, we were never meant to like look at something close up for eight to 10 hours a day, right?

So the artificial junk light that we are exposed to, like light is a big piece, eyes are light receivers. So natural light is just so important for everything from hormones to circadian rhythm to sleep and for healthy eyeballs, right? So the, now we have these LEDs, we have all these bad lights now that really have an impact on our vision too.

Well, let’s go back. So I, I also wonder with third world, are they just not? It’s just not as accessible, whereas here it’s like the minute your eyesight goes down at all you’re in the grocery store and there’s the readers, you know, it’s like it’s so accessible.

They had that eye doctors, you know, basically that, They know their data, but when those, when they looked at the same third world countries, there was India, Brazil and Africa, and I don’t know exactly the state in Africa, but when they went into the cities, it was the same rate.

So there was higher education, like I said, more, more brain powered stuff, right, that we were doing. Yeah.

More reason that we need to get back to kind of being out in nature and calming down and not working so much. Note to self. All right. So over to sunglasses, cause you kind of whipped that one out there and, uh, said, I don’t wear sunglasses anymore, but I’ve always heard that we’re supposed to wear sunglasses to protect our eyes from the sun.

So what’s the story there?

Okay. So eyes are light receivers, like I said, right? Our eyes, I’m talking about, first of all, healthy eyeballs, right? If there is, if that’s not the case, then please wear sunglasses. Or if you’re skiing, like when I went skiing, right? Or like extreme bright conditions. I’m talking about our daily, normal lifestyle lives.

So we have pupils. They go really big when it’s dark and they get very small when it’s bright. So that’s our built in sunglasses. And when we eat a healthy diet and we get enough of that lutein, the zeaxanthin, we eat the dark leafy greens, we eat the fruits and vegetables, all the stuff that you’re teaching, right?

We have a healthy diet. Our eyes actually absorb the blue light. So we have, the biology is pretty amazing that we have, right? So again, extreme conditions are different, but when you always wear sunglasses, like I used to do on overcast days, your pupils never, they never learned to react to light, right?

They just stay behind these dark glasses all the time. And it really affected my night driving, like the bright headlights. I actually almost gave up night driving. And when I learned how to Reduce my light sensitivity, right? And now night driving doesn’t bother me anymore at all. And I hear that from so many of my.

That is it, it almost reminds me of being like a, a thermometer or a thermostat and that, you know, one of the challenges we have in modern life for our metabolism is that we’ve set our thermostat. Like I just walked upstairs to my office and I go, the thermostat’s set at 72, so we don’t have to regulate our temperature.

Like it’s easy. Right. And it seems like the same for your eyesight. So. All of a sudden, you’re just keeping it steady the whole time. Your eyesight, your eyes don’t have to work to adjust to differences in light. So then when the lights go down, they can’t adjust because you’ve taken that process out. Is that a way to interpret that?

Exactly. I mean, we have the pupillary reaction. They do that sometimes. We know eye doctors, they shine a bright light into your eyes and see how quickly does the pupil close, right? So we need to practice that, right? Our eyes need to be exposed. Exposed to these different brightness levels. So that makes total sense.

And for me, that was a game changer. Do I still wear sunglasses? Sometimes, like I said, if it’s extreme conditions, it’s snow, it’s a blue sky, right? That’s different. Um, and if you are somebody listening and your pupils, you have some kind, you take some kind of drugs or you got Atrophine in the eye from the eye doctor visit, right?

Your pupils are wide open. And then please wear sunglasses because that can actually damage your eyes for sure.

So, walk us through, because you talked about junk light, and I look at light in terms of regulating our circadian rhythm and being for health, um, how would you walk someone through light exposure, what they need to do in terms of being in front of screens, like getting up in the morning and seeing the sunlight, like what’s, what would you take someone through for a good, healthy eye, eye behavior during the day?

We definitely want that. Light in the morning from the natural light, right? I recommend going outside even right before the sun rises. No sunglasses, just get light into your eyes and actually get it onto your skin. We now know how important it is for hormonal health to get all these things. Well, what if it’s still dark

when you wake up?

So I, what I do is like, I just got some of those salt lamps, right? I usually actually don’t turn lights on in my house. I mean, it’s different if I had to put on makeup, right? Of course we have to put light on, but do as much as you can and like dimmer light or no use the salt lamps up some really.

Orangey, low, low level lighting, right? So dimmer light, no bright lights in the ceiling to kind of mimic the sunrise, which is also more that horizon level and it’s warmer light. So that’s what I would do. That’s what I do now. I don’t turn any bright lights on.

Have you seen those Philips Hue lights where you can, you can use them program on your phone so they can mimic Normal circadian rhythm?

I have heard of them. I haven’t seen them yet, but that sounds like a really cool technology.

Yes, they’re very cool. Okay. So, so first thing is you’re trying to use natural light or at least if natural light’s not out yet because of the stupid daylight savings time, then I can’t see daylight savings time.

It’s like, could we just get rid of this thing? Anyway, then you’re going to use. It’s either Philips, Philips lights or salt lamps or something. So it’s not that direct overhead blaring light. Okay. Next up.

And one thing I want to talk about, you know, studies have shown that infrared light is really helpful to rejuvenate the mitochondria in older retinal cells.

And guess what? That’s all for free included in natural light, right? We don’t always, we don’t have to buy these expensive devices. I mean, just getting sunlight during the day. Right? At different times. I like to do it in the morning, the evening, and then during the day also. And sometimes I just walk up and down my driveway or go in the garden.

Little things, right? If you walk in an office, just grab your lunch out of the car, do something just to, right? We can, we can do these things for ourselves. Get, even if you get five minutes, it really helps.

It’s like a five minute exercise snack, a five minute light snack.

There you go. I love that.

I, I think one of the biggest things that we need to be doing is getting outside more.

It is a great reason to have dogs because they have to go outside. So guess what? Go with them. So.

You know, the funny thing is, um, when I, I actually, I used to smoke cigarettes, which is the worst thing you can do for your eyesight, but I’m from Germany and we all smoke cigarettes. But when I moved to the U.

S. initially, we always found time. Even if we worked on the 12th floor, we found time to go outside, smoke a cigarette, right? So sometimes I think, like, think like a smoker in terms of taking that break, not like smoking cigarettes, right? Like, because we, it’s true, right? We, we always spend that time when anybody that ever smoked, it’s like, you know, it’s, you do it.

I don’t know. I’ve never smoked. So there you have it. I’ll take your word for it. My, you know why? Because my dad was a huge smoker and he would like put us in the car. You’d never do this nowadays, but we’d all be locked in the car with the cigarettes and it’d be so ill that I can’t, if someone is on the freeway and they’re smoking in a car next to me, I can smell it and I get an instant headache because I have that memory of it.

And

it’s really bad for your eyes. Cataracts, macular degeneration, smoking is the worst thing. So please don’t do that.

So, so we talked about morning, well what happens then as we get into the evening with light and, and along with that, like, the junk light that you’re talking about, you’re not just talking about overhead light, like what are we doing about the screens?

Do we need those glasses during the day to protect our eyes from the screens? Like what should we be doing there and how bad is it?

I, I use like software, right? Apple devices have night, uh, night shift mode. And I usually have my screens a little yellow, so I get, don’t get that much blue light. I don’t think, I don’t think it’s a big deal to be honest with the blue light.

What we don’t want is blue light after sunset, right? In the evening, because that does mess up with our circadian rhythm. But I have my screen set to that like dimmer light and then more yellowish. So there’s lots of software. That’s Iris. It’s a software, there’s Flux, there’s Flux is free, I think Iris costs a little bit of money.

Um, but there’s software now, we don’t, I hate putting glasses on my face, period. Um, the only time I use these kind of orangey glasses are in the evening if I do watch TV and my, my TV doesn’t have any fancy screen settings. So I put them, the orange glasses on to watch TV. Um, TV sometimes in the evening, but that’s it.

I don’t really like TV.

A bad, like, it’s funny. I never, ever used to watch TV until I met Tim. And then we became like hooked on Netflix things. Um, how bad is that in the evening?

I mean, I don’t think it’s that bad. I mean, it’s again, are you staring at the screen? Are you sitting really close? I blink a lot.

There you go. Is the room also you, here’s the thing too, right? When we. When we have that light in our eyes, our pupils, uh, get smaller, right? Which is a good thing. But if we sit in a dark room and the only thing that’s on is the TV and everything else is pitch black dark, or the computer for that matter, the pupils open up because it’s dark, right?

So what we do, we want the peripheral field. This is a thing that happens with computers and glasses, people that wear glasses. We have that kind of tunnel vision, right? We have this It’s over focus on what’s ahead of us versus being aware of the whole room around us. Does that make sense? So having maybe salt lamps, having some orange lamps, you don’t want to sit in a completely dark room and only have the TV screen on or the computer screen on.

So you want to match the lighting of the screen to your environment, if that makes sense.

So, speaking of that, what would be the best way to set up, like, your workspace, because I would think that’s where we’re doing, spending the majority of our time, is workspace in front of a computer. What are some tips to set that up so that it’s the most efficient?

I, I say friendly situation.

So I’m, I’m sitting here in my kitchen right now, which I, cause I love sitting in my kitchen and my computer would be too low if I just put it on the counter. Right. So I have two yoga blocks under my laptop right now so that the top level of the computer is that eye level. So that you want the top of the, you don’t want to look down.

I see that a lot with computers, with laptop, right? We looked up and if I were to type now, I would have to need an external keyboard, right? Because otherwise. Right, the posture, you want the elbows at a 90 degree, the arms so that your wrists are relaxed, the shoulders are relaxed, that you can look straight, about two feet distance.

It depends a little bit on how big your screen is, but what I see to happen is when people are farsighted and they, they, they sometimes like they’re really far away and people that are near are like, for those of you listening, you know, so we want to find that about two feet distance. That allows us to relax our eyes, but also not too close or too far away from the screen and have good posture that we are looking, that we’re straight, right?

We’re not doing the head, forward head posture, which is a real problem.

And is there a certain amount of time, like, should you be taking a break? Like, I want people taking a break and moving, but for your eyes, is there a certain amount of time that you should say, at this point you need to go do something else for a little bit?

Yes, here’s my favorite tip. So eye doctors love to throw out the 20 20 20 rule, which I think is super catchy. That means every 20 minutes, get up for 20 seconds and look 20 feet in the distance. And I’m like, who is going to set a timer on their phone? So I always recommend set your computer up if you can, right?

If you’re walking the cubicle, it’s different, but if you can set your computer up in front of a window so that literally all you have to do is like, I’m, I can just look out really. It’s easy. I don’t have to get up. I mean, I like movement to get, don’t get me wrong. I have a standing desk that I can easily make go up and down.

Uh, a balance board that I’m standing on, so there is always a little bit of automatic movement, right? I’m not moving a lot right now in this recording because that can be distracting, but I, when I’m on my, when I’m working, I’m moving, I’m on the balance board or maybe I sit, but I look out in the distance all the time because I’m right in front of a window, not against the wall, which is right.

Does that make sense so that you can easily find you without any rules or timers? Because honestly, yeah.

That won’t work. I want to get some practical advice and I know you also have a challenge and you have guides. So we’ll talk about that too. But before we get there, I think we’ve covered most. Are there any other like, Silly myths out there or misconceptions that, that we haven’t addressed?

I think one of the myths is that your eyesight cannot get better. That it’s just like you’re just doomed to get worse and worse. That’s one of the myths I, I do talk about. And that it’s all based on your eyeball. And if your eyeball has any faults, that’s Basically 90 percent of our vision happens in the brain.

The retina is actually an extension of our brain. So when we, when we look at perception, because I see people with the same prescription and one person can read this line on the eye chart and the next person can read another line. Like how aware are we? How much are we paying attention? Eyesight can only happen in the present moment.

Foresight, imagination, right? It’s like future thinking or back, like hindsight. Memories, All that is important in vision. Like we, I work a lot with the brain in terms of like, do you have a visual memory? Because our visual cortex lights up the same way. If we think about something or we visualize. Then when we actually open our eyes, right?

And so sometimes people have problems with memory and imagination is always based on memory. So I work a lot with that stuff too. Yes. Healthy eyeballs, blinking, breathing, right? We need good breathing, that the eye, that the brain gets the oxygen, we need to release tension in the neck. I work a lot with myofascial release so that the lymph can flow and All that stuff, right?

But we also need to work with our brain and our perception, right? Like, what do we actually know? What do we actually see? I

think, you know, one of the things when you think about this, this is what I’d love to walk through is, is again, I think most people listening, Myself included would go, all right, well, you know, this is just part of aging.

It’s normal, right? I always hate that. It’s normal. I’m like, okay, well normal, like if you look at what’s out there, you would say, oh, it’s normal to lose your muscle, gain weight, get depressed, do like, That might be normal, but that doesn’t have to be you, right? That might be what’s happening out in the world, but we know that you can actually put on muscle as you age, that you can have better energy, you can do all this stuff, and it sounds like eyesight’s another one of those things.

The question is, because this has been my belief, is that yes, that’s true, and it takes a lot of time. So, but what I’m hearing from you is actually a lot of the habits that you need to put in place to have better eyesight are the habits that you put in place to have better, a better health, metabolic health overall.

And then are there some specific things that you need to do for eyesight and how much time does that take to do?

Here’s the thing. When somebody starts working with me, there’s always a bigger time investment. Like if you learn to do a different workout or you change your diet, right? Initially, you have to learn how do I replace this with that?

You, you have to read ingredient labels. You just have to kind of learn stuff, right? And then it becomes, Autopilot. You know exactly what to buy. You know exactly what to make. And the same with vision. Like I do the, the, I don’t, I don’t even like the word exercises, but a lot of the exercises we teach, it’s about light, light, you know, um, able to tolerate light, eye movement.

The saccadic eye movements happen automatically, but we can improve them, just like we can improve blinking, how we can improve breathing. So a lot of the things I teach are just like things that you initially do these kind of quote unquote exercises to basically know what’s the difference between being relaxed and seeing, letting things come to you.

Eyes are light receivers, we’re not grabbing things with our eyes, right? So initially I would say 10 to 15 to 20 minutes a day is good. I don’t spend any time on any of this. I just. Use my eyes well all day long because I know what to do. You know, does that make sense? So you can, the whole day, like when you’re driving, you can do blinking, peripheral awareness.

Like you, you know, yeah. Does that make sense? Maybe something, some people need to do certain exercises, how the eyes work together. Like there’s fusion exercises, you know, that might be more of a thing where you actually have to designate a little bit of time, a couple minutes to do something. But compared to your workout regimen that you do every day, I’m like, I don’t have time for that.

Well, you should make time.

Like, you know, we don’t have to spend 30 hours, uh, 30 minutes of an hour every day on eye exercises at all.

That’s good. Um, oh gosh, let me see if this. It comes back to me when you said that is there. So it sounds like there’s different things that need to be corrected, but they won’t be the same for everybody, which would make sense.

It’s just like if someone’s coming in and they want to age powerfully, well, maybe they need to add more steps. Maybe they need to do resistance training. Maybe they need to up their protein. Maybe they need to get themselves to sleep. So is there an initial assessment that someone goes through to say, is it that my eyes are not working together well, or I don’t blink?

Like, how do they, how do they know those things?

Yeah, first of all, I always teach, you know, if you have an eye doctor prescription, right? What do all these numbers mean? What do that assess? And then we also check your vision. I mean, there’s an eye chart. You don’t see it right now, but a traditional Snellen eye chart is a great way to check your visual acuity.

When we talk about eyesight, that’s what we mean. Visual acuity, how sharp can you see something? And you can literally just measure that yourself. Like sometimes people are shocked that their vision is way overcorrected. with the glasses. And sometimes they can barely drive with the current glasses. So we have to look at all these factors.

Then we look at like astigmatism, which is one of those things that a lot of eye doctors put in the prescription. But if it’s very minor, it doesn’t affect your vision and astigmatism is linked to posture. So again, we’re tying together like, what should I look at the prescription? I’m like, are you right handed?

They’re like, Oh yeah. How do you know? I’m like, well, your left cylinder astigmatism is worse. You must be looking a lot to your right so that your left eye is further away from the focal point. Like, So, so I, I, you know, we kind of look at all these pieces, what is your binocular vision, which is how the two eyes work together so that we have depth perception.

And I find that a lot with older clients or people that have so called monovision correction, where one eye looks near and one eye looks far. That they, the eyes never work together. So they have very weak depth perception, which leads to tripping and falling and bad balance. We look at night vision, like what’s your night vision ability, your peripheral vision.

So we train that by blocking the central vision. There is an assessment in my group online programs. There’s everybody kind of learns how to do them themselves because Right? What’s your dominant eye? We have a dominant eye, just like we have a dominant hand. Um, you know, what are, we even go into like emotional things.

That’s a big piece too. You know, what is, what is your right eye’s personality? What’s your left eye’s personality? Like, how do they, do they like each other? Do they, you know, it’s, we don’t stop that because people were like, that’s too woo woo. But then everybody’s like, wow, this is so interesting. I’m learning so much about my eyes and you know, they don’t want any exercises.

Sometimes people are really surprised. Our eyes can tell us a lot what they want and need.

It is interesting how it feels like a field that’s really hasn’t caught up with the times. And I know that there’s so much that you can see through the eyes just in terms of diagnosing diseases and it’s just kind of doesn’t feel like we’re using, using any of what we now know to our advantage here.

Myself included. Tell me about, this will be the last, the last thing here, and I know you won’t like this question so much, but I would love, and maybe it’s just pull out a person or two, but I would love to know what someone could expect. Someone coming in who wears glasses, maybe has for five or ten years, and would love to be able to either reduce the prescription or toss them all together, maybe just have to use them here and there.

You know, what would they expect to have happen as they go through the program? How long would it take? You know, what are some initial things they’d notice? Like, take me through sort of Because I would imagine that’s a pretty typical, um, client that you see.

Yeah, we have, I work with clients, I would say most people fall into either near sighted or far sighted category.

Really quick, near sighted you see good up close, but distance is blurry, and then we have people that have far sighted, they can see the distance better, but cannot read the small print, right? And so my program, my natural key vision program is a 12 week program, and we have had people that really got out of classes completely in 12 weeks.

Just somebody just told me that just went back to the eye doctor, And, um, did the test again at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Now they’re cleared. They don’t need glasses for driving anymore. We have people in any age from like 30 to 70 to 80 reducing diopters. We had somebody with a very high level of Reducing what?

You just said reducing something with a D.

Somebody reduced, um, all the way from a very strong near sighted prescription for diopters which means Like think of losing weight in a way that they improve. Everybody is in weaker glasses at the end of 12. And depends on, like I said, a nearsighted person might be able to now be on the computer without glasses or read without glasses, but they might still need glasses for driving, right?

But we, we always improve quickest at the distance where we better at. So for you to try to read small print and candlelight, It’s not as realistic as being able to not need glasses for, let’s say, being on the computer or for reading. You know what I mean? Like, we improve step by step because, like I said, glasses are only good designed for one specific distance, and we break everybody from progressive glasses, which lead to kind of, you know, Here’s the thing, progressive, if you wear progressive glass or bifocals and I see you on the computer with your chin up looking through the lower part of your

chest,

that creates tension in the neck that is related to astigmatism creation because they assume when you look straight, you look in the distance and when you look down, you’re reading.

But guess what? Computer, you look, you look straight, but you need, it’s a near point. So you, now you’re doing this. And people fall downstairs because they look down and they look down at their feet and that’s not reading distance. So we get everybody into separate pairs or not using glasses when we don’t need them.

We don’t. So that’s important to improve. It’s like you have to be willing to let go of some of the control in certain areas where like maybe there is a little bit of blur when you go on a hike, let’s say. When you’re on the computer, you need clarity, right? We can’t, we don’t want to strain your, our eyes, but where do you really need to, where can you let go of some of that super sharpness for, for, for to improve, right?

We need room to improve. Quick thing. You can’t improve your strength and your flexibility if your arm is in a cast. And so we need to get out of that cast of the full strength prescription. And slowly step down.

That’s a beautiful way to explain that one. That makes a ton of sense. So for someone listening to this, who would love to either toss their glasses or at least not have to use, use as heavy a prescription or use them as often.

Um, what are some options? How do they work with you? How do they find you? And we’re going to put all of this information at jjvirgin. com forward slash DEXA. Claudia, C L A U D I A. Um, but what talk, walk us through what the options, I know you have a YouTube Wednesday live class you do. What all are you doing?

So the first thing I usually recommend, I have a guide called 10 habits. Right. That gives you 10 healthy habits. Some of the things we talked about, it goes in depth into the things you can do that get you started. That’s a free guide that I have. That’s a good way to get started. I have an Instagram, I have a YouTube, Holistic Vision Coach.

I’m known as the Holistic Vision Coach on Instagram and YouTube. So I have great content there. And I have, and you talked about this a little earlier, um, A five day training. I don’t call it challenge, but it’s kind of like think it’s a five day free event. And I call it see better in just five days, because your eye doctor might say this doesn’t work.

You’re like, Claudia, I don’t know if I believe you. You know, I always say, don’t believe me. Don’t believe your eye doctor. See for yourself. And in five days, People have improvements and now they’re like, wow, I get it now. I understand that this is possible. And what I hear over and over again, there’s hope.

There’s hope. Five days.

How much time each day and for five days and what, what is it? What is like, tell me a success story in five days.

Okay. So the time, the trainings are all like a couple minutes long, the pre recorded trainings. And then we go live every day for like an hour and a half. Right where we go, like where we, we are coach people, where we practice things together.

So for the five days, I would say like an hour to 90 minutes for that, each of those days, if you want to participate in all the life coaching days, which I would highly recommend. Uh, success story is that somebody said they immediately didn’t need their glasses anymore for, um, looking up close at the computer.

They were like, I can’t believe it. I can see the computer clearly. The biggest thing is that people notice that their vision changes and that they can do things to make it better. What I, that was the big thing I noticed at 15, right? Like, like, okay, my vision changes. I didn’t realize that. My doctor told me my eyes are just bad eyeballs, right?

I just have to wear glasses. And now I’m connecting the dots that when I do that, when I get the sunlight, when I rest my eyes, when I blink more, whatever we, all the little things, right, that we’re have a big impact on how sharp I see. So that is basically, right? That sensation of like, I can make, I can change something.

Thank God you didn’t believe what they told you. It’s, it’s a bigger thing though. Think of it, Claudia, how many times we’re told stuff and it changes the trajectory of our life because we believe some limitation instead of going, Oh no, I’m not going to go with that. Look what a shift it has made for you.

And I know you’ve helped thousands of people now have naturally clear vision because You just weren’t going to take that as truth. So I think it’s super exciting. And again, we’re going to put everything at jjvirgin. com forward slash Claudia. And that’s not a lot of time to invest when you think about the, what it can reap for you.

Like it’s pretty crazy. Yes. Very cool. Plus it’s free. So we’ll have the free guide. We’ll have a link to the training, the free guide, um, and all of your different social channels and your YouTube show so everybody can toss their glasses or at least reduce their use.

Exactly. See better as you get older, not worse.

Perfect. Powerful aging, powerful eyesight. Need them both.

Yes.

Yes.

I love it.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook, and my website, jjvirgin. com. And make sure to follow my podcast at subscribetojj. com so you don’t miss a single one.

And hey, if you’re loving what you hear, don’t forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll catch you on the next episode.

Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that’s designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

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