The three-minute eye press
On a small palming practice I learned from a yoga teacher — and what it has done for tired eyes and the small headaches that came with them.
I work in front of a screen, like most people. By five in the afternoon my eyes are tired in a particular way that no amount of blinking quite addresses — a small dull ache behind the eyeballs, a slight blurring at the edges of the screen, the beginning of a headache that I know will arrive by seven if I do not do something about it.
Three years ago, on a yoga retreat in southern France, the teacher introduced a small practice called palming — three minutes of cupping the warmed palms over the closed eyes, sitting quietly, with no other activity. I tried it on the retreat and the eyes responded immediately. I came home and started doing it most afternoons around five. The end-of-day headaches mostly stopped.
What palming is
Sit upright in a chair, feet on the floor. Rub the palms together briskly for about ten seconds, until they are noticeably warm. Cup them gently over the closed eyes — without pressing on the eyeballs, just resting on the surrounding bone. The fingertips overlap on the forehead. The base of the palms rests on the cheekbones. The eyes are in complete darkness inside the warm cups of the hands.
Stay there for three minutes. Breathe normally. Do not do anything else. The mind will, at first, try to use the three minutes to plan the rest of the day. The mind is not in charge of this. The three minutes belongs to the eyes.
What the eyes do in the warmth and the dark
Reset, mostly. The constant work of focusing on a screen has, by five in the afternoon, exhausted the small muscles around the eyes and inside the orbit. The eyes are looking at a fixed distance for hours at a time, with the focal length unchanging, and the muscles that control accommodation are locked into one position. The dark inside the cupped palms relieves them of all of this. The warmth gently relaxes the small muscles. The complete absence of visual input lets the visual cortex briefly disengage.
After three minutes, you slowly remove the hands, let the eyes adjust to the room light, and look at something distant — out of a window if possible, across the room if not. The relief is immediate. The dull ache behind the eyes is mostly gone. The blurring at the edges of the screen has cleared. The headache that was forming does not arrive.
On the small place this has earned in the day
I do it almost every afternoon now, usually around four-thirty or five. The practice takes three minutes plus a small amount of time to settle into and out of it — call it five minutes total. The cost is small. The return — fewer headaches, less eye strain, the rest of the evening available for things other than recovering from the day — is large.
If you work in front of a screen, try this. The instruction is simple. The investment is three minutes. The change, after a week of consistent practice, will be noticeable. The eyes do most of the heavy lifting of a modern day's work, and they almost never get a deliberate rest. Three minutes of warm dark is, in my own experience, the cheapest and most useful gift you can give them.