Imagine your body as a well-balanced tower. To stay strong and stable, it needs a solid foundation and clear vision. Now, think of your feet as the foundation and your eyes as the lookout at the top. Both play crucial roles in maintaining your posture, movement, and overall well-being.
Starting with your feet, they have special receptors call mechanoreceptors that provide feedback to your brain about the surface you’re standing on. These receptors help you stay balanced and adjust your body accordingly. But sometimes, due to factors like tight shoes and weak feet, these receptors stop working efficiently and can get a bit confused. When this happens, your foundation becomes unsteady, leading to imbalances in your posture and movement.
Now, let’s look up to your eyes. They not only allow you to see the world but also help with something called eye convergence which affects depth perception. As one eye controls one side of the body, and the other side controls the other, if both aren’t working the same it can get very difficult for the body to determine true reality!
Imagine your eyes as two captains steering different sides of your body. They work together to make sure everything is aligned and balanced. But what if one captain gets a bit confused and starts giving wrong directions? That’s what happens when there’s an issue with eye convergence in one eye.
Eye convergence is the ability of your eyes to focus on a single point when looking up close but it also helps you judge distances accurately. But, if one eye has trouble with convergence, it may send mixed-up messages to your brain about how far things are.
Now, imagine you’re reaching for an object. Normally, both eyes would give your brain the same information about the object’s distance. But if one eye is not sensing the distance correctly, it confuses your brain. Your brain tries to make sense of this conflicting information and ends up sending instructions to your body that might not be quite right.
To compensate for the mixed-up messages, your body may twist and adjust its neck and shoulders and posture. For example, if your left eye has convergence issues, your brain might tell your body to twist slightly to the right to align with what your right eye sees. This twisting and adjusting help your body stay balanced and adapt to the perceived distance of objects, and may be the reason your body feels twisted, as this constant twisting and adjustment can lead to imbalances in your body’s alignment and fascia over time. It can cause discomfort, muscle imbalances, and affect the internal proprioception and coordination of movements.
In today’s digital age, we often spend a lot of time staring at screens, which can strain our eye convergence abilities.
But that’s not all. These imbalances in your body’s posture and movement can also have an impact on your mental health. When your body feels out of balance, it can send signals to your brain that something is not quite right. The brain also has to work so hard to keep trying to determine which messages to trust, as both eyes may be giving mixed messages, and so too might the feet! This can contribute to feelings of unease, anxiety, fatigue, stress, physical pain and even affect your self-confidence.
So, taking care of your feet and eyes is crucial for maintaining a healthy posture and movement, as well as supporting your overall well-being. It’s like ensuring your tower stands tall, sturdy, and in harmony with the world around you. By keeping your foundation and lookout in check, you can improve your posture, movement, mobility, and promote a healthier mind-body connection.