Brain Expert: 'If You Have Brain Fog, Fatigue or Burnout — It Might Be Your Eyes!' | Bryce Appelbaum

1. 0:00 – 1:33

   Functional vision red flags: reading, screens, headaches, brain fog and fatigue

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

      I wanted to start off by asking you about vision. In terms of symptoms that might-

   2. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum0:08

      Yeah

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:08

      ... indicate we've got a functional vision problem, what would you say they are?

   4. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum0:13

      So absolutely it starts with reading and screens, because so much of our life is stuck up close. And so somebody who avoids reading or is losing their place or skipping words or skipping lines or not remembering what they're reading, or their attention seems like it drains so quickly with reading, those are clear signs of something with the eyes not working as well together as a team as they could or should is in play. But then eye strain and headaches and tired eyes and dry eyes, those are all absolutely issues with vision where the stress of what they're asking of them, they're no longer able to, to meet the demands of.

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:52

      What about things like brain fog or just general fatigue in life-

   6. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum0:58

      Yeah

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:58

      ... or even things like burnouts?

   8. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:00

      Yeah.

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:00

      Do you think vision problems can play a role in those things as well?

   10. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:04

       I think vision is a direct reflection of brain function, and so if there's fatigue cognitively, if there's brain fog, if we're tired or we're losing productivity throughout the workday or throughout just the day in general, very often vision is playing a role in what's taxing the system. And when you think about functional vision problems as being brain problems that are manifesting through the eyes, our vision can only withstand what our brain is asking it to do.

2. 1:33 – 4:49

   Eyesight vs vision: why 20/20 is only one small piece

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:33

      Yeah. I believe, Bryce, that when most people think about vision, they're actually thinking about their eyesight. Okay, so I'm someone who has worn contact lenses and/or glasses for many years. So when I think of vision, I think about the power of my lenses.

   2. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:55

      Yep.

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:55

      You know, is it getting stronger? How much can I see without needing to put something on my eyes or in my eyes?

   4. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum2:04

      Yep.

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:04

      Okay. But I think it's really important that we get that differentiation clear right at the top, okay? Vision and eyesight, they're not the same things. Perhaps you could explain to us why they're not and why we need to know that.

   6. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum2:19

      So appreciate you bringing this up. So eyesight is a symptom. Eyesight is how well we can see at a certain distance, and pretty much every eye doctor is, is heavy set on this pursuit of seeing 20/20, 20/40, 20-whatever, to allow somebody to see crystal clear at the far end of a dark exam room on this tiny letter chart. But there is so much more to vision than just eyesight. Vision is how our eyes move together, converge, track, focus, process information. How we derive meaning from the world around us and then direct the appropriate action. So eyesight is a symptom. Eyesight is glasses or contacts. Vision is brain, and vision problems are brain problems, and there are so many solutions and fixes out there for vision problems that extend way beyond just getting new glasses or new contacts.

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:14

      You said eyesight is a symptom. Are you saying then these two things are different, they're related but different? You have vision, which is brain-

   8. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum3:23

      Yep

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:23

      ... and eyesight, which is how well we can see and read certain things, right? Are you saying that if we focus on vision and improving the various aspects of our visual system, which I've been doing all week with you, and we're gonna talk about that shortly, that as a byproduct, your eyesight may and can get better?

   10. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum3:49

       Absolutely. Eye- eyesight is a reflection of vision. So somebody who notices far away keeps getting blurrier, or their eyesight fluctuates throughout the day, sometimes it's clear, sometimes it's blurry. The more tired they are, the more reading they're doing, the more fatigued they are, the more their vision changes. That is the symptom of some underlying vision problem, and so often in today's world, that stems from the focusing system, the inside muscles of the eyes not being able to withstand stamina or not having flexibility or not working together like they're supposed to, or the outside muscles of the eyes, the eye coordination system, each of these systems becoming fatigued or becoming burnt out the more that you're asking of them. And then eyesight starts to change because the visual system and the eye-brain connection is either damaged or not functioning at its potential.

3. 4:49 – 9:27

   The neglected health pillar: vision as a driver of performance and longevity

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:49

      What's become very clear to me over the past few years, and especially since I've got to know you and come and done your five-day intensive, is that the visual system may well be one of the most neglected areas in our health, for our health.

   2. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum5:11

      I know I'm biased. It's not maybe. It, it 100% is.

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:14

      No- no one's talking about this.

   4. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum5:16

      N-

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:16

      There is a real interest in health and wellbeing, whether that be to increase our health span or our lifespan, but most people who are thinking about that are talking about things like nutrition and sleep and movement, and of course these things are important. But no one's talking about vision or the visual system. That's a problem, isn't it?

   6. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum5:39

      It is a huge problem. Vision is the new microbiome. We're gonna look back on this in a few years and realize vision is responsible or at least influences so many aspects of longevity, consciousness, happiness, productivity, critical decision-making, even interpersonal connection, and none of us even had a file on it.

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:02

      Yeah. That's it. None of us even had a file on it, because if-You know, if we have a problem with our eyesight and we go and see an optician, typically, and I can't speak for every optician in, in the world, right? But, but my experience, and what I think many people's experience is, is they go and get their eyes checked, and if there's an issue, they get corrective lenses, whether it be in glasses or contact lenses.

   8. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum6:31

      Yep.

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:32

      And that's it. It's kind of like, "Yeah, I'll see you in a year."

   10. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum6:34

       And that's the reactive model.

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:36

       That's the reactive model, right. No one's differentiating there between vision and eyesight. No one's being taught that, hey, listen, at the moment, you're struggling to see. You're struggling to see that line. But actually, that's a symptom. Let's draw an analogy, right? Someone comes in to see me in clinic, let's say, right? And let's say I, I find them to have a raised blood sugar. Maybe it's not diabetic, type 2 diabetes. Maybe it's pre-diabetic. One option is to say, "You have this. Here is a medication." The other option is to say, "Hey, listen, there's quite a few things that will no doubt have been going on in your lifestyle over the past five or 10 years that have contributed to this. Would you like me to help you identify what those things are and help you then address them?"

   12. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum7:32

       And the why.

   13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:32

       And the why, right? Do you think that's a reasonable analogy that, you know, when we've got a problem with our visual system, it shows up in our eyesight for many of us, but we're just told to wear glasses. We're not told or we're not educated as to, hey, there could be things you can do to improve this.

   14. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum7:54

       It, it's such, such a similar parallel, and it's the band-aid approach, the reactive model we talked about rather than a proactive model. You go see your eye doctor, whether it's an ophthalmologist, optometrist, optician, whatever O word, and especially if there's a data point from last year or from the past, and at a minimum, we can all agree that we're noticing a change. Far away is blurrier. As a patient, no one's asking why, and as a healthcare practitioner, very few are educating on the why. It's just more here's what we can do to improve the symptom. But if we ignore the problem, the symptom's gonna keep changing, and we're gonna very often adapt to the situation we're in and then need something stronger or different to maintain that same level of, of function. But if we look at this as performance and the eye-brain connection, and like you described, the other factors that influence eyesight and vision like lifestyle, environment, nutrition, sleep, systemic function, metabolic function. I mean, so many other areas of health influence vision and that eye-brain connection, and if we're disregarding those, we're leaving such a massive piece of healing still on the table.

   15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:16

       Yeah. It's amazing how many different systems and symptoms in the body can be related back to problems in our visual system.

   16. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum9:26

       Yeah.

4. 9:27 – 12:52

   Unexpected symptoms tied to vision: motion sickness, night driving, ball sports and more

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:27

      Okay? You mentioned a few. You know, fatigue, uh, difficulty reading, uh, difficulty staying focused and concentrating. You mentioned others to me over the course of the week. Motion sickness.

   2. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum9:40

      Thank you.

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:40

      Right? Reading as a sleeping pill. That was an interesting one to me. Someone who prefers audiobooks to, uh, regular written books. Trouble catching a ball. You know, avoiding driving at night. That's, I guess you could think, yeah, that must have something to do with the visual system. But motion sickness, you know, how common is that?

   4. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum10:03

      So we could unpack every single one of those plus dozens of others. Motion sickness, for instance, most people think, oh, that's the inner ear. That's the vestibular system. But vision and the vestibular systems, they need to be in a healthy marriage. They need to be providing feedback that the brain can interpret-

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:21

      Mm-hmm

   6. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum10:22

      ... and process with symmetry and with equilibrium. Somebody who, as a passenger in the car or in the backseat when they're on a phone or tablet, their brain is sending the signals of things being static, yet their vestibular system are sending signals that there's motion, and the brain gets in this disequilibrium, this disconnect, where it can't filter and process both of those systems. And so many people will notice their motion sickness is either gone or significantly improved when they're driving because they're motor planning. They're looking straight ahead. They're adjusting their body based off of visual input on what's occurring and what's to come, and that alone can help support motion sickness so much. But you know, when our, when our brain is under so much stress from our environment, it's really hard to function at its potential. I would say that the vast majority of motion sickness has a visual component that's treatable, and yet most people don't even know that's possible.

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee11:19

      Did you just say that if you're driving the car, your motion sickness is less? Is that because you're in control, and you know what's coming, you know what's happening, whereas if you're a passenger, you don't, so you're having to react to an environment that's out of your control? It-

   8. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum11:35

      That is accurate, but I think even more so, we have two main visual processing pathways in our brain. One that responds to central focal visual input, and then one that responds to peripheral ambient visual input. And when we're overriding one or the other, it can lead to a seesaw that's balancing back and forth. When we're driving, we're actually relying on focal processing but taking in periphery rather than when we're in the backseat, and the seat in front of us is static, and everything around us is static, but we're getting all this peripheral optic flow of-

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee12:10

      Right

   10. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum12:10

       ... there's motion, and your body's not in a safe place.The brain doesn't know what to do with that information in many cases

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee12:17

       There's an imbalance.

   12. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum12:18

       Yeah.

   13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee12:19

       I guess through an evolutionary lens, you know, obviously a car or a high-speed train, you know, uh, the- these are relatively new inventions in the context of our, our evolution. So I'm just trying to think about in the past, you might be running fast, but-

   14. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum12:39

       Right

   15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee12:39

       ... you're putting in effort. You're seeing that things are changing. You know, the, the, the environment around you is changing, right? So it's all syncs up together, whereas in a car or a train, something's out of sync.

5. 12:52 – 14:49

   Evolutionary mismatch: ancient visual systems vs modern near-work and screens

   1. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum12:52

      Evolutionarily, vision is intended to guide movement, and our visual systems are billions of years old, and they've evolved from scanning the horizon for danger and dinner and the saber-tooth tiger coming at us, and exploring through nature, and with this delicate balance between intricate near work with our hands and then lots of distance exploration, to now collapsing all of that for all this near work that we're doing. And we haven't, as a species yet, evolved to have the visual foundation to handle all of this input that's coming at us from so many directions all day through our crazy busy lives that often have these 2D devices inches from our face blasting high-energy light at us for hours on end.

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee13:39

      Yeah, it's interesting. We, we understand many of us that there's a mismatch between our evolutionary heritage and our modern world.

   3. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum13:49

      Right.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee13:50

      And for many years, people who are interested in health, and perhaps listen to podcasts like this one, will know that there's a mismatch in our food environment. The food environment in which we've evolved and the food environment in which we now reside is very, very different, and unless we address that mismatch, it can have consequences. But you can make the same case for the visual system, right? We're now using our eyes, yes, on screens, but in very, very different ways to how we used to, and this is another mismatch that needs addressing. And by us not addressing it, it stands to reason that this is why we're having all kinds of downstream problems from the mismatch, the fatigue, the lack of focus, the headaches, the migraines, the motion sickness. You know, what about this reading as a sleeping pill? Why is that a symptom of potential visual problems?

6. 14:49 – 18:24

   When reading feels impossible: audiobooks, ‘reading as a sleeping pill,’ and visual fatigue

   1. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum14:49

      Vision is our dominant sensory system, and it should be what's guiding and leading and tying together input from all of our other senses to allow us to feel safe in space. If somebody is relying on their ears rather than their eyes to digest information, whether it's through audiobooks or a child preferring to be read to rather than reading on their own, very likely it's because it's really hard to process vision and use all the delicate, intricate muscles that control our eyes and the pointing and focusing and converging of our eyes to then be able to process that information fluidly like it's supposed to. And when using your eyes together as a team is so taxing and so fatiguing, it drains the system. It makes you want to fall asleep or disengage or find other means to try and still take in that information.

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee15:41

      So hold on a minute. This is, this is so interesting, right? So two things came to mind there. One is that many people today, one of my cousins will say this, is that he can't read books.

   3. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum15:56

      Yeah.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee15:56

      He says he much prefers audiobooks. And I think the common conclusion for many of us is that that's because of the way we consume information now. We're used to short-form content-

   5. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum16:10

      Yep

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee16:11

      ... quick-moving targets on social media, reels that are just 15 seconds long. So our ability to concentrate and read a book has massively changed, so that's why we might prefer audiobooks. But interestingly enough, hearing you speak makes me think that maybe that is one reason, but maybe it's also because our visual systems are malfunctioning, and therefore it's not a lack of focus necessarily, it's a symptom of our visual dysfunction.

   7. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum16:44

      I would ask your cousin about reading and say, "Hey, do you lose your place when you read? Do you sometimes skip words, skip lines? Do words move and sometimes separate or even go-

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee16:53

      Mm-hmm

   9. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum16:53

      ... go into double? Do you feel like you're then having to reread because you're not remembering what you did read, or your comprehension is off, or your eyes are just tired and you're rubbing them and you're leaning in and you're adjusting your body to compensate for what vision isn't doing naturally?" For most people, we avoid things that are hard for us, and when reading is hard, we find other ways to still do the necessary tasks. Now, there are many people who say, "Well, when I wanna get information, I listen to a podcast, or I take it through auditory," and that's being productive. But what can really come from reading with our eyes, the ability to visualize and to create this story in our mind that is totally unique to the person who's reading that material and is a different story than somebody else reading the exact same material, because we're applying past experiences to what we're reading, we're anticipating what's gonna come, we're thinking in our mind's eye. So much more can be digested and optimized through reading with our eyes than when we're just hearing it through our ears, and it's estimated that over 80% of what's learned comes through the visual processing of information. Now, if we're shutting that down and we're avoiding vision as that dominant primary sense to understand what's in our world-

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee18:12

       Mm-hmm

   11. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum18:12

       ... our brains can still use oth- other areas of it to function, but we're bypassing the most efficient way to reallyGet enjoyment out of so many aspects of life

7. 18:24 – 22:26

   Kids mislabeled: ADHD, dyslexia and behavior issues without a functional vision assessment

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee18:24

      Yeah. You mentioned skipping words, so you said that I could ask my cousin does he skip words when he reads, you know, uh, and other things which might indicate that there's a problem with his visual system. I immediately jump to children then-

   2. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum18:41

      Yeah

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee18:41

      ... because a lot of kids will struggle with various things, and I know for you that there's a lot of problems with our visual system that are put down to being behavioral problems. But again, that's just downstream, and if we were to address the visual system, those things would get better. So can you speak to that a little bit, please?

   4. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum19:01

      Would love to. ADD or ADHD, dyslexia, learning disabilities, mental health challenges, even executive functioning deficiencies all have a visual component, and so often in the medical world, labels like those diagnoses are so quick to be slapped on behaviors without looking into what the root cause would be of those issues. And functional vision problems have so many of the same symptoms and behaviors as so many of those labels. If you cannot control your eyes and their ability to focus, for instance, then you cannot control your mind and its ability to focus. And if we think about just eye movements across midline, which is the tracking eye movement that would intimately correlate with losing our place with reading, skipping words or skipping lines, any change in eye movement, whether it's voluntary or involuntary, is a change in attention, and if you can't control your eye movements, you can't control your attention. So, so often, a child in a classroom setting who is not looking at the teacher when they're talking because they're r- it's so hard for them to take in all the sensory input from the classroom that they're relying on their ears, not their eyes, they may be listening and fully engaged to everything that's going on in the classroom through that processing system, but they're gonna be mislabeled as somebody who's not focused or has ants in their pants 'cause they need this motor overflow or because it's so hard for them to copy from the board to their page because they don't have the flexibility with their eye coordination systems. So, you know, I think in so many aspects of health, we're so quick to just put a label on a behavior, but trouble focusing and ADD or ADHD, it's not like there's a blood test that says, "Oh, you have this." It's based off of a profile and symptoms, but there's so many treatments out there that are often low-hanging fruit to address the ability to focus the eyes, which then, at a minimum, improves ability to focus the mind.

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee21:06

      Yeah. I've heard you say that these are incomplete diagnoses without a functional vision assessment.

   6. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum21:13

      Without addressing vision re- even looking into the functional vision.

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee21:16

      Yeah, and I think that's a really nice way of putting it, because you're not saying things don't exist. You're not saying they're not real. You're just saying, let's look at the visual system, because if we can improve the visual system, you might be surprised by how many things start to get better.

   8. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum21:33

      No one is born with the ability to read or to track their eyes or to focus or even with depth perception. It's all developed through our life experiences, and it's either learned well through the right sequencing of developmental milestones-

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee21:46

      Mm

   10. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum21:46

       ... or learned poorly, and that's when intervention needs to take place. But especially kids today, they're being exposed to screens and technology earlier than ever before. They're often being asked to read at earlier and earlier ages before they're visually ready, and if somebody doesn't have the systems and the foundations in place to meet the demands, they avoid or they adapt, and these maladaptations, these bad habits, are really what so many of these vision problems look like.

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee22:15

       Yeah. I definitely want us to cover practical things that people can start doing.

   12. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum22:22

       Yeah.

8. 22:26 – 35:14

   Rangan’s 5-day intensive: dramatic eyesight improvement and a ‘switch’ in perception

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee22:26

      Before we do that, though, I wonder if the best way to approach this is through my experience this week. Okay, so I mentioned earlier, but just to reiterate, I have been wearing, uh, glasses or contact lenses for many years now. I can't remember when it started, but definitely at some point in secondary school or high school.

   2. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum22:52

      Mm-hmm.

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee22:53

      So a while. And a few years ago, I started to think, "Why is it that myopia is on the rise?" Right? Shortsightedness.

   4. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum23:05

      Yeah.

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee23:06

      It's interesting that the less time we spend outside, the more time we spend indoors on screens, the more this is going up, right? So I thought, this is really interesting. So clearly there is an environmental component here. So I started to investigate and start to research, is it possible to reverse myopia, right? So I've been doing all kinds of things. I've been looking various things up and it's, it's not easy to get clear information on this, and most opticians will tell you that it's not possible.

   6. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum23:34

      You can't trust everything you read on the internet.

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee23:36

      Yeah. Uh, yeah, exactly, right? But I'm a very curious guy, and I'm thinking, "No, there must be a way that I can get this better." Now, the punchline is, right, for people, when I came to your clinic on Monday, and today's Friday-

   8. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum23:51

      Mm-hmm

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee23:51

      ... what was the state of my eyesight, and what was it when you checked me about two hours ago?

   10. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum23:57

       Yeah. So without any correction on, without your contacts on, without glasses, on Monday, you were seeing twenty four hundred, which is that big letter E for most people, they know what that looks like on the letter chart. That was the smallest symbol you could see across the long exam room, and I say this with love and respectfully, you know, it was making a face and leaning in and really trying to pull it out. So it was a weak twenty four hundred, but it was twenty four hundred.We measured the exact same way today, exact same room, exact same person, and you are seeing 20/70, like, pretty well, and even made out a few on the 20/60 line, which means you're seeing images or symbols significantly smaller farther away than you were five days ago, without lenses on your face, without anything helping support that other than the crazy amount of work you did this week to really emphasize eye coordination and depth perception and visual processing and eye focus. But mainly for you, the accommodative system, the focusing muscles inside of our eye whose job is to make things clear and keep it clear. Like an old-school camera lens, we want that system to be on auto-focus. When we met on Monday, that was stuck on manual focus, and you've now developed a clear rapport with the Z axis, what's in front of you, so that you've learned how to lock in and see things clearer at different distances because you know where that image is. You know that spatial mismatch has been dramatically improved.

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee25:37

       Yeah. So basically, I've gone from 20/400 on Monday with nothing in my eyes, no contact lenses, no glasses, nothing, to 20/70 or even 20/60, right, in just five days. Now, we've been working together, me and various members of your team. Maximum this week would be three hours a day, but sometimes it was two hours. Okay?

   12. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum26:01

       We did, we did 12 hours of active work.

   13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:04

       And it was a lot of fun.

   14. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum26:05

       That's awesome.

   15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:05

       It, it was a lot of fun. I was, like, smiling and making jokes throughout it. It was re- I f- I felt like a childlike play.

   16. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum26:12

       Yeah.

   17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:13

       I've learnt so much. I'm noticing it just when I walk around. Even after day one on Monday, you did two hours of assessment with me in the morning, two hours of, um, work in the afternoon of me doing exercises. The following morning when I got up, I went out for a walk. I was noticing all kinds of stuff that I wasn't noticing before. It is as if a switch had been flicked in, uh, on in my brain.

   18. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum26:37

       Mm.

   19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:38

       I was noticing the peripheries. I was... I, I, I had a, I had a different dimensional experience of the world. I thought, "Wow, we only did two hours of work yesterday. What else is gonna happen this week?" So-

   20. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum26:50

       Yeah

   21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:51

       ... there's many more things that we've done throughout the week that have improved, which we'll talk about, but I just wanna make that clear to people that we get told that you can't reverse your eyesight. I have massively improved. I don't know, what would you call that? A factor of six? A factor of seven?

   22. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum27:07

       I'm, I'm doing the math as we're talking. I- it's close to, close to that. But I wanna be clear, this wasn't just like, "Hey, let's, let's do some eye exercises. Let's do yoga together." I mean, we have what we call vision performance training, which is a very specific, uh, synergy of lots of different modalities that we've evolved with time, but can figure out the exact protocol of exactly what to do at the right sequence with the right feedback so you can learn how to self-correct, self-monitor, and really use your eyes to rewire the software of your brain to change how you're using vision.

   23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee27:43

       Yeah.

   24. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum27:43

       You were teed up for us because, as a complete exaggeration, you were going through life as if you were looking through paper towel holders. Very focal, very central, very myopic, where your visual system was tunneled in. And by opening up periphery and developing a better balance between what's in front of you and what's around you, you've drastically decreased or eliminated the spatial mismatch where you were literally aligning your eyes as if you were perceiving things farther back in space than where they were. Your depth perception, your brain's ability to see in 3D, which is the best indication of how the eyes are working well together as a team, was not where it should be for an adult who has the visual demands that you have in life. And your eyes were working independently of each other.

   25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee28:31

       Yeah.

   26. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum28:31

       I mean, there were so many times where, because of this rivalry or this competition over sensory input, your brain was saying, "I can't use both of my eyes together, so I'm gonna just pick one rather than use, use them both together." You were using one eye for near and one eye for far because it was too hard to use both for both distances. What's so cool is we could not have taught a brain to function or do what you were doing if we tried. It's not how our brain is wired.

   27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee28:56

       My brain had adapted over decades to, to function in that way.

   28. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum29:00

       Absolutely, and there was-

   29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:01

       In, in a very dysfunctional way

   30. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum29:02

       ... completely. And there was these roadblocks that you did all the work, and because you were so motivated, and you're here for the right reasons, and because we knew how to filter and screen out, is this gonna leave us with life-altering improvement or just a little bit of improvement? We knew from day one, you probably remember the smile on my face like, "Oh man, you have no idea what's coming for you this week."
9. 35:14 – 40:37

   The cost of chasing 20/20: ‘20 happy,’ weakest lenses, and prescription creep

   1. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum35:14

      And we talked on the way over how in school, for myself and for every doctor out there, we're told that we have to take the measurements to get somebody to see the tiniest letters far away, and then we have to give them glasses or contacts to allow them to see that 20/20 line, and if we don't, we're, we're failing them as providers. No two people see the same. Not everybody has to see the same, and I always try and push for 20 happy rather than 20/20, which means let's be in glasses or lenses if needed that are the weakest amount possible, the most balanced between each eye, that give the most improvement to performance. If performance isn't improving with any type of medical intervention, why are we going down that path? And performance can be systemically with our blood work. It can be with brain function. With what we're talking about here, performance is with depth and reaction time and visual processing, and the more we can access and use on our own, the more of our brain that we can tap into, the more potential we can unlock, and the more unnecessary struggling can be avoided.

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee36:30

      This idea that you in your field are all taught to help correct your patients to that 20/20 line, it's really interesting because many things in life we accept as truths-But we don't actually realize they're beliefs, right? A belief is not a truth, right? So correcting your vision to 20/20, i- it's not a truth in the sense that it's a belief. It's a belief that that is the best way to treat you or, you know, improve your eyesight. Okay?

   3. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum37:12

      Or the only way.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee37:13

      Or the only way, right. But does that correction to 20/20 vision sometimes come at a cost? And what I mean by that is if you need, I don't know, a minus three lens in order to see the 20/20 line, and then you go out in the world with that minus three lens on all the time, have you optimized for one thing at the expense of other things?

   5. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum37:46

      I love that we're talking about this because it totally depends on the person. There are some people who get their first pair of glasses in fifth grade, and their prescription never changes. And then there's others who literally every six months for decades, they keep adapting, it keeps progressing, and they keep needing more help in the form of stronger lenses to maintain that-

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee38:10

      Mm-hmm

   7. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum38:10

      ... same level of clarity. If we're not asking why or addressing what can be done to slow this down, in some cases even stop it, we're doing ourselves, our patients, our family members a disservice. And as an adult, if your prescription is changing year after year, to me that is like neon lights around it, warning signs that there's a functional vision problem. Our prescription should not be changing unless we're not able to meet the demands of what we're asking of our eye-brain connection, and then that, that's evolving. And, you know, I think it's important to recognize somebody who is in sales, who is talking with people all day long, has a very different visual demand than somebody who's a computer programmer on a screen for 10 hours plus a day. Their visual profile, their prescription change is gonna be so different because the demands that they're asking of their eyes and brain are so different.

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee39:14

      Can we look at this... I don't know. Let, let's make a comparison with physical exercise.

   9. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum39:20

      Yeah.

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee39:20

       Okay? So if you wanted to run endurance, half marathons, let's say, or marathons, and you wanted to train in the week for that, you would have certain things that you would do more of than others.

   11. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum39:39

       Right.

   12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee39:39

       Right? Probably more endurance. Maybe you would do some strength, but maybe less strength than, for example, someone who really wanted to be a bodybuilder and focus on getting big and muscle hypertrophy. They may do less endurance and lots and lots of reps of heavy weights in the gym because they've got different goals.

   13. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum39:58

       Mm-hmm.

   14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee39:59

       Is it fair to say then that we should or might want to be looking at our lives a bit more holistically and go, "Well, for the things I wanna do in life, I need a visual system that's good for A, B, and C"? So for example, let's say you were a tennis player, right? I wanna come to tennis 'cause I, I sort of feel some of the stuff I've done this week with you makes me realize why ball sports and outdoor ball sports, for example, might be so good for our visual system.

10. 40:37 – 47:10

    From struggling kid to high performer: Bryce’s story and vision in elite sport & flow

    1. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum40:37

       Can I share my story?

    2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee40:38

       Please.

    3. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum40:39

       Because tennis comes into this story. So I'm a product of this work, and I'm one of the most drastic of success stories. And as a child, fitting in with my peers mattered. Obviously, sports was the whole thing. When I was really young, I every time with baseball would strike out. On the soccer field, I was totally lost, overwhelmed in space. I fought my parents on reading and on homework. I could never pick up on sight words. I'd write letters flipped and reversed around. I would get super motion sick on long car rides. I, uh, we had a brown bag there all the time.

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee41:15

       Wow.

    5. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum41:16

       I struggled with confidence, and it really hindered my performance in the classroom and even my behavior with my parents, siblings, and, and friends. Now, at the time I didn't, I didn't know this, but I had massive visual developmental delays, meaning I had really poor depth perception. My eyes didn't work well together as a team. I had an alternating eye turn. So I really used one eye in the presence of the other but never used them both together, and I felt like a turtle in my shell, retreating in so many aspects of life. Fortunately, I got the perfect right work for me in vision training, and I turned this disability into a strength where I went from being a reluctant reader and the last one picked on sports teams to an avid reader, stud with hand-eye coordination, and a really confident kid. And I now attribute all my success in life athletically, academically, even, even interpersonally to the benefits of, of doing this work at the right time in life. But I... Tennis was my sport, and it's not because of genes, but I could-- I literally developed the ability to slow down the ball to process information more quickly, to prepare myself to move to where the ball was going to be rather than where it was. I not only got perfect depth perception, I could anticipate where the ball would be and plan the path of the ball so that I could get an advantage over my opponent by being a step ahead. And with tennis, I mean, our ability to take the inside and outside muscles of our eyes, have them work together in synergy to then-Perceive depth and react appropriately. For any brain at any age, that can be enhanced and improved. But even for you now, after all this work this week, tennis is gonna be a great way to help solidify what's been developed so that you can allow for transfer to life and apply all this hard work to fast-moving space. And one of the coolest things I do now is I help identify with, with pro teams or college teams or even Olympians where vision development is, where visual cognitive development is, and when there's a gap, we'll say, "Take this player. We'll close the gap, and you're gonna get that much more return on the investment if it's somebody that you're bringing on onto your team." Because vision should be guiding and leading, and it can be for any of us, but if we don't even recognize that as, as having the potential that it has, we're, we're missing a huge piece of the puzzle.

    6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee43:44

       Yeah, it's, you know, [laughs] in, in a whole variety of different fields, you often find the best practitioners and the, the ones who are breaking down boundaries, like I would argue you are in this field, it comes from personal experience-

    7. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum44:00

       100%

    8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee44:00

       ... or personal struggle, and no one is gonna be more motivated to overcome that than you, right? So you had all these different symptoms, relationship problems, fatigue, you don't wanna read, you're fighting with your parents, and, but these are all downstream symptoms. You had one problem, your visual system.

    9. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum44:17

       It was all because my eyes weren't working well together.

    10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee44:20

        Yeah, and you correct that, and suddenly all these seemingly disparate symptoms just get better. Okay? It's, it's a real root cause approach to life. Now, you said, like, in tennis, for example, that you're effectively, y- you're effectively slowing the game down because y- you're able to [laughs] see the ball much better, much earlier. You have more time to prepare. We often hear, don't we, that some of the top athletes in a whole variety of different sports, when they're in flow state or when they're playing well, they're seeing things that other players are not.

    11. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum44:54

        Yeah.

    12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee44:55

        Right? You know, Messi, Ronaldo in football, or what you would ca- call soccer, right?

    13. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum45:00

        It's, but you're playing with your feet. It's football.

    14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee45:02

        Right. It's as if they knew what was happening two seconds, or what seems like two seconds-

    15. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum45:06

        Yeah

    16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee45:07

        ... but it was probably, like, t- two milliseconds ahead. Do you think those guys naturally have good visual systems?

    17. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum45:16

        I've been blessed to see some of the top athletes in many different sports, and in many cases, they do have elite level visual processing and visual skills. But when I hear flow state, I mean, that's like, so many people are on this pursuit of flow state and how can I find this and how can I get more of this? And my interpretation of flow state, have it- being able to access it myself pretty much at will, is this heightened sense of central and peripheral processing where you are so confident on your sense of self and space and what's in front of you that dynamically you can make the most accurate adjustments in real time, and literally the world is in slow motion.

    18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee45:58

        Yeah.

    19. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum45:59

        And we can measure that. We can quantify that, and we can help close the gap to help people access that more easily.

    20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:06

        Yeah. I'm, I'm just so happy right now, Bryce, I can't even tell you, because we, we've done this intensive work, but I can feel day to day that my experience of the world is different. So-

    21. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum46:18

        That's so great

    22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:18

        ... even though we're having a conversation here now, I can see what's on that wall, right? I can see the picture there. I can see the red timer clock. I can see the plant there, right? I don't think six days ago I was aware of that stuff, right? And even if I was, I wasn't aware that I knew. And so this is just a, a great real-life, um, expression for me that what we did in your clinic this week is already having real-world application.

    23. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum46:50

        A- and it's such a joy to watch, and I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to work with you because you are such a beautiful person. But your excitement is what everybody should be feeling going through this, and most of our patients, you know, it's, it's along the same, same lines here. You are in a constant state of fight or flight visually. I don't know about other areas of life, 'cause-

11. 47:10 – 52:55

    Vision, stress and empathy: screens lock us into fight-or-flight and narrow perspective

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee47:10

       But hold on. Can you even separate the visual system from the rest of the body? Because I wanted to talk to you about stress and the visual system today-

    2. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum47:17

       Yeah

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee47:17

       ... 'cause it really relates to that, right? We know that if we're looking at a horizon, um, the sea, we're on a beach, we're on holiday, and we've got that soft peripheral vision where we can just see as far as the eye can see, we know that that actually is, um, a way of activating the parasympathetic nervous system.

    4. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum47:37

       Absolutely.

    5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee47:37

       So you're switching off stress, promoting relaxation. So it kind of stands to reason, because all of these things are bi-directional. You said when I came to see you on Monday, I was locked in this manual focus. I had tunnel vision. So my eyes were in a state of visual stress. To me, it's kind of an obvious follow-on that there would've been stress in my life outwith the visual system, because I, I, I, I just don't see how you can separate the visual system from your nervous system.

    6. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum48:13

       You can't, and your eyes are part of your brain. They emerge in the first trimester from the brain. They're only part of your brain you can see without things getting messy. The human visual system under stress, when the autonomic nervous system is in that fight or flight response, our pupils widen, and we lock in with this tunnel vision.

    7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee48:32

       And it's meant to do that.

    8. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum48:34

       It's meant to do that, to protect yourself for danger that's coming at you so you can react. You're blocking off everything that doesn't matter other than that saber-toothed tiger coming at you, so you know how to react and get out of harm's way. To a T, this is what's happening with our world that's now been brought within arm's length. When we're on screens, our vision, our thinking, our attention become tunneled.And for the average American adult, they spend seven hours and four minutes a day on a screen. The average American eight to 10-year-old spends six hours a day on a screen. That's average. But what that means is we're promoting stress and the stress response and shifting how our brain is functioning. So people are making critical decisions for work under a state of fight or flight. People are not able to divergently think or think outside the box, or aren't able to have the patience that they deserve when they come-

    9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee49:32

       Mm

    10. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum49:32

        ... home to see their family after work, because literally you're, you're tensed up and you're locked in all day long.

    11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee49:38

        It changes who we are, right? A lot of people don't realize that when you're stressed, things are meant to change, right? You- as you say, you are meant to have tunnel vision.

    12. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum49:45

        Right.

    13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee49:46

        Uh, you're not meant to be empathetic and seeing the other perspective, right? You're, you're dealing with the immediate threats, right?

    14. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum49:54

        But if you can be intentional and pull back and-

    15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee49:57

        Exactly

    16. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum49:57

        ... and we'll talk about things that we can all start today, but you mentioning being on the beach and looking out to the horizon and activating parasympathetic tone, I mean, having that balance, it allows you to be more present. It allows you to not react without being intentional and actually thinking before you react, and it can avoid so many aspects of systemic disease.

    17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee50:23

        Yeah. I had a thought then, right? It can appear sometimes that the world is very divided, particularly online, okay? You know, huge division, huge disagreements, people shouting each other through their keyboards.

    18. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum50:41

        Yep.

    19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee50:42

        And a lot of the time, the blame or some of the blame is put on social media or the modern media landscape, and, you know, which headline can out negative the next headline to capture the attention, and of course, that's a contributor. But looking at it through the visual system, you could argue that if many of us, stroke most of us, because of our modern screen-dominated worlds, are having visual system problems and locking us into a state of visual stress-

    20. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum51:16

        Mm-hmm

    21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee51:16

        ... which ultimately is gonna translate to whole body stress, maybe one of the reasons we appear so divided is because of our visual systems. And maybe if more n- more of us could improve our visual processing and the way our visual systems operate, like I've had the very good fortune to do with you and your team this week, it could help make the world a kinder, more empathetic, more compassionate place.

    22. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum51:44

        Take away the maybe. 100%. And so many different generations of people coming up now, a lot of the 20-year-olds and teenagers who have difficulty maintaining eye contact because they haven't had the interpersonal connection that comes with being away from screens and actually communicating in the real world, they have trouble controlling their eye movements. They have trouble looking at somebody without having to look away or even just maintaining eye contact, or when they're looking at someone, they're thinking, "Do I look at the left eye or the right eye or the nose or the mouth?" Because they can't take in the whole picture.

    23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee52:18

        That's so common.

    24. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum52:20

        So common, but that's, I would argue, created by our society, and we don't know what an entire lifetime of screens does to somebody yet, but we have the initial data, and we're seeing what's evolving and emerging by the data show it is scary what's occurring right now, and I can't even imagine decades from now what this pounding of this visual stress is gonna do to just overall happiness, quality of life, and empathy that we can have for each other as humans.

12. 52:55 – 1:07:26

    COVID as accelerant: ScreenFit, new protocols, and a ‘vision performance training’ model

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee52:55

       It's interesting that your whole, I guess, urgency to look into this and tackle this and create the ScreenFit program that you have done, this online program-

    2. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum53:10

       Yeah

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee53:10

       ... really, I think, was from the COVID pandemic. Is that when things really started to kick off for you?

    4. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum53:18

       Yeah, I mean, honestly, everything for me personally, emotionally, but even professionally, changed over COVID. And pre-COVID, at least professionally, I thought, "If I can't help somebody 100%, I don't want to work with them." And now realizing helping somebody 20%, 50%, 80% is still helping somebody. And seeing what screens were doing to my three young kids at the time, I immediately knew, okay, this is a big problem for them, and it's a big problem for mankind that hasn't emerged yet. So we... I created this online vision training program designed to build the visual foundation, build the visual skills and abilities necessary for reading, for screens, for driving at night, for life, in a way where it's kind of like body weight work at home instead of going to the gym. You're gonna get in better shape if you go to the gym and work with a trainer. Same thing here. You're gonna have better results working one-on-one in an intensive like we did this week, but not everybody has access to that.

    5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee54:20

       Didn't you tell me that someone went from minus eight to zero just by doing the ScreenFit program?

    6. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum54:27

       With intention, yeah. And I wouldn't say that's the reason to do ScreenFit-

    7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee54:30

       Yeah, I understand that

    8. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum54:31

       ... but this type of person was in this heavy stress response and kept eating up the lens powers, and their prescription was rapidly increasing, and in a very short period of time they went from a minus 150 to a minus eight. And luckily, heard about what we were doing and realized, oh my gosh, you guys are changing the model of vision and how the world is viewing vision. I want to be a part of this. Th- this gentleman did not live locally, so we didn't have the opportunity to have him come to the office at the time. Went through the ScreenFit program, andThroughout very clear benchmarks in the program, he dropped his prescription and took it from really high to really low based off of doing the right functional work to support easing into less help in the form of lenses.

    9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee55:20

       Yeah.

    10. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum55:21

        And then even, you know, this intensive that we did this week, we had always, we'd always seen people from other states and countries for, for the last dozen or so years, but it became so dialed in as a clear protocol over COVID because the visual profiles we were seeing were unlike what we've ever seen before. And my team and I were, "Okay, w- we've never seen this lead of accommodation. Somebody who's, has a spasm of their focusing system, yet is under-converging their eyes. This makes no sense."

    11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee55:53

        What, what does that mean in layman's terms?

    12. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum55:55

        In layman's terms, we have inside and outside muscles of our eyes. The inside muscles, that's our focusing system. That lets us know what something is, allows us to make something clear and keep it clear. Outside muscles is our eye coordination system that lets us know where something is. So in a normal, healthy brain, the where and the what give us the same feedback, so something is single and clear. For this gentleman, his what was, uh, was completely locked in, and his where was under-engaged and let go because he literally couldn't use these systems together. And so we came up with new protocols, and every single day learn from our patients and continue to raise the bar in terms of what the ideal treatment protocol should look like for certain conditions, but got to a place where we rebooted everything we were doing in terms of treatment to go from what was vision therapy and vision training to now this vision performance training, which is this holistic model that incorporates movement and balance and vestibular input and-

    13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee56:57

        Yeah

    14. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum56:57

        ... thinking because vision doesn't operate in isolation of these systems.

    15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee57:01

        Yeah.

    16. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum57:02

        And so now that we're in this world where screens are not going anywhere, and I'm not anti-tech. Actually, you know from this week, we're very pro-tech. We use augmented reality and virtual reality and eye-tracking-

    17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee57:13

        Yeah

    18. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum57:13

        ... computers, but we also do three-dimensional work. But most people don't have the foundation to thrive in this digital world without training it because it hasn't naturally evolved yet as a species.

    19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee57:26

        Yeah. A bit like we would've always been active. You couldn't sit at home and have your dinner delivered and work from home and earn money. You, you had to go out and walk and hunt.

    20. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum57:39

        Yeah.

    21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee57:40

        Uh, or go and dig for tubers and then bring it back and cook it, right? You, you had to be physically active each day in order to survive, right?

    22. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum57:49

        I'm sure it's like this in the UK. You can go to the grocery store through your phone.

    23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee57:54

        Yeah. [laughs]

    24. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum57:54

        You can date through your phone. You can ask your neighbor for an egg if you need one through your phone. And we're not engaging in movement.

    25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee58:02

        Yeah. Hence we need all this education on you, you need to move your body regularly, gyms, this sort of training, that kind of training.

    26. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum58:09

        Here's what you shouldn't eat. Here's what you should eat.

    27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee58:12

        Yeah.

    28. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum58:12

        Here's what you should do.

    29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee58:13

        Yeah. Whereas we didn't need that 100,000 years ago.

    30. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum58:15

        Right.
13. 1:07:26 – 1:11:55

    Screens vs books: closer distance, scattered eye movements, flicker, junk lighting and circadian impact

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:07:26

       Well, what's different between screens and reading books?

    2. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:07:31

       Yeah.

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:07:32

       I know there's a blue light issue, right?

    4. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:07:34

       And, and let's even pause on the blue light for a second.

    5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:07:36

       Yeah.

    6. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:07:37

       Entirely different visual demands on a screen than on a paper book. First of all, there's a closer working distance. There's different demands on those inside and outside muscles we talked about, the focusing system and the eye conversion system. There are more eye movements required that are less organized. When you read a book, you're going left to right, and you're going in a line. On a screen, you're darting your eyes all over the place. It's a closer working distance. There's the high energy, short wavelength light, the blue light. There's the contrast, the glare, the brightness.

    7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:08:13

       The flicker I think is a problem.

    8. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:08:15

       The flicker. I mean, flicker frequency, that creates sensory overload for so many people, and I can't believe we've been this long in, in the, in the talk here where we haven't even brought up junk lighting. I mean, junk lighting, these LED lights, can put our s- our brains into a, an immediate state of fight or flight, and can shift how we're processing and taking in the world. We're then getting artificial blue light that's blasting our eyes and brains for hours on end. Blue light is, is actually not bad for us. Blue light is essential for us, but that's natural blue light to help regulate circadian rhythms and mood and alertness, which is why first thing in the morning, last thing before bed, it's great to go- get outside, get some movement in, but get natural light in through our eyes, which are light receivers. But this artificial blue light that's blasting our eyes all day long, that's telling the specialized cells in the back of our eye, whose sole job is to s- to signal the release of melatonin to let you know whether you're asleep or awake, when those cells are overstimulated, there's a negative feedback-

    9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:09:20

       Mm

    10. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:09:20

        ... loop that occurs, and all of a sudden, metabolic function gets in- influenced, sleep gets influenced, and our homeostasis changes.

    11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:09:30

        Yeah. To make sure you're taking action after watching this video, I've created a free guide to help you build healthy habits. We can all make short-term change, but can those changes become a fundamental part of our life? Often they don't, and that's why in this free guide, I share with you the six crucial steps you need to take that are really, really effective. If you wanna get hold of that free guide right now, all you have to do is click the link in the description box below. Hey, guys. I really hope you're finding this useful. If you are, and you want more content like it, please do check out my book, Make Change That Lasts: Nine Simple Ways to Break Free from the Habits That Are Holding You Back. It's in all the usual places as a paperback, e-book, and as an audiobook, which I'm narrating. Now, back to the video. Reading books then compared to being on a screen is completely different. You're saying it's better to read books.

    12. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:10:31

        Better read, better read books, and tactilely holding the book gives you such a better sense of where this is positioned in space, so you can make the right eye movements that are more accurate.

    13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:10:42

        But that's one thing I don't think we really have realized. I, I've understood this through my work with my own movement coach, Helen, who is just phenomenal, but that tactile awareness, you know, we are these three-dimensional creatures. And, you know, just as if in a car when you're moving fast even though you're sitting down, and your brain's like, "There's a disconnect here. Like, I'm not moving. My quads are not moving, yet-"

    14. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:11:11

        But the whole world is.

    15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:11:12

        The whole world is. There's a big mismatch there. I think also on screens there is-

    16. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:11:16

        Yeah

    17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:11:16

        ... that mismatch. What you said there was, was really quite provocative, that at least in a book, you know, you can feel it. You ha- you're feeling the page. All the signals, the inputs to your brain, they're all kind of, they're synchronous. They're all going the same way. Your brain knows what to expect, whereas on a screen you don't.

    18. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:11:34

        And not only do you, do you not, you're locked in. You get the dopamine release where it just wants you to stay and come back for more, and then all of a sudden you're under that stress state for significantly longer than you would be on paper because you're coming back for more, and, and you're almost getting the taste that your brain doesn't wanna let go of.

14. 1:11:55 – 1:48:12

    Practical toolkit: 20/20/20 breaks, eye push-ups, eye stretches, and peripheral pointing

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:11:55

       Yeah. In terms of practical exercises, okay, so yes, for those people who are that way inclined, motivated, and have the resource to do so, yes, there is this deep dive five-day intensive with you and your team, which of course, the truth is, most people in the world are not gonna have access to.

    2. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:12:14

       Absolutely not.

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:12:15

       Right? And are not gonna be able to do that, or even have the motivation to do that.

    4. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:12:18

       Right.

    5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:12:20

       You have this online ScreenFit program, which is brilliant, which people can do at home themselves to learn those skills. I really, really appreciate you giving my audience that discount codes. So if people go to screenfit.com/livemore or just put in the promo code LIVEMORE, they're gonna get a discount. It's a $200 discount, so thank you so much for that.

    6. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:12:44

       Absolutely, and it, it makes it a lot easier to cross the start line for people to, to get going on that journey towards vision improvement.

    7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:12:52

       Great. But in terms of practical stuff that people who don't wanna do any of that, that they can immediately go, "You know what? I've, I've been convinced. I wanna do something for my visual system," what are some things that they can kinda do immediately?

    8. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:13:09

       So I think, like you hit on, there's four different levels. There's the all-in intensive. There's the at home customized sequence program with ScreenFit. There's the at home stuff, and then level zero is doing nothing.And everybody listening right now, you're crushing that. You're doing nothing-

    9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:13:27

       [laughs]

    10. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:13:27

        ... 'cause you didn't know any better. But absolutely let's get to that first level where there's simple exercises that everybody should do every day, just like you move your body, just like you go out on a walk, we should all be doing a near/far focus activity, and we can talk through that. We should all be doing eye stretches. We can talk through that. We should all be doing peripheral pointing, and we should all be taking regular, consistent vision breaks when we are on screens.

    11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:13:55

        Okay.

    12. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:13:55

        So the 20/20/20 rule at a minimum, which means at least every 20 minutes, taking a break for at least 20 seconds, and looking at something at least 20 feet away, but getting up, getting away from that locked in screen where when we're on a screen, literally our focusing system is under tension over time. Unless you're trying to get buff and you're at the gym, tension over time is not what you want for muscles of your body, especially your, your eye muscles, because that is what causes eye strain and fatigue and headaches and light sensitivity. And your visual system, I mean, if everyone were to squeeze their fists right now, and to go- squeeze them as hard as you can, after a few seconds your hand starts to hurt. But if you were to let go and come back, you could do that for much longer. Your focusing system is under tension when you're on a screen, and just the same way your hand aches with extended squeezes, extended screen time causes headache and eye strain and that locked up visual system.

    13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:14:55

        Yeah. It's kind of interesting. One of the most amazing things that I'm going home with following five days with you is just a deep increased awareness.

    14. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:15:08

        I love that.

    15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:15:08

        Yes, I've learnt skills. Yes, I've got exercises to do, but I just feel that I'm so much more in tune now with my visual system, my eyes, the tension in my eyes. I mean, I think many people will be having tension in their eyes, and they don't, they're not even tuned in to it.

    16. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:15:25

        Yeah.

    17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:15:25

        They don't even know what that feels like, and I think you and your team are really great this week at, um, throughout the exercise, you know, what does that feel like?

    18. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:15:34

        Mm.

    19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:15:35

        Or what does it feel like here? And it's what Helen d- has always done with me as my movement coach is like, "What does that feel like?" Really to try and empower me so that I don't need her, right? So I can start to feel, oh, that's what it feels like. And I had a very light work week this week on purpose because I knew how intense this week was gonna be, but I did have a Zoom call after our training on Wednesday. Got back to the hotel, and I was on it, and I tell you, I could feel it. After 15 minutes, I thought, "Oh my God, my eyes, my eyes are tight."

    20. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:16:10

        Yeah.

    21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:16:10

        And without telling anyone, I just raised them to the top of the screen. I went out wide, all the divergence that we've been practicing this week. I, and I just felt it all release-

    22. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:16:21

        Oh, so great

    23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:16:22

        ... then I came back to it, which, which is awesome, right? And then I think how many Zoom calls have I done where I've been there for an hour or an hour and a half constantly looking at the screen focusing.

    24. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:16:32

        Yeah.

    25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:16:33

        I mean, that's exhausting, isn't it? Yeah. I don't tend to get symptoms like a headache, um, or eye strain that I'm aware of, but you definitely feel tired sometimes after these calls, don't you?

    26. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:16:45

        When you've put in a ton of work before this point on your body and on your mindset and on nutrition to really set up as robust of a, a system as you c- as you can, most people we see with your profile, it's the complete opposite. It's eye strain, fatigue, can't wait to shut down the Zoom calls after the back-to-back-

    27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:17:09

        Mm

    28. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:17:09

        ... meetings, the, you know, s- so many aspects of life are influenced based off of vision interfering and, and not functioning like it's supposed to. But I think what's so neat with what you've shared about Helen and the work you've done before is your body has learned to compensate in such unique ways because you didn't ha- you haven't had the bilateral integration and the visual midline that's been stable and as supportive as it could be. And as a result, the same thing happened with your visual system. You were using your eyes independent of each other, different distances.

    29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:17:42

        Oh my God.

    30. BADr. Bryce Appelbaum1:17:43

        And, you know, that's thrown off your visual midline, which then for many people impacts balance and coordination and even just navigating through space. I mean, we'll see people with your profile who are really hesitant stepping onto an escalator or going up or down stairs because it takes a while to prepare your body to motor plan based off of visual input that you're not really trusting.

Episode duration: 1:48:13