Dave, I seem to have higher IOP on stressful days and weight lifting days.

Here is a 10 minute video on effortless deep breathing from YouTube that I recommend:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh_C4LBBMrY

If you know of similar or better instructional videos on breathing, please let me know.

When a part or even the entire optic nerve is dead, I know it does not promote vision. Does theis death grow like when a limb had gangrene? Is the Nerve 'dead' so it should be rejected by the body? I think it must mean something different from most tissue dead for optic nerves to be determined dead. Does anyone know or have a good hypothesis?

Tonight is the next webcast of Oprah Winfrey's online class with Echkart Tolle: A New Earth Web Event. I strongly suggest it is worth watching for all glaucoma patients and anyone else interested in maintaining good vision. There is more to the connection between this topic and our visual health than one might realize at first glance. The current chapters deal a lot with the ego.

 Below is part of a very interesting email a reader sent me a little while ago. I asked for his permission to share some of it here. I hope this person eventually finds time to start a blog on FitEyes.com or share more of his experiences. I could learn a lot from him, and I suspect many other people would like to hear more about his experiences with intraocular pressure.

I received some nice feedback about yesterday's blog article on how nasal conditions affect eye pressure. Thank you for your emails (and I would appreciate it if more readers will leave comments on my blog too).

Sinus conditions affect one's eye pressure. This is particularly important for glaucoma patients. Nasal blockage can have a strong effect on eye pressure and there are subtle effects as well. In addition, I speculate that the nose may offer an effective way for glaucoma patients to improve the long-term health of their optic nerve. The nose can be the doorway to the optic nerve as well as being intimately connected with eye pressure. In this blog post I'll touch on both areas.

NOTE: This post was made in late 2006. The comments following it were made in early 2007. In the time that has passed since these initial intraocular pressure observations were made (see comments below), we have come to understand this situation much, much better. This thread is interesting for background information, but please see the more recent posts on FitEyes.com if you want to really understand the relationship between stress, breathing, meditation and eye pressure. I have been in contact with a number of people who have tonometers and who have replicated some of these observations, and the patterns continue to hold. Basically, this seems to apply to all glaucoma patients. However, there are individual differences, especially among meditators and non-meditators.

This abstract simply triggers a discussion in the comments below. All the interesting info is in the comments.

Effects of Valsalva's manoeuvre on intraocular pressure

Increased intraocular pressure and visual field defects in high resistance wind instrument players

Joel S. Schuman MD, Emma Craig Massicotte MD, Shannon Connolly BA, Ellen Hertzmark MS, Bhaskar Mukherji MD and Mandi Z. Kunen MD

New England Eye Center, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts., USA 

Received 23 March 1999; accepted 30 August 1999 Manuscript no. 99154. Available online 10 January 2000. 

As I understand this study, the researchers had subjects with primary open angle glaucoma (gluacoma simplex) breath through their right nostril only (by closing off their left nostril). Breathing through one nostril while closing the other with the fingers is a common pranayama (yogic breathing) exercise. However, normal pranayama usually alternates the open nostrils with the aim of creating balance in the physiology.

 Today I compared several eye pressure measurements on the basis of a normal measurement vs. a measurement after 1-2 minutes of relaxed breathing. I wanted to see if my eye pressure is lower when I do simple deep breathing as a form of relaxation.

When I started this IOP data collection project, I expected stress management tools like meditation and pranayama (yoga breathing exercises) to lower my IOP. Immediately after starting the project, I was surprised to find that my IOP was much higher after meditation when we measured it. Those initial meditation sessions consisted of several elements, including pranayama. Today I tested a 10 minute session of pranayama alone, without any meditation.