How effective is eye yoga for ‘anti-ageing’ your vision?

Sir Paul McCartney cuts a youthful figure. His tousled moptop is as luxuriant as ever, he plays energetically with his grandchildren on the beach and he’s busy recording new music. But perhaps most surprisingly, at the age of 78, the former Beatle now says his vision remains as good as ever, too. “I don’t need glasses when reading a newspaper,” he revealed in a recent podcast. Sir Paul’s secret? Eye yoga.

Sir Paul said he had learned the practice from a yogi he met in India in the 2000s. “He explained that your eyes are muscles. Your ears aren’t, so you can’t exercise your ears. But your eyes, you can.” He says eye yoga, which involves rolling eyes in specific patterns, can “look a bit weird”, but that as well as preserving his own vision, it helped a friend’s daughter to boost hers and delay needing glasses.

Eye yoga is a growing trend, promising brighter, better-rested eyes, a cure for eye strain and, yes, even improved vision in just a few minutes a day. You might be tempted to dismiss it with a good old-fashioned roll of your own eyes – but with “digital eye strain” on the rise, and four in 10 adults in the UK reporting that a rise in screen time during the pandemic has negatively affected their sight, there’s increasing interest in the practice.

Yoga and wellbeing expert Phoebe Greenacre introduced eye yoga classes via her Instagram Live channel during lockdown. She says: “It’s important to use the full range of our sight, just as it’s important to use the full range of our body. It’s not natural just to look straight ahead at screens or laptops all day. This leads to stress, eye strain and headaches. Eye yoga can help relieve these.”

Chatty Dobson, yoga teacher and founder of yoga studio FLEX Chelsea in London, which also introduced eye yoga classes during lockdown, adds: “Looking after the muscles in the eye area is more important than ever. Eye yoga is not complicated and feels so good. If you do it every day you will feel your muscles getting stronger and longer, reducing the deterioration of eye focus that we see as we age, while easing tension headaches and relaxing the muscles of the face in general.”

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But is there any science behind the trend? A 2012 study showed little to no improvement in short-sightedness. However, in another study of 60 nursing students, eight weeks of eye yoga practice was shown to make eyes feel less tired. And in one study, even though researchers couldn’t measure any objective improvement in eyesight, participants felt as if they were seeing more clearly. This might be because eye exercises appear to help people more quickly identify what they are looking at.

Optometrist Sheena Tanna-Shah agrees that eye yoga may have benefits, though says it’s “unusual” not to need reading glasses in your 70s, as Sir Paul claims to. “When you look at a screen you tend to blink less so eyes can feel dry and uncomfortable. Rapid blinking, which is part of eye yoga, can help. Eye yoga can feel pleasant and I don’t think it can cause any harm. Just don’t expect to throw your specs away any time soon.”