This is definitely working (vision therapy is 90% technique, 7% persistence, 3% hard work)

 Man.  What a lesson to learn.  I've been thinking about what it takes to be successful in vision therapy as I approach the end.  The more I think about it, success in vision therapy is 90% technique, 7% persistence, 3% hard work.  It doesn't matter how hard you work.  If you're doing the wrong things, you'll never succeed.  That sounds, and indeed feels right (because it is).  But that extends far beyond vision therapy.  It's similar to the Abraham Lincoln quote:

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.  

--Abraham Lincoln

When you're doing the right things, results should come fast.  Hard work is important, but overrated, in my estimation.  By far the most important thing is doing the right things.  Everything else is secondary.   Persistence is second, because persistence is what allows you to eventually discover what works.  The remaining is hard work, whatever the hell that even means.  

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” 

  

--Bill Gates

The tricky part is learning and discovering effective technique.  You may not learn it from a vision therapist.  You may have to figure it out on your own through experimentation and an ungodly amount of persistence.

My current regimen is definitely working.  Double vision is going away.  My weak eye is getting stronger.   

Still moving fast

 Yeah, wow.  Man.  My vision looks better than ever especially today.  I finished my cold exposure fast (I'm now doing cold exposure again).  And yeah, it does seem that cold exposure has had a greater impact on my vision and vision training than any single thing.  It's such valuable knowledge to have.  It is an incredibly powerful technique, which I'm sure more and more people will discover over time.  Its utility to learning new skills will be increasingly invalidated I feel.  

I feel like I struck gold.  In particular, I think there are synergistic effects of cold exposure and red light therapy.  It's very powerful stuff.  I'm still making tweaks.  It does seem that a regular dose of three minutes of cold exposure at 33* F every day combined with red light therapy will interfere with sleep.  If I take a few days off of cold exposure, I'll sleep fine again.  So I'm tweaking the dials a bit so I can have it both ways: get the benefits of cold exposure while still being able to sleep normally.  

Some of the dials I'm tweaking are

• Doing cold exposure earlier in the morning.
• Doing less cold exposure (two minutes instead of three).
• Alternating days with cold exposure (one day on, one day off).

Cold exposure interferes with sleep (at least it does for me)

 Yeah, I took a break from cold exposure for about three days.  Here's the deal with cold exposure.  This is just a hypothesis.  This is what I think happened.  

Cold exposure has extremely powerful ant-inflammatory effects.  Through this mechanism, as well as through dopamine, it has a host of positive effects on the mind: boosted mood, greater resilience and endurance, better cognition.  A huge part as well is that the effects of a night of lack of sleep are almost unnoticed.  It's through this that it had a huge positive effect on my progress with vision therapy.  It really knocked the cobwebs off my brain.

However, there are drawbacks.  Your body needs inflammation for recovery.  So my body was getting sore from daily workouts over time.  But I think the reason my body was getting sore is that it wasn't recovering correctly due to lack of sleep.  Andrew Huberman has said cold exposure (cold plunges) should be avoided when you're about to go to sleep.  Fine.  I always do plunges in the morning anyway.  However, I think the reason the plunges interfered with sleep is through the anti-inflammatory mechanism.  I think your brain perhaps uses inflammation as a signal to sleep.  I noticed that when I took a three-day break from cold plunges that I had no trouble falling asleep.  Then I did another plunge yesterday during the day, and that night I had trouble sleeping again.  

Problem is that when doing cold plunges, you're less affected by lack of sleep, but the body does need to sleep in order to properly repair itself.  I think that may be where the soreness came in, because the red light exposure really enabled me to work out much harder and beat up my muscles more.  Then when I went to bed (read: not sleep), it wasn't fully repairing itself.  

So this requires some tweaking.  There are two things that come to mind.  Man, it's weird how powerful cold exposure is.  Even though I slept like shit, my mind seems to work really well at the moment, and I can type extremely fast.  What I'm going to try first is alternating days with cold exposure.  I'm going to take a break one day, and do cold exposure the next day in alteration.  And when I do cold exposure I'm only going to do two minutes at a time (not 3-5 minutes, which I think may have been way overkill).  I think maybe doing cold exposure every day every morning may have been overkill, and too much on the body.  

The other thing I might try is doing cold exposure earlier in the morning (like 8am), and see if that allows me to sleep better. 

Cold exposure fast--regimen is definitely working

 My current regimen is definitely working.  The changes I've been noticing were particularly pronounced yesterday with VR and driving around.  More and more often I find myself noting to myself 'My double vision is nearly gone.'.

The things I'm doing with my body are definitely powerful.  Particularly, the red light therapy.  What an interesting thing that is.  I did not expect the effects to be so pronounced and obvious.  It really very quickly had a significant improvement on my body composition.  Namely, I lost of a lot of fat, particularly around the abdomen, but around the body as well--noticing better pop with the veins in my arms--and I can feel the underlying muscles pushing against my skin.  I can also see the difference in the mirror when I have my shirt off.  

I think the red light therapy has a sort of steroid effect.  If you don't know, the way steroids increase muscle mass is that they improve the body's ability to recover.  So when you work out hard, the body recovers quickly, and effectively so that when it's time to work out again, the muscles are ready to rip.  And then you can work out even harder, which then produces an even stronger signal for them to build back even stronger, and so on.  If you do steroids and don't work out, you don't get any benefit.  

Well I think red light therapy works in a similar way, but without having an impact on hormones.  From what I've read, it doesn't increase testosterone or impact hormones in any appreciable way, which is somewhat surprising to me.  What it does do, however, is that it appears to very substantively improve recovery and healing.  One of the surprising things I noticed is that my workouts got much easier.  I can do way more push-ups than normal.  I don't normally count.  I normally do push-ups to failure.  I just noticed I have way more in me to do more when I'm at the point where I normally tap out.  Same with pull-ups and deadlifts.  So I'm able to do more, which then sends a stronger than normal stimulus to my body to build muscle in a way that's similar to steroids, but without messing with the endocrine system.   

However, working out harder is also a bit harder on the body.  I've begun to notice some soreness at the point where my latissimus dorsi meets the tendon.  A buddy was telling me I should maybe consider taking a break from the cold plunge because it can interfere with recovery.  Apparently, the anti-inflammatory effects of cold exposure are so powerful that they can interfere with recovery/healing, and inflammation is an important part of healing.  So I'm kind of fasting on cold exposure and also taking a break from the workouts until the soreness goes away.  Man.  This is powerful stuff.  

Aside from that, everything is looking good.  I've made massive progress since I began doing Game-Blyopia.  Taking this one day at a time.  Excited to see how things are in a few weeks.  Progress is still noticeable on a daily basis.  

Progress should be fast. If it isn't, then it means you need to change something in your routine

 I've run into this many times.  If your exercises are effective, you should notice changes in your vision on a nearly daily basis.  If you don't, you need to change something in your routine.

Making very fast progress again (Columns + Game-Blyopia + Nicotine gum)

 Yeah, I kinda petered out a bit with the previous regimen of Columns.  Then I added in Game-Blyopia, and holy crap that really sped things up again.  I'm seeing massively improved objective as well as subjective markers of improvement.  

As mentioned in previous entries, I think the special new way of doing Columns helped because it forced me to strengthen my weak eye.  But then when I realized that's the way it worked, I researched some other ways of increasing the strength of the weak eye and found a very good and useful way of doing it which targets the mechanism of action more precisely and powerfully: Game-Blyopia--or anti-suppression exercises with red/green filter glasses.  And then I hit the exercises really hard.  

Game-Blyopia consists of many different games.  I found one game that forces the use of both eyes very well.  I can only play the game if both eyes are being used simultaneously.  It is a bit challenging, but man does it work very well.  Let's see how this goes.  

Game-blyopia seems to be working

 Game-Blyopia seems to be working.  God I'm such an idiot.  I thought the difference in power of the images between the two eyes was a difference in refractive index--and indeed it might be part of the problem, but it's definitely the case that the right eye is weaker.  So I'm now focused on building its strength.  Really going through my day and trying to use that eye more than the left eye, hitting Columns for 30 minutes a day, and then hitting Game-Blyopia a lot.  Been playing this 2048 game which is both fun and really forces you to use both eyes.  I am hitting it hard while chewing my Nicotine gum.  Let's see where this takes me. 

Game-blyopia and red light

 Damn, I'm an idiot.  I was reading some past entries and thinking about Heather and Robert and about standard vision therapy and began looking at the Bernell site and perhaps looking into adding some standard vision therapy to my regimen.  This is embarrassing... but for a while I was thinking about how the right-side image during Columns is a bit weaker than the left-hand side.  Then it struck me that it's the weak eye--the lazy eye.  Then I thought about ways of increasing its strength.  

I did some searching.  One method is patching.  Another is tranaglyphs.  

I think Columns helps because it forces you to use both eyes.  But what about exercises that are explicitly for getting both eyes working together.  I went on the Apple Store on the iPad to find some anti-suppression exercises.  I found a game called GamE-blyopia, and bought it.  It uses some red/green filter glasses I bought the previous day.  It's got a number of games.  I just got done playing anti-suppression Snake for like an hour.  I got super close to beating it.  

I think moving forward, I'm going to do 30 minutes Columns, and 30 minutes GamE-blyopia.  

I feel like even though I've only done a few sessions this way, I'm making very rapid progress.  The idea with the game is that I can only see the snake with the lazy eye and only see the food the snake eats with the left eye.  It feels weird and a bit uncomfortable, but I do feel like I'm making very rapid progress.  I'm excited.  I've played games like this in the past but I think now it's going to work, because of all of the new things I'm doing now to help the brain change, like the cold exposure, keto, Nicotine, and red light therapy.  

Heh, it's all coming together.  My brain... feels like it's on fire now.  Been reading about the Russian revolution.  

Oh yeah, and red light therapy.  That shit works.  I was a bit skeptical about it.  Did a bunch of searches on it, and read a lot of 'red light therapy may improve cognitive function, may smoothen skin and assuage skin imperfections and wrinkles, may reduce inflammation...'.  Then I saw a few videos about Andrew Huberman talking about it who advocates red light therapy and I said 'ok, let's try this.'.  

It works.  It's hard to say the biggest thing it does, because the effects are comprehensive.  This is probably because they say the mechanism of action is on the mitocondria.  Apparently it helps with the generation of ATP.  When I read about that, I thought 'hmmm, if that's the case, then the effects should be very general and comprehensive all around the body, because mitocondria function is central to all aspects of our biology'.  Indeed, that appears to be the case.  

I do feel like I have quite a bit more energy.  As I sit here writing this, part of me wants to get up and move, and lift weights and swing some kettlebells around or something.  My appetite has increased a bit.  As well, I have gotten leaner.  Normally on Monday I will look at myself shirtless in the mirror to inspect damage from weekend eating.  Actually, I noticed I'm quite a bit leaner.  I kinda have a six-pack now, actually, and picking up my buddy from the airport, he confirmed that I appear leaner.  I think my skin has smoothened as well, and I do feel like my brain is functioning on a much higher level.  This stuff be cray.