Tag: red light

The Root Cause of Sensory Processing Disorder – It is all About the Eyes

  • Many highly sensitive people are sensitive to their perception of the spectrum, specifically red and blue light.
  • Sensitivity to red and blue light causes the visual image not to always fall centrally on the fovea centralis at the back of our eye. Movement of the visual image from falling on the centre of the fovea (promoting sharp visual acuity) and switching on red and green cones, to image falling on outer edge of the fovea (promoting less sharp visual acuity) switching on blue cones, and all the incremental changes of these combinations, cause disturbance in our visual system.
  • Disturbance in our visual system cause small muscle imbalances.
  • Small muscle imbalances cause sensitivity to misalignment of our gaze (Phorias)
  • Misalignment of our gaze causes issues with focus, tracking and depth perception.
  • On a deeper level, misalignment of gaze causes Lack of Coherence (difficulty seeing the big picture or processing the whole.) A person’s world may appear to be unintegrated or flat.
  • Lack of Coherence causes confusion. It is as if the brain is trying to do a giant jigsaw puzzle but can’t quite make the pieces fit together.
  • Confusion overloads the nervous system and the result is sensory processing issues (visual, sound, touch and texture, proprioception, balance and interoception.)
  • Issues with focus also cause too low or too high saturation of colour, augmenting the sensory issues of taste and smell.

What Do We Do About This?

We need to: –

Test people to see if they could be sensitive to their phorias.
Offer people the right prisms to correct their phorias.
Teach people about spectral sensitivity because this is essential in understanding our phorias and working with them successfully.

When the Red Tones are Missing . . .

I often see too much blue and not enough red. When red tones are missing, nothing feels complete.

When I went back to school as a child the trees were losing their leaves and they didn’t feel compete.

The pumpkin of October didn’t feel complete and even less so with holes in.

The flames dancing around on the fire in November hurt my eyes and didn’t feel complete.

The presents and tree of Christmas didn’t feel complete. The colours and patterns of my clothes didn’t feel complete.

The colours, shapes and patterns of the food on my plate didn’t feel complete.

People’s voices, music, the sound of a bath tap didn’t feel complete.

A hug or a kind word didn’t feel complete.

Nothing felt complete until New Year when there was a bit more blue and red light and my hope of completion started to rise. By Easter things were feeling better and by my Birthday in May I could process the patterns on my new Birthday cardigan.

And then in June, that old feeling of incompleteness started back again. On a sunny day when all looked so beautiful, the garden felt incomplete, the beach, the hills, the woods – they all felt incomplete. And vegetables and meat started to become very slightly blue and colours appeared in general a bit drained, like someone was forgetting to add red to the world. I felt unsafe from September to December but now it was a different feeling of being unsafe – the light felt brash and harsh and I could feel exposed and lost. So my ‘normal’ is to feel ‘incompleteness.’

As an adult I understand it. It is all about my perception. The world doesn’t change like I think it does. My perception does.

My experience has taught me to trust and taught me to have faith. These are the two things that are constant in my life. These things are unchanging.

What Definition Are You Seeing the World In?

When we perceive more blue light than red light, we see the world in higher definition.

When we perceive more red light than blue light, we see the world in lower definition.

When we see in high definition we can feel separate and lonely. We can find it hard to gather and maintain our energy. We can find it hard to drink in from the world and feel part of the world.

When we see in low definition, we can feel that everything is a bit too blended. Life doesn’t draw us in and we can’t quite get hold of things. We can feel tired, apathetic, depressed, as if we have no clear use or purpose.

Look at the photograph at the top. Do you want to walk into the picture and pick up the marble or do you feel you can’t reach it or do you feel oblivious?

If you feel you can’t reach it, you may not perceive enough blue light today.

If you feel oblivious, you may not perceive enough red light today.

If you want to pick it up, then you are just fine the way you are!

How Does it Feel to Have Ambient Colour Sensitivity?

Experiencing ambient colour sensitivity, I am highly aware of my brain’s interpretation of what I perceive in the world around me. I detect the slight rise in red light in autumn, the lowering of blue light in the winter, the change between predominance of red and blue light in the spring, and the lack of red light in the summer. I feel the harmony of colour combinations all around me as soothing, or less soothing. I detect the slightest change in luminance, changing all the colours I see and the way they interact with each other, constantly, throughout the day and seasons. I have an extreme experience of contrast. experiencing a dance between colours becoming subtly darker and lighter, altering the way I see and feel line, shape and pattern all around me.

Anxiety – Does it all Really Come from Within?

If you had asked me the question – “Does all anxiety come from within?” a few years ago I would have said “Yes” without hesitation. And as a result of thinking this, I have had a lot of therapy and worked long and hard with my self development, expecting to resolve my insecure anxious feelings and thoughts.

A Story

Today I woke up feeling bright and breezy and decided it would be a good day to go with my family to a small seaside town and play mini-golf. Now, for our complicated family, it is amazing to just get out of the door, let alone make it down to the beach and participate in an activity! But I felt the light was good, my energy felt good and it was worth giving it a try.

As soon as I decided to go out, I felt my anxiety levels raise. I started thinking about all the things we needed – rucksacks, juice, chocolate, tissues, paracetemol . . .! I then told myself that this was just like any trip for us. We would take the same things for an appointment at the hairdressers! So I relaxed a bit. But I noticed I still didn’t feel as grounded as I had felt when I first got up. My legs were a bit achy and physical tasks like carrying things around the house were starting to feel difficult. I then realised the light had changed – I was perceiving less red light than when I first woke up. I wondered if I still really felt like going out. But of course, with a 12 year old who is excited about the prospect of mini-golf by the seaside, you don’t really get a choice. With the suggestion comes a commitment!

So . . I committed and off we went! When we arrived, I felt the same as I had done at home – happy, pleased to be alive but ungrounded. How does this feel? Well . . it feels like my legs aren’t as substantial as the rest of me. This feeling used to make me feel insecure but it doesn’t any more because I recognise it and understand it. At the seaside today, I knew I was safe and all was well and it was this knowing that I depended on. The real give away with how my perception of the light affected me, was just how much my legs ached when I had to climb lots of steps to get to the golf course. I felt as if I had run a marathon in the last 3 days, it was so painful. Also, when the energy is low in my legs, I have a tendency to pull muscles in my knees so I have to be super careful how I I use my legs and the rest of my body.

At the mini-golf I felt just OK. When you don’t feel grounded, it is harder to feel more than OK sometimes. it takes a distraction like seeing an amazing gull or getting a hole in one to feel more than OK. This feeling of just being OK can raise the alarm that something isn’t right but I am used to the feeling now and just stay calm and go with it. As I say, I know I am safe and that all is well.

My son, who is 12, has a similar experience to me. As he is a child and not always thinking rationally, small things can knock him off balance emotionally, and have massive impact on him physically. After the game of golf, we decided to go to the fish shop which was at the bottom of a very steep hill. I could see the pain on my son’s face as he walked down the hill, and the fear in his eyes that he might not make it back to the car. I remember this feeling so well from when I was a child. I would sometimes feel that I could not walk another step. But there is nothing wrong with our legs. Having rested a little on the drive home, my son got out the car and ran to check on his pet doves. I just got on with life as normal.

Not being grounded and having low energy in our legs does affect our daily life but it affects us much more when we try to go out and have some fun!

Anxiety definitely doesn’t always come from within. Sometimes we don’t know what is affecting us. We just know we don’t feel right.

Video Snippet – The Grounded Feeling of the Red Light

Seeing more blue light and less red light most of the time, I am looking for the red light in the atmosphere to balance my perception of the spectrum. I notice if I see less red light, that I feel less energy in my legs and feet than I usually do. When I perceive more red light or I find I can wear glasses to either block blue or enhance red, I suddenly feel more grounded and more secure.

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