Your Emotional State Can Physically Alter Your Eyes
How stress makes you see the world differently
When you’re stressed (or angry, scared, etc.), you view the world just a little bit differently. Like, literally through-your-eyeballs see things differently.
I was floored by a statement by doctor Andrew Huberman in a recent Lewis Howes podcast episode. He said that our pupils dilate when we experience extreme emotions and, because of that, our vision is altered.
I think that, at one point, I had heard the pupil thing, but I had never thought about how that connects to our brain’s perception of what we’re seeing.
According to the BrightFocus Foundation, “Pupil dilation occurs when the opening in the center of your iris grows bigger to let in more light. Under normal circumstances, pupils can dilate to let in more light or in response to a variety of stimuli”. Pupils can even dilate when we’re feeling strong feelings of love or arousal caused by another person.
But, what does that actually mean for what we SEE? Well, Andrew Huberman put it in a context that I could understand.
When your pupils dilate, you see the equivalent of portrait mode on your phone.
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Have you ever played with portrait mode on your phone’s camera? Have you noticed that it brings the person on the other side of the camera’s face into sharp focus and blurs out all of the other things around it? That’s what happens when your pupils dilate.
The whole portrait mode thing also makes a lot of sense when you connect eye dilation to strong amorous emotions (which is a scientific fact — it actually happens). If you’ve ever watched a love scene from a movie from the ’40s or ’50s, you probably know what I mean.
When someone falls in love, the camera racks focus on (usually) the woman’s face, everything around her becomes soft (out of focus), and the background music swells.
And while that’s great for old movies or taking a photo, it’s not always so great for going about our everyday lives. When we enter a state in which our pupils dilate, we could potentially be missing important aspects of the situation that surrounds us.
Let’s say, for instance, that you are having an altercation with your partner about a set of lost keys. If you focus in on your partner and everything else around them is blurry, you’ll miss seeing that the keys are on the mantel behind his/her/their head.
Similarly, almost any state of agitation or anger can cause a lack of observation when it comes to external stimuli. If you’re in line at the airport and you’re stressed about the slowness of the person in front of you in line, you could potentially miss looking up at the screen above your head to see that your flight has been delayed and you could have stopped stressing.
There are countless examples of this, but the important take away is that, if you know this fact, the next time you experience a stressor, you can make a conscious decision to override portrait mode and take a look around you to consider external stimuli.
We can be conscious of the fact that our states alter our vision (and, thus, our perception) and then deliberately take steps to be more observant and potentially counteract negative consequences that might come about because of our lack of shortsightedness.
Now, while this is the official end of this little article, at this point, I’d like to make a little public service announcement:
STRESS IS NOT ALWAYS BAD.
As a society, we tend to view stress as a bad thing. We tell each other, “Don’t stress out” and commence work on our latest breathing technique to lower our heart rate.
But, the truth is that a little stress is good for us. It raises our body’s level of tolerance for stressors and makes us better capable of handling anything that life throws our way.
That’s why the Wym Hofs and Tony Robbinses of the world take ice baths. According to Psychology Today,
“Some researchers have suggested that exposure to a moderate level of stress that you can master can actually make you stronger and better able to manage stress. It’s like how a vaccine, which contains a tiny amount of the bug, can immunize you against getting the disease”.
This is also one of the reasons exercising is good for us.
The most important take-away from all of this is that some stress is good, but if we don’t take a moment to consciously consider our surroundings when in a stressful situation, we could end up regretting it in the long run.
When you feel angry, scared, or even smitten, take a moment, take a breath, and work to see the big picture.
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