Expand Your Periphery
I am currently working through the online S-Phase course with Z-Health Performance, and yesterday the material I watched discussed peripheral vision/awareness in detail. I was aware of the importance of peripheral vision, and knew that when we have more sympathetic nervous system activity (fight-or-flight response) our brain will narrow our peripheral field to keep our focus on the dangers in front of us. I thought that to gain back a wider peripheral field, we might need to first consider/decrease our level of stress.
What I learned yesterday was that actually working on improving peripheral vision can create a decrease in stress, lowering sympathetic nervous system activity — it never occurred to me that this would work in the other direction!!
Try this activity:
Stand with your arms reaching out in front of you, and begin wiggling your fingers.
Slowly open your arms out to the sides, keeping your gaze focused on something in front of you.
Notice how far you can open your arms and still be aware of the finger movement in your periphery, and try to increase that range, even if slightly.
Repeat this with your arms opening at different heights, to work on your peripheral field above and below eye level.
It is important to keep the fingers moving, since your eyes detect motion better than static objects in the periphery.
See if this awareness of the periphery and the time spent working to improve it makes a change in your body’s level of fight-or-flight response.