Exhausted. Exceptions. Spain on Saturday.

My ophthalmologist has assured me that eye blurriness is very often caused by dry eyes, and I can assure you that dry eyes, just like dry mouth, are indeed stress-based conditions. When I was still working with a full tax practice, it meant 12 hour days 7 days a week during tax season. I had severe dry mouth from mid-January until, literally, April 16th. Every year. Looking back with TMS awareness, it's clear that I couldn't afford to have more debilitating symptoms, so that's what my brain came up with. I used that brand-name line of products (gum, rinse, and spray) for temporary relief and to protect my oral biome until busy season came to its abrupt and arbitrary end in April. The rest of the year I forgot all about it.

I believe I'm several decades older than you, @dlane2530, and there are some inevitable facts about aging which just have to be accepted. One of them is dry eyes. At the urging of the eye doc I finally gave in and agreed to do the warm compress thing for ten minutes a day, and guess what - it really helps reduce the blurriness - very noticeably so if I skip a day. It also forces me to actually sit and relax without any visual input for ten minutes a day ( plus another five or ten of temporary blurriness). This is something I fool myself into believing I will do in the name of meditation and mindfulness, yet somehow I manage to never get around to it. This works for me because I love multitasking, LOL. And also the doc told me that this time she was going to follow up with me, and since I'm a good little goodist this gave me the incentive to comply. Mind you, this only happened earlier this year, and she's been recommending it for at least three years.

So, it works, as the doc assured me it would. Is it a physical crutch for a stress-based response? Yep. In my case, I kinda accept that there's an aging component (there's a tiny bit of cataract development also contributing, but not enough for the surgery yet). In your case, you can use it to take the edge off during times of unavoidable stress, and accept the comfort and the benefit without beating yourself up. A damp warm washcloth works, or pharmacies have masks with special plastic beads that heat up and hold the right temperature with just 20-30 seconds in the microwave (probably not an option while hiking the Santiago de Compostela!)

 

PS, I've been addicted to my progressives ever since I got tired of constantly peering over the tops of the increasingly stronger cheap readers that my husband would pick up in Costco three-packs a couple of times a year. But when I got my very first pair of Rx progressives they seemed great during the checkout process, until I stood up and tried to leave the clinic, and I turned around and said "are you kidding? I can't even walk straight!"