Moving items in vision, anxiety ? Eye strain ?

[JonnyUK]

About 7 weeks ago I started to notice things in my vision were very slowly moving around. Then within a week I started to suffer what felt like eye strain, I was on the computer a lot and I got double vision and had trouble focusing. I would wake up with heavy eyes and feel nauseous and sick looking at a screen, even with computer glasses on. Shutting my eyes would help reduce some of the ache.

A lot of the symptoms remain. I have a pressure feeling between my eyes and I can't focus well on distance text. Some close up text is blurry. I find when I first wake up in the morning the "moving" or "hovering" appearance to objects is a lot less then an hour later. Simply speaking if I look at DVDs on my shelf they appear to move to the right. When I look at my TV is looks a lot like it is hovering or bouncing slightly up and down or around in a circle, but very smoothly, not sudden jumps. I do have also what feels like neck or back spasms, probably due to my heavy weight, but that movement doesn't seem to match the eye movement, so I don't think it is that.

I just wondered, can bad eye strain cause objects to look like they are moving and long distance objects to appear out of focus ? I suffer from GAD and I worry that every new symptom I have is anxiety. Sometimes though I know it could be serious, but again that could be the anxiety talking. Every time I look on the net for "things moving in vision" it brings up neurological problems.

I know no one here can tell for sure, but it is interesting to know if any other anxiety sufferers have "moving objects" symptoms ?

Thanks all !

[Sparkling_Fairy]

Are the objects you're looking at moving?
Or do you see tiny shapes moving in front of your eyes?

[JonnyUK]

The objects appear to move, not floaters within my eyes. So for instance, if I look at a plug on the wall, it appears to move to the right slightly and then back, like a slow yoyo. I sweat a tiny bit on the face and feel hot headed when trying to focus on things. I guess it is like being on a boat.

[Sparkling_Fairy]

Hmmm, can't really say much about that. I can tell you that at the height of my anxiety, sometimes when I was watching TV it felt like the picture went a bit wavy. Like it was moving up and down like a slightly shaky camera. But it only ever happened with the TV, not with other objects.

But if I'm being honest I do think it's just anxiety. The mind plays tricks on us and the hot headed thing is definitely anxiety related.

[Marietta08]

Hi Jonny, are you still getting these symptoms or have they improved a bit? Hope they have improved. :)

I have health anxiety and one of my worries is my eyes. I've been the eye hospital 3 times in the past few months for various things and my eyes were fine except a doctor told me I was having optical/visual migraines.

For a month or so I've been getting this thing where when I look out of the window at a streetlight and it looks like it's moving, sometimes slightly and sometimes swinging more. It looks like it's moving from side and sometimes shaking. This is through the net curtain. Sometimes it actually IS moving in the wind, I can tell the difference. My family do say they can see a similar effect sometimes.

I had an eye test the other week (I was having some other symptoms too) and my eyes were ok apart from a slight change to my prescripton (I'm mildly long sighted). The optican didn't have an explantion for the streetlight moving. I'm still worrying so I've made a doctor's appointment but you have to wait a while these days at my surgery.

I did also get eye "shaking" while looking at fairy lights the other night but it's improved now. Sometimes the picture on the TV screen seems to be shaking out of the corner of my eye. A few years ago I was reallty stresed and my vision seemed to be bouncing around but this is different.

Hope it helps a bit to know about someone with similar symptoms. :)