Can your eyes play tricks on you?

[Lf93]

Hi,

A few years ago, I had a huge worry that I was seeing smoke. One time I was on a train, I think I was in and out of sleep and next minute I looked up to see what looked like smoke billowing above the seat in front of me. I don’t really know if it was real or not, but I let it become a worry. Since then, I became paranoid all the time, thinking that I was seeing smoke, one night I got myself really paranoid thinking it had happened again to realise it was just the light reflecting on my glass and my anxiety jumping to conclusions, so then I forgot about it, and it didn’t really happen after that.

Now a few years later, I was just doing work and I thought I saw smoke billowing from the blinds, if I’m being logical, it could have just been dust billowing in the sunlight-that can look like a puff of smoke. I was then looking at my iPad, and then I look up and see what looks like white fog/smoke in my face. It made me very anxious, and it doesn’t help that I’m on about 5 hours sleep.

I get all sorts of visual disturbances, from flickering to floaters to flashing to afterimages, I also wonder if i have visual snow as I can get that white noise thing sometimes. I am sort of wondering if visual disturbances are what’s going on and I’m just getting paranoid about it. I don’t really have any other issues apart from occasionally being tired and thinking I see the tap running out of the corner of my eye to realise its not.

I’m mostly worried because my Nan was schizophrenic- no one else has inherited it though. Does this sound like something to worry about or just anxiety playing games?

Thank you

[ankietyjoe]

Completely normal with anxiety, and not really related to schizophrenia in any way. Schizophrenia is almost always a result of childhood trauma.

[Lf93]

Thank you.

To be honest I wouldn’t even be super worried about it if someone related to me didn’t have it. But I get what you mean as we’ve always believed my Nan had it as a result of things that happened to her during the war. The smoke thing has happened to me before and I got really paranoid about it for weeks only to then dismiss it when one time I realised it was just my eyes and all the floaters/astigmatism/visual disturbances etc. I’ve always been that person who turns around to think I’ve seen a a spider when it’s just those annoying dark floaters.

It happened to me again last night as I was going to sleep...admittedly I was even more shattered by then so it’s probably nothing but yeah I think I need to try and cut down my anxious response because I feel like the anxiety kind of heightens it and that just creates a cycle of re-triggering it and getting myself into a mess.

[ankietyjoe]

Thank you.

we’ve always believed my Nan had it as a result of things that happened to her during the war.

And you'd almost certainly be right.

Schizophrenia is related to imaginary childhood friends and is an extreme reaction of a relatively normal part of the brain as a reaction to trauma that a childhood brain cannot process. Almost all 'genetic' passing down of the condition is more likely to be behavioral rather than chemical.

For example, diabetes was thought to be genetic, where in reality it's now thought that it's passed on eating habits and sedentary lifestyles that are the cause rather than an automatic predisposition to becoming diabetic.