Headaches and visual snow

[David55]

Hi, for about 10 years I've had visual snow and other assorted visual symtoms; fortunately none of these are seriously debilitating but they are persistant. In the past year it has gotten worse and I think it's linked to my anxiety and it has made me get headaches if I look at white-on-black text or bright red colours. I've also got headaches from using some PC programs; however it's difficult to know if the headaches are caused by my anxiety hyper-focusing on the text and/or the visual symptoms, or if the colours themselves are giving me an automatic 'cybersickness' headache. I don't think that the screentime alone is the cause as the symptoms go away when using other programs/websites.

Has anyone had something similar? I'm trying to do some neck stretches as visual snow can be related to muscle tension (which I certainly have a lot of).

Thanks for any advice.

Edit: By 'visual snow' I mean the comorbid symptoms such as palinopsia rather than just visual snow itself, the latter being pretty trivial since it's just a case of occasionally thinking- 'oh is it raining outside or is that just the visual snow?...nope, it's raining'.

[Dexter James]

When i started to read a lot about visual snow i developed it the reason for that was because i started to focus on it and my eyes a lot , in fact i was paranoid i would go blind, I personally think it's in the mind and is bought on more by over emphasizing on the matter lets be honest staring at anything to long gives us eye stress headaches and all kinds of funny symptoms at times its like if you stare at a dim light for a while and turn round the image of the glow takes a while to clear from the eye, We as humans are not designed to sit if front of computers TV and mobile phones for hrs on end it's not natural its not healthy and of cause we will get head aches and feel sick so its nothing to worries about especially if you have had eye tests and seen a doctor about it , 10 years is a very long time so think hang on i can still see? all is good :) in my experience thats what i did i shut it out and took a little extra time of the computer i all so changed the monitor to a dimer setting and just done other activities to take it of my mind , unfortunately visual snow is well know to be very difficult to explain by doctors and not dangerous most people dont even know they have it , In my case i deal with it by not thinking about it becuase when i did i got worse i felt sick and in some cases i had flashes in my eyes and they went blank crazy as it sounds the mind is powerfull when you over emphasize , So now it no longer bothers me becuase i just dont worrie about it any more.Try take your mind of it :)
Hope that helps :)

[David55]

Thanks for the reply :) Actually the feeling of 'hang on it's been X amount of years and I'm not blind' helped me to become less stressed about it earlier, but since early 2019 it's got worse. I had some very bad headaches the month before it got worse so maybe it's related? There are some things which just will give me headaches such as white-on-black text (very annoying when I spend a lot of money on a game and then find out it has white-on-black text with no options to change it), yet there's other things such as the visual snow and to a certain extent palinopsia where the symptoms can be worse if your mind focuses on them. I remember back in 2011 I would hyper-focus on a particular symptom yet in hindsight it was a very trivial thing and I was only worried about it because I didn't understand it.

You're right that it's difficult to talk about to doctors, since it seems like a neurological thing rather than something to do with the eyes. I've had several eye tests with opticians and hospital eye clinics and they never found anything wrong besides some mild astigmatism.

[.Poppy.]

I used to struggle with visual snow, and like the other poster I found a lot was hyper-focusing on it.

I get terrible eye strain from computers and phones. I have to use the blue light glasses. I had no idea why it was such an issue as my previous eye doctor just said to wear the glasses and use eye drops, but no one else seemed to have the problems I did. My old eye doctor retired, then, so I went to see a new one and right off the bat looking at my eyes he said "I bet you have problems with technological eye strain". I was baffled - turns out my scripts being so different from each other (-4 and -1.5) can cause this, even with contacts. For years I had no answers and he knew right away.

All that to say, I sympathize. Eye problems can be so frustrating, especially when they lead to headaches. Has anyone ever given you any suggestions on things to try?

[David55]

Thanks that's very interesting as I also have very different lenses for each eye, so I may check out the blue light glasses! By 'visual snow' I mean the comorbid symptoms such as palinopsia rather than just visual snow itself, the latter being pretty trivial since it's just a case of occasionally thinking- 'oh is it raining outside or is that just the visual snow?...nope, it's raining'.

As for reducing eye strain I've downloaded f.lux yet oddly enough I feel more relaxed with the blue setting (which is supposedly worse for my eyes since it's closer to ultra-violet), perhaps because it darkens the white-on-black text, thus reducing the overall contrast and being less harsh on my eyes whereas the "reduce eye strain" function just makes things orange. I've stopped using the blue function because of it being supposedly bad for visual health, though it's a shame since that was one of the few things which helped my eyes feel more 'calm'.

I haven't had any professional advice for it since it's undiagnosed. Indeed it's difficult to find any medically-certified information on visual snow/palinopsia as there's so little research on it.