Hello everyone
I am curious about how anxiety and stress can or cannot cause visual disturbances.
For the past few months I have been increasingly noticing visual "static" every day, every time I look for it. Especially when I first wake up or when it's dark or when I'm looking at something relatively blank, but even if there are a lot of other visual stimuli around, I don't see the static as much as it looks like everything is shimmering, like my visual field is oscillating or swimming. I also very often have afterimages of bright things (which I know is normal) or even when I look at the TV for a few minutes and then look at the wall. I have short trails of maybe 0.3 seconds if I move my hand across my face. I am always telling myself I'm just hyperaware of something that everybody sees and I'm noticing it more which makes it seem more pronounced but that doesn't prevent me from stressing about the what if of it. I am also pretty sensitive to light.
Of course this led to Googling about "visual snow" and getting extremely freaked out at the prospect of having this rare disorder. It has been a long time but I am still not entirely convinced that I don't have visual snow or HPPD. I even asked my uncle who is a psychiatrist and he said I need to medicate for a genetic serotonergic dysfunction i.e. the symptoms are a product of my anxiety. But it is so hard to believe that when you see what you see.
More recently I have sometimes been noticing patches or blobs of colour in my peripheral vision which obviously disappear once I look towards them which just makes me look for them more. It feels like an impossible loop. I have been to the optometrist who gave me the all-clear and I asked my GP who said it's normal but I can't stop worrying about it. I find it impossible not to be constantly on high alert for any changes and then naturally when I see a change I have the validation I needed to keep looking for it. Earlier today I saw a pink spot on my blue jumper which wasn't there. Things in my peripheral vision or even just things I am not looking directly at seem to be a different colour to when I look directly at them.
For context I have been medicated for depression/anxiety for the past few years and more recently have suspected that I may have sensorimotor OCD due to genetics and behavioural stuff. Most recently I have been taking fluoxetine for the past month or so but my GP advised me to stop because I suggested it may have been giving me blurred vision.
Sorry to offload, I guess I am just seeing whether anybody else has gone through a similar thing.
Thank you
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Originally Posted by jamie
