Home Exercises - Stereograms Treatment for Convergence Insufficiency

Stereograms are 3D pictures hidden within another picture. It’s a type of exercise for your eye muscles and it helps to control your eyes and help improve symptoms of something called convergence insufficiency.

Convergence insufficiency is the name given when your eyes find it hard to work together as something they are looking at gets too close to them. If you have convergence insufficiency, the orthoptist may ask you to start with the ‘cat’ stereogram first. Once you can do this exercise, you could try other more difficult stereogram exercises like the ‘bucket’, ‘ABC’ or ‘123’ stereograms.

The orthoptist will tell you and/or show you in clinic how to carry out the exercises and tell you how long to do them for. They may also change the exercise just for you – please remember these are just basic instructions.

The orthoptist will also inform you how important it is to relax your eyes after the exercises.

Instructions

It is better if you get someone to read you these instructions as you do the exercise, to help you.

1. Keeping your head straight, hold the card about 30- 40cm in front of you, at eye level.

2. Place a pen, flat against the middle of the card, with the top of the pen right in the middle. Focus on the top of the pen and make sure it is single and clear.

3. Slowly bring the pen toward your nose, away from the card and keep focusing on the tip of the pen.

• a. Try to keep the pen single and the card at the 30-40cm distance.
• b. Be aware of the cats, but don’t look directly at them. Keep your eyes on the top of the pen. At first you should notice that the cats on the card, behind the pen appear to become double.

4. When the pen is roughly half-way between the card and your nose, you should find that whilst holding your focus on the pen, the two original cats now appear as 3. The 3rd cat should be seen in the centre of the card.

5. If you can manage to see this, hold the pen in this position and try to maintain this 3rd cat for a few seconds.

6. Remember to RELAX YOUR EYES after this exercise, this could be looking far away for 5-10 minutes or even closing your eyes for a few minutes.

Eventually, it should be possible to achieve the same effect without using the pen. This should happen after some practice.

• Firstly, by slowly removing the pen from view and keeping your focus on the same point of space or:

• By removing the pen completely and just focussing on the point in mid-air between you and the card, and then focussing on an imaginary point.

Some people find this exercise quite difficult at first and sometimes can’t see the 3rd cat in the centre. This is usually because they forget to keep their focus on the pen and look toward cats again. It is important to keep focus on the pen as you move it closer to your nose, otherwise the middle cat will not appear.

• As with all new exercise forms, you may feel tired or uncomfortable and might even get some headaches when you first start out. This is because you’re using muscles which are not working as hard as they should be. This is normal and it will get easier as your muscles get stronger.

It is really important that you attend your appointments once exercises are started so we can see how you are getting on. This also allows us to change the exercises if it’s needed. If you can’t attend an appointment, please contact the team on the number below: 01253 953457