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3 Clever Ways to Improve Your Eyesight Without Glasses

Sharpen your vision in seconds!

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Clear vision means you get to experience more of the fun that the holiday season has to offer. And these fixes help improve your eyesight without glasses — in seconds!

To see close: Unwrap five candy Santas

Planning on dining out with old friends in town for the holidays? Nibble on five dark chocolate Santas or a few squares of a chocolate bar first, and you’ll be able to clearly see the restaurant’s specials without pulling out your readers. Recent JAMA Ophthalmology research found cocoa’s polyphenols fine-tune eyes’ ability to see small-print letters against a white page. This improves “contrast vision” almost instantly, an effect that lasts a full 2 hours. Tip: Choose dark chocolate with 72 percent cocoa or higher, which boasts the study-proven concentration of vision-boosting compounds.

To see far away: Cross your eyes

To easily read road signs, cross and uncross your eyes before you start the car. University of California research suggests doing so sharpens distance focus almost instantly. Most of us spend so much time on near-focus tasks, like peering at a computer screen or watching TV, that the neural connections that help our eyes see objects in the distance weaken. But eye-crossing acts as a form of visual exercise, signaling the brain to expand its focus and take in the larger picture. The payoff: vision up to 31 percent better. To do: Focus on an object at least 20 feet from you, then cross your eyes. Uncross them and focus on the object again. Repeat four times.

To see at night: Try a warming mask

It can take nearly an hour for eyes to fully adjust from indoor light to the darker outdoors. The fix: 10 minutes before you head out, place a warming pack over your eyes. The soothing temperature relieves the day’s eyestrain and blocks out light, priming cone cells in your retinas to be up to 80 percent better adjusted to the darker landscape, according to U.S. Air Force research.

A version of this article originally appeared in our print magazine, Woman’s World.

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