Explainer:Why early improvements are so fast
Early gains are by far the fastest gains when starting out in the process. People can drop a whole diopter in the first 90 days of the process, with some degree of consistency. This is great, and gives everyone that quick win they're looking for initially. Why?
Why early gains are the fastest
There are three layers to the 'vision improvement cake':
The first two layers are really quick and easy to deal with! The third is the one that takes all the time.
Overprescription
Optometrists will frequently prescribe more minus lense than is needed to see well. Even if you're seeing really well with the lense you were wearing before, or one of the lense options they have given you to test with, if they try another lense and you see ever so slightly better with that one, then before you know it there's a really high chance they'll bump up the correction. Clearer vision is always better, right?
You never needed this correction in the first place, so it just comes off.
Ciliary spasm and eye strain
When you use full strength glasses for close-up, not only is your eyeball length elongated through hyperopic defocus, but you give your eyes huge amounts of strain. You're trying to see something up close with the equivalent of nuclear weapons, that are far too powerful for what you need. In addition to this, if you have prolonged screen usage time with few to no breaks in your life, the ciliary muscle inside of your eye will be locked up for the most part, preventing accommodation of the eye at distances and manifesting as pseudomyopia.
To fix this, begin wearing differentials, and incorporate more distance vision into your life. Differentials by themselves will cut down on most of the eye strain problems you face, and as a result a lot of myopia can be cut down nearly immediately when beginning the process.
The long haul
After the first diopter or so, things can slow down to a crawl. You shouldn't kid yourself into thinking your improvement rate will be anything like the improvement rate you just went through in the first 90 days. Reversing axial change can take serious time. As long as you set your expectations in the right place for when the early improvements trail off, you'll be ready to make the more long term improvements as well.