What is Eye Twitching?
Eye twitching or eye spasms are common problem experienced by all at some point in our life. Surprisingly, no one knows what causes this but some heath experts correlate it as Blepharospasm, it usually twitch involuntarily and occurs spontaneously without giving any warning sign.
Why my eyes twitch? (Causes)
This eyebrow twitching is the spams of muscles located in the eyebrows and people who experience involuntary movement around their eyes causes some discomfort and awkwardness especially if you are distillate in staring of something. The eyelid twitch is associated to Blepharospasm, a medical condition that involves rapid movement of the eyelid or eyebrow. Health professionals do not exactly know what causes it but at some extreme point they linked it to some external factors.
Generally, health experts associated the eye twitch with these factors,
● Stress ● Fatigue ● Eye Strain ● Alcohol intake ● Dry Eyes ● Nutritional Imbalance ● Allergies
Stress
Common indicator if you are experiencing involuntary movement around your eye corner is that you are totally stressed of something. If you are under stress at some time, our physiological body reacts in different manner causing to some reaction especially if it is related to vision problem such as eye strain.
According to Dr. Monica, a clinical person for the American Academy of Ophthalmology said that stress is the number causative factor why the eyelid twitches. In addition, Dr. Jeffrey Cain state also that when our eye twitch our body is telling as that we are under at stress. When our physiological body suffered from stress, it releases some hormones in the body that prepared it for fight or flight and causes muscle arousal which affects our eyelid muscles.
Fatigue
Another factor is tiredness or fatigue. For instance, if you are lack of sleep, let say you just had 4 hours of sleep after such an exhausting day yesterday. Our body did not efficiently recover from the energy that you released during your yesterdays’ activities.
Those draining activities causes fatigue leading to stress and weakness of the body. In many cases fatigue is one of the reasons of getting sick or having ailments and other complications, It extremely affects our body. Same idea goes with overworked, focusing on your computer all day long are the more you will probably experiencing eye twitching.
Eye Strain
People who suffer from eye strain involve a vision problem. The term is describes a group of symptoms which happen after extended use of eyes. It occur in cases that requires too much staring or focusing in to something over extended period of time like reading, working in the computer or driving for so long.
Therefore, ophthalmologists require their patient to wear glasses in order to correct minor or major vision problem. The eye strain is accompanied by headaches, blurring of the vision, dryness sensation around the eye corner but it does not cause any major eye damage.
Dry eyes
This condition is also termed as reflex tearing. Whereby, the eye releases excessive water or known as “tears”. The case for dry eyes is different perspective, wherein a particular person doesn’t have enough quality tears to lubricate and nourish the eye.
When the eye has an inadequate amount of tears it causes spasm that trigger to twitch your eye. The “dry eyes” is often observed among people who frequently use computers and for some who take certain medications such as anti-histamine, antidepressants and other decongestion drugs.
Alcohol intake
Excessive drinking of alcohol can result to eye twitching. According to the research form the New York University, such heavy intake of alcohol is accountable for the muscle spasms as it over stimulates the nerves and muscles. Same Idea with caffeine or tea intake, it triggers the release of serotonin and noradrenaline which blamable as the excitable chemicals that stimulates to induce eyelid spams.
Nutritional Imbalance
Health is wealth, a slogan that should always follow by us to maintain the essence of life. Once a particular individual is malnourish or lack of some certain nutritious compounds inside of their body, it results to susceptibility to foreign pathogens to invade our immune system leading to some chronic conditions and other major health ailments. One that can trigger having nutritional imbalance is eyebrow twitching; deficiency in minerals such as the calcium, magnesium in your food intake can lead to muscle twitching.
Allergies
Medical problems are also suspected as main causative agent to trigger eyebrow twitching. Generally, allergens have the capacity to irritate eyes which leads to eye twitching. Once you rub or wipe your eyes, you release the histamine that situated in the lid tissues and tears and histamine has been associated with eye twitching.
Types of Eye twitches
There are 3 common medically diagnosed as twitches.
Minor Eyelid twitch
From the term itself “minor twitch” is not high risk item. This condition is associated through irritation of the eye surface or the membranes that line the eyelids or conjunctiva.
Factors include; Fatigue, Stress, Lack of Sleep, or Alcohol, Caffeine abuse.
Benign essential Blepharospasm
The condition starts with non-stop blinking or movement of the eyelid. As it prolonged the movement, it causes sensitivity to brightness of light, the vision will get move blurry, and accompanied with facial spasms.
Factors Include- Fatigue, Stress, Lack of Sleep and Exposure to light and wind pollution.
Hemifacial Spasms
This rare case was described by Gowers in 1884. The condition expresses a segmental myoclonus of muscles innervated by the facial nerve. Meaning, it only affect one side of the face to cause movement around the mouth or the eyelid.
Factors Include- Vascular compression, facial nerve compression by a mass, Brainstem Lesions (Stroke or multiple sclerosis) and Trauma such as Bell Palsy.
How to stop Eye Twitching?
There is no specific treatment for the eyebrow twitching though the sudden eyebrow movement is not serious case, sometimes can be a red flag of some underlying health ailment that needs an immediate medical attention.
Yoga Exercise
Trying this exercise will helps you to your body to maintain the healthy physiological process. It also help to increase your muscle flexibility, increased muscle strength, helps to improved respiration, energy and vitality, maintain the metabolism, it helps also to reduce weight, lower the risk of having cardio ailments and circulatory diseases.
- Abstain from drinking beverages such as alcohol, coffee or tea.
- Have at least 8 hours of sleep a day
- Take a break between work (especially those who work with their computer)
- Reduce stress
- Eat Green leafy vegetables and Fruits
- Keep hydrated (drink 8 or more glasses a day)
- Face Steam- this technique helps to calm and hydrate your facial including your eyes.
- Hot & Cold compresses- instead of face steam you may compress your eye with hot or cold compress to relax the muscle around your eyes.
- Acupuncture- this technique involves an expert practitioner where a pressure must be applied to a specific site of the body usually they massage the eye in a circular motion for few minutes to relax the muscles.
- In rare cases, if the twitching lasted for a weeks or more than. It is advisable to seek for health professional to diagnose correctly the underlying cause of twitching.
SOURCES:
- http://www.simple-remedies.com/eye-care/why-is-my-eyebrow-twitching.html
- http://www.webmd.com/eye-health/why-your-eyes-twitch#2
- http://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/eye-twitching.htm
- http://www.writingandwellness.com/2015/05/26/what-your-eye-twitching-is-telling-you-and-its-not-good/
- http://www.medicinenet.com/eye_strain/article.htm
- http://www.webmd.com/eye-health/eye-health-dry-eyes#1
- http://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/dryeye.htm
- http://www.aoa.org/patients-and-public/eye-and-vision-problems/glossary-of-eye-and-vision-conditions/dry-eye?sso=y
