Ocular Reset

• A specific eye movement, with the eyes closed.
• Deep, conscious breathing.
• A passive visualisation: the images are allowed to arrive, they are not built.

It lasts five to ten minutes. It needs no equipment, applications or devices, and it can be done before an exam, in the car park before a meeting, in the changing room before a race.

The Ocular Reset takes the active principle of four things already known and concentrates it into a short, self-contained sequence: hypnosis, for the state of receptivity; EMDR, for the use of eye movements in reworking emotional states; the REM phase of sleep, in which the brain reorganises information; crying, for the release that follows an emotional discharge.

The brain produces electrical activity continuously, and its frequencies correspond to different states. Under pressure the Beta band dominates: alert attention, and beyond a certain threshold over-analysis, rigidity, blockage. The Ocular Reset works to shift activity towards Alpha and Theta, the zone where concentration is relaxed and intuition becomes accessible again — what athletes call being in the zone. The eye movement engages both hemispheres together, instead of leaving the field to the rational hemisphere alone.

There is a proposed explanation for how an eye movement comes to change the state of the nervous system, with its predictions and the conditions that would disprove it. It is set out in full in the hypothesis paper.

• Thought that will not stop at night and will not let you sleep.
• The tension felt in the belly, the chest, the throat, the head.
• Sleep that does not restore, and the irritability of the next day.
• Concentration under pressure: an exam, a race, a presentation, a decision.