Sudden onset of eye floaters

Erik1971

Erik1971

Peer Supporter
Hi,

Over the past few years, I’ve experienced many different TMS symptoms, ranging from body-wide muscle twitching to tinnitus, sleep problems, and urinary issues. All of these TMS symptoms eventually went away.

This year, I suddenly developed itchy, dry eyes, followed by pain in my eyes, and then, from one day to the next, I started experiencing floaters in both eyes.

I was examined by an optometrist, who diagnosed a posterior vitreous detachment in my right eye. Apparently, this can happen earlier in people who are highly myopic, although eventually everyone experiences it because it is part of the aging process.

Still, I keep wondering whether this could also be TMS. It happened after a stressful period at work, as well as problems and stress in my personal life, and then suddenly I developed this symptom.

Because this is a new symptom involving my vision, I’ve once again found myself caught in a vicious cycle of hyperfocusing on the symptoms, which in turn creates more fear and stress.

I also find it strange that I suddenly have floaters in both eyes, while the partial vitreous detachment was only found in my right eye.

Has anyone here had a similar experience? Should I just view this as another TMS symptom and approach it in the same way?


Thanks in advance for your advice and support.
 
Hi @Erik1971. It’s incredibly common to get floaters without a PVD, especially if you’re nearsighted. Longer eyeballs stretch the vitreous gel, so the collagen fibers break down and clump earlier in life—often in the 20s or 30s—well before any PVD. Some people are even born with tiny floaters or have had them since childhood, so they’ve literally been there as long as they can see. Your PVD and dry eye pain probably just acted as a big alarm bell. Because you were already stressed, your nervous system went into high alert and stopped filtering out visual “noise”. The debris was likely there all along; your brain just suddenly started paying attention to it.

Since your optometrist has confirmed your retina is safe (no tears, detachment, or bleeding), it can be helpful to treat your reaction to the floaters as mind-body/TMS. The shadows are physical, but the hyper‑focus and fear are neural circuit processing.

I’m in my 60s and my vitreous is full of floaters in both eyes, but most of the time I don’t notice them because my brain has learned to filter them out. That’s a sign that adaptation is possible—and in fact it’s quite usual once you adopt a policy of paying no heed to them.

When a floater pops up you can just note “harmless floater” and then gently return your attention to what you were doing. It could also help to stop tracking them or testing your vision against white walls and bright screens (which is something I used to do when I first got floaters but eventually realised that was unhelpful). Over time, as the fear drops, your brain can neuro‑adapt again and filter them out more. Of course, if you ever get a sudden shower of new floaters, flashes of light, or a curtain/shadow in your vision, that’s the time to get checked out urgently.

Hope this helps.
 
Hi @Erik1971
This happened to me 2 years ago. At first I thought it was TMS, but something told me to head to an ophthalmologist.
The floaters happened, but he was clear, my brain would learn to bipass them over time. He even mentioned “neural pathways” 😂
He was right! 99% of the time I don’t see them. Occasionally in certain light I do. No worries because I know they are normal.
 
Erik1971 said:
I also find it strange that I suddenly have floaters in both eyes, while the partial vitreous detachment was only found in my right eye.
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That's a very good thing to note! Obviously those above know way more about this symptom than me, but assuming that the PVD doesn't need medical treatment (a quick search of this told me that oftentimes it doesn't), then as long as your optometrist is comfortable with where things are at with your eyes then I think you're safe to treat it as TMS :)
 
@Erik1971

P.S.
Floaters always move when you observe them so if you ever get anything obscuring your vision that doesn't move at all when you focus on it, be sure to get it checked out by an ophthalmologist.

I particularly say this because three years ago I went to A&E (the ER) concerning a large 'blob' that suddenly appeared in my left eye in my central vision and I told them that the 'blob' didn't move at all. They ignored the latter, however, and told me that it was a "Weiss Ring" floater, which is a partial PVD where the vitreous gel comes away specifically from around the optic nerve. (I'd never heard of Weiss Rings before.) Anyway, I got a second opinion because I subsequently found out that even Weiss Rings move when you observe them and it turned out to be something entirely different from a Weiss Ring floater. Fortunately, it was something that eventually cleared up on its own and needed no emergency or short term or long term treatment, but it did, however, need to be distinguished from other similarly presenting retinal issues that don't clear up on their own and do need treatment.
 
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I really appreciate your advice. It’s just so annoying having these shadows in your field of vision all the time, and it’s difficult to ignore them and let my brain get used to them. But that’s also exactly my TMS personality. I’ve had that same kind of hyperfocus and anxiety with tinnitus, but that went away too, so by now I should probably know better.
 
@Erik1971 Whether you're prone to TMS or not, floaters are very annoying (especially when you've never had them or noticed them in your vision before) so don't beat yourself up about your reaction. It's hard to believe that the brain can bypass them, but it does. Some of mine were like cobwebs across my vision but I just don't see them anymore.
 
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BloodMoon said:
@Erik1971 Whether you're prone to TMS or not, floaters are very annoying (especially when you've never had them or noticed them in your vision before) so don't beat yourself up about your reaction. It's hard to believe that the brain can bypass them, but it does. Some of mine were like cobwebs across my vision but I just don't see them anymore.
Click to expand...
It’s reassuring to think that eventually the brain can filter it out. Do you have any other tips on how I can encourage this process? Or should I just try to ignore it so that the brain starts labeling it as unimportant and can eventually filter it out? How long did that process take for you?
 
My ophthalmologist suggested that once one eye makes some adjustments (this is a common, age related situation everyone goes through) the other eye usually does within a year - ask your doc said, it's a normal part of aging. I wouldn't worry about them but I would think about what my attitude and emotions are within the aging experience.

Just ignore it, and don't compare your journey to others by asking the time line of when the "process took" for someone else. Your experiences with the process will be different, just know that it happens!
 
I think one of the biggest hurdles at the beginning is actually feeling angry about having them. For me, things started to change when I stopped fighting the fact that they were there. I eventually got used to the idea and accepted them as one of those things that happen to a lot of people, and gradually became better at carrying on regardless of them.

I didn’t try to force myself to stop feeling angry either. I let myself be pissed off about it, and eventually I just didn’t feel that way anymore. Carrying on with life regardless of the floaters seemed to naturally lead to me paying less attention to them. I suppose, in a way, I was gradually teaching my brain that there was nothing it needed to keep monitoring.

I think @Cactusflower is also right about the timescale. It varies from person to person, and for me it was definitely gradual rather than something that suddenly switched off. I think each brain just takes its own time.

One thing I’d really try to avoid is constantly assessing whether you’re adapting to them — looking for them, checking whether you can see them, or wondering “Am I noticing them less yet?” Doing that just kept my attention on them. The aim isn’t really to force yourself not to notice them. If you notice one, you notice it, but you don’t need to investigate it or give it any particular significance. The “ignoring” them, for me anyway, was simply carrying on with whatever I was doing, or whatever I had intended to do next.

A metaphor I like is a smear on a car windscreen. If you stare at the smear while driving, it becomes really distracting. But if you keep your attention on the road ahead, your brain can gradually treat the smear as part of the background that it doesn't focus on. You know it’s still there, but it doesn’t demand your attention in the same way.

There are also things you can do to make them less noticeable if you want to — reducing screen brightness or glare, using a less stark display setting such as dark mode, or having a darker background behind a desktop monitor can help because bright, plain backgrounds tend to show floaters up more clearly.

Sunglasses can help outside too, mainly because they reduce the glare and contrast. I used sunglasses, but I didn’t really use the other things. I probably would have been reluctant to deliberately make everything less stark because I wouldn't have wanted to interfere with adaptation. Whether that actually makes any difference to the underlying adaptation, though, I have no idea — I don't think there’s any evidence that making floaters less visible prevents your brain from adapting to them. I suspect those things are mainly about making them less noticeable and therefore less bothersome while the process is happening.

Also, rolling or moving your eyes around stirs the vitreous gel, which may cause a floater to drift away from your central vision temporarily. (Doing that never worked for me, but a friend said it helped her with one of her floaters that used to annoy her until her brain made the adaptation.)
 
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This is a very timely topic for two reasons: Dr. John Stracks recently addressed this very issue during one of his hour long Curable Q&A sessions last month, and back in January I had some eye issues develop that included a pesky new floater in my right eye. The eye issues, including a floater, all started to happen after I began intensive treatment for anxiety AND started doing my first mindbody work. I immediately assumed it was TMS for sure.

BloodMoon is really spot on with the responses so I won't rehash a lot of that.

Dr. Stracks replied to someone in the Q&A that had some recently developed floaters that wouldn't go away. He stated that while a lot of folks will associate floaters as a TMS symptom, there isn't any evidence to support that and he feels they are unrelated. He did talk about exactly what BloodMoon was mentioning regarding being hypervigilant about the floaters - due to TMS and where one might be in the process.

My ophthalmologist told me, and Dr. Stracks mentioned this as well in the Q&A and during one of my appointments, that floaters can become much more pronounced and frequent for people getting up there in years. Ouch! (I'm 59).
 
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