Have you ever tried eye yoga exercises?

If you’re an avid reader, you regularly watch TV or you spend a lot of your time looking at a screen, you’ll likely be familiar with eye strain.

It’s something that many of us experience, particularly as we are so often presented with new means of entertainment and virtual communication.

Our eyes are always working hard – so it’s important that we take the time to give them some attention.

In this week’s blog, we’re taking a look at some of the best eye yoga exercises to help strengthen your eye muscles:

• The Pen: Convergence

This exercise, featured on the Specsavers website, involves holding a pen or pencil at arm’s length before focusing your gaze on it.

Named ‘Convergence to a Pen’, the next step of this exercise requires you to slowly move the pen towards your nose, ensuring that it remains clear in your vision.

Practised regularly, this exercise aims to strengthen your eye muscles and improve your focus.

Visit the Specsavers website to see the full exercise.

• Focus Shifting

Focus shifting helps to train your eye muscles to focus, strengthening them and helping to prevent eye strain. 

This exercise involves holding your thumb out in front of you, at arm’s length, and slowly moving it from side to side whilst you follow it with your gaze.

Take a look at the Healthline website to read the exercise in full.

• Eye Yoga Exercise: Fast Blinking

Another eye yoga exercise to try is fast blinking.

For 10 seconds, blink as fast as you can and then hold your eyes closed for a few seconds. This exercise can help to cleanse the surface of your eye and get rid of debris.

• Eye Yoga Exercise: Switching Directions

The next step in your eye yoga routine is to close your eyes and move them in different directions.

Moving your eyes to the left, right, and then up and down can help to strengthen the muscles behind your eyes. It’s also been suggested that this exercise can help to boost short-term memory.

For visual tutorials of the above two exercises, watch this video.

• Near-to-Distant Viewing

This exercise helps to train your eyes in shifting from close-up to distant vision. 

After finding two points of focus (one close to you and one further away), use two breathing cycles to focus on one object before moving on to the next one. Try this for ten cycles each time.

For an in-depth tutorial, take a look at this article by Harpers Bazaar.

Don’t forget to give your eyes rest in between exercises. You can also find a few different variations of the above exercises online; take a look at this article by Vogue, for example.

Try incorporating meditative practises into your eye yoga exercises, too. There are plenty of opportunities to slow down your breath, breathe from the diaphragm and increase your awareness of it as you try new exercises. For example, during the convergence exercise, try breathing in as you move the pen closer to your nose, and then breathing out as you move it away.

At Huntington and Langham Estate, we’re passionate about providing professional and compassionate care to our community and taking every opportunity to boost our residents’ mental and physical health.

If you’d like to find out more about our services, please contact a member of our team or take a look at our website.

Why not take a look at our previous blog to discover 5 benefits of seeking professional dementia care?

How is your garden looking?

Whether you’re a novice or an experienced gardener, tending to your produce can be an incredibly rewarding and therapeutic experience.

If you’re keen to spruce up your outdoor space this year, take a look at our gardening tips and tricks below:

Remember That Every Garden is Unique

No two gardens are the same. Whilst some may be north-facing, others may be south-facing – and this has a huge impact on the amount and quality of sun that your plant gets, in addition to the time of day it receives sunlight. 

Once you’ve established the sun’s trajectory over your garden, you can start to plan locations for your plants, and come up with a watering schedule.

Don’t forget to check your soil, too. Some soils are more acidic than others, whilst some are more alkaline. Discovering the types of soil in your garden will help you determine which plants will thrive, and which won’t. For example, azaleas are known for growing best in acidic soils, whilst geraniums like alkaline conditions.

Gardening Tips and Tricks: Learn How to Prune Properly

Pruning is an essential step for maintaining the quality and condition of each of your plants. In addition to keeping up its aesthetic quality, pruning organic matter and dead leaves helps to prevent overgrowth, making room for seasonal blooms. 

Pruning your plant in the right place, and at the right time, can stimulate growth near the roots. Plants have different pruning requirements, so it’s important to do your research so you can ensure you’re really making the most of it. 

Make the Most of Your Compost

Whether you make your own compost or you purchase it from your local garden centre, you may be surprised to learn of the many ways it can help your garden to prosper.

When fed to your plants, compost and organic matter helps plant roots retain moisture and nutrients. In addition to supporting healthy plant growth, composting provides an eco-friendly method of disposing of your household waste.

Gardening Tips and Tricks: Create a DIY Greenhouse

If you own a small garden, or you simply don’t have the resources to build a greenhouse, you can use a variety of household items to make your own seed-thriving pods.

Using the top half of a milk bottle or a transparent umbrella over a plant pot, you can create a shelter for your seedlings that will provide ideal conditions for growth.

Make Reusable Gardening Tags

If you’re a keen gardener and your outdoor space is flourishing with plants galore, it’s important that you remember which plant is which, particularly when it comes to individual plant care.

This tip is ideal for beginner gardeners too, who may be learning about different plant types.

Consider investing in a label maker, in which you can make your own reusable and weather-proof labels for each of your plants. This way, you’ll never forget which plant is which – and you’ll be able to research care and growth instructions should you lose them.

At Huntington and Langham Estate, we take pride in our outdoor space. It’s much loved by our staff and residents alike, and is a place where many of us like to reflect, relax and hone our gardening skills.

To find out more about our care, or to book a viewing, don’t hesitate to contact a member of our team.

Alternatively, why not take a look at our previous blog post to discover why our dedicated carers love their careers?

Did you find our gardening tips and tricks useful? For more inspiration, check out our previous blog post on the therapeutic benefits of gardening.

Happy #GladtoCare Week!

Once again, we’re delighted to have the opportunity to celebrate the care industry and highlight some of the many amazing reasons to work in care.

From creating meaningful relationships to feeling a sense of purpose, there are so many amazing benefits to providing compassionate care to those that need it most.

Bess, a member of our H&L family, told us why she’s glad to care: “Because it’s so fulfilling. It’s absolutely lovely, and you get to know people; they become part of our family.”

Take a look at our video from last year’s celebrations:

If making a positive difference to the lives of others is something you feel passionate about, take a look at some of our best reasons to work in care:

Reasons to Work in Care: Every Day is Different

No two days are the same when it comes to working in the care industry. Varied activity and event schedules, newcomers and family visits add an element of surprise to each day. It’s truly wonderful to experience the feeling of accomplishment and fulfilment that arise when residents discover a new hobby or make a new life-long friend.

You’ll Make Friends For Life

Caregiving is, by nature, a very sociable job. You’ll be interacting with residents and other caregivers on a daily basis, and you may even make a new friend for life.

Reasons to Work in Care: Caregiving is Incredibly Rewarding

Amidst all our other reasons to care, this is perhaps the most widely experienced benefit of caregiving.

Knowing that you’re making a positive difference to the lives of others is an incredibly rewarding feeling. Ensuring that residents are as comfortable and happy as they can be is always the end goal; and when you achieve that, it’s a wonderful feeling.

You’ll also provide peace of mind for the family members of residents; there’s no better feeling to know that your loved one is in good hands.

The Care Industry Offers Plentiful Opportunities for Career Progression

Many care homes and care groups offer training and qualifications of their own, offering passionate trainees the chance to learn on the job.

For those qualified as a trained nurse and/or carer there are many opportunities for progression. This can include roles such as team leader, senior nurse positions and/or management.

Reasons to Work in Care: The Care Industry Offers Flexible Hours

Caregiving is a 24/7 job. Many residents require both day and night care – and for staff, this means that, more often than not, they’re able to work shifts that fall anywhere within these hours (considering it fits within their job description).

This flexibility allows carers to live a better work-life balance – whether that involves working shifts around childcare or working shifts that allow you to pursue other hobbies and interests.

There are so many amazing reasons to work in the care industry. At Huntington and Langham Estate, we’re a family-owned and operated care home that delivers compassionate care to the Surrey community.

If you’d like to explore our vacancies, take a look at our website or contact a member of our team.

Why not find out all about our brand new extension in our previous blog? Alternatively, to discover some more reasons to work in care, find out the benefits of family-centred care in our article.