How to Get Rid of Floaters on the Eyeball

Everybody has had floaters--those tiny, transparent shapes that pop into your line of sight. They're perfectly natural, a product of the fluid in your eye. Floaters are harmless, save perhaps for being occasionally annoying. Getting rid of them is simple--just move your eyes around or look at something different, and you'll forget they ever were there.

Instructions

• 1

  Look up and down and side to side. This swishes aroung your eye's vitreous humour, the liquid that helps keep the shape of your eye. Floaters exist in this liquid.

• 2

  Adjust your computer monitor, or look at something darker. Floaters show up best when you're looking at something light. Floaters will also show up when you're looking at a large, uninterrupted swath of a particular color.

• 3

  Wait it out. Floaters highlight one of the brain's most fascinating abilities: the ability to ignore. As you age, the vitreous humour ages too. It pulls away from your eye's retina, which causes small amounts of jelly to break off and form floaters. The more you get, the more your brain will get used to them. The more your brain gets used to them, the less it will tell you that you're seeing them.

• 4

  See a doctor. If you see a sudden and extreme increase in floaters, it may be a sign of an underlying condition or an effect of an eye injury. Also seek medical help if floaters are so numerous that they interfere with your sight. A popular method of ridding people of floaters is draining the vitreous humour and replacing it with a saline solution.