How Wearing Glasses & Contacts Can Deteriorate Your Eyesight

Have you recently been told that you need glasses? Maybe you went to the eye doctor and they checked your vision and gave you a prescription for lenses. They told you that you can either buy glasses or contacts.

You should know that these options will not improve your vision or even benefit your eyes in the long-run. There are lots of natural and holistic ways you can improve your eyesight. But, forcing your eyes to adjust to lenses is not one of them. Here’s how wearing glasses and/or contacts negatively affects your eyes and your vision.

The Problem with Glasses

If you have trouble seeing, getting glasses can feel like a lifesaver. Finally, you can see what everyone else sees! Right? Not exactly.

1. First, the time of day your eyes were checked by the optometrist affects the prescription you were given. If you rushed to the eye doctor after work when the sun was already setting, your eyes were likely beginning to adjust to the low-level lighting. This means that your prescription will only be perfect for your eyes when they are in that adjusting state.

2. If your prescription is a tad off, your eyes can “break in” your new glasses within a couple days. That brings us to the second point, the breaking-in period your eyes go through causes tenseness and discomfort that shouldn’t be happening in the first place. Your eyes should not be forced to go through a painful period to fit the prescription.

3. Third, glasses are designed to be effective when the retina is focused on the center of vision only. Therefore, people who wear glasses become dependent on moving their neck and head to see things outside of the optic center. Normally, you could shift your eyes to see side to side, but glasses don’t allow that. Your peripheral vision is not improved. Not to mention the fact that many glasses’ frames are so thick they interfere with any vision outside the center.

4. Another huge concern is people wearing prescription glasses in situations that don’t require them. For example, if you are given prescription glasses for myopia (nearsightedness), and then continue to wear them when reading a book or looking at a computer screen up close, you can damage your vision. If you’ve ever forgotten to take your glasses off and then focused on something up close, you’ve likely felt the twinge of strain in your eyes. Your eyes already work hard to focus on up-close objects. Adding a layer of prescriptive lenses forces them to focus 10 times harder which strains the muscles.

The Problem with Contact Lenses

Although contacts do eliminate the issues from having your glasses’ frame interfere with your vision, they come with their own slew of issues.

1. First, to place the contacts onto your eyeballs, you are required to touch your eyes directly with your fingers. This can introduce various germs and bacteria into your eyes that can lead to problems. Infections, styes, and corneal ulcers can develop due to the unsanitary placement of contacts. We know that we should be washing our hands before we touch our eyes in any circumstance, but most people don’t consistently follow that rule.

2. The inserting and removal of contacts can also cause corneal abrasions from your fingers trying to grasp the lenses. When you’re in a rush or trying to move contacts while on the go, that’s when potential damage can occur.

3. Another serious concern when it comes to wearing contacts is the potential to develop corneal neovascularization. Your corneas (the clear frontal surface of your eyeball) requires oxygen to survive. It’s the only part of the body that doesn’t rely on blood flow to deliver oxygen because it gets it directly from the air. When you wear your contacts more than the recommended length of time, then you risk depriving your corneas of oxygen. You may not know you’ve become a victim of this condition until it’s too late and your vision is impaired.

This post originally appeared on Rebuild your Vision.