If you wear glasses, you may have wondered from time to time if they’re making your eyesight worse. Not while you’re wearing them, but when you take them off.
Everyone will need glasses at some point in their lives. And when it happens to you, you’ll probably ask yourself this question on the lips of every glasses wearer.
There are two very different reasons why people wear glasses :
- Refractive Errors which are vision problems that make it hard to see clearly. They happen when the shape of your eye keeps light from focusing correctly on your retina. Shortsightedness, Long sightedness and Astigmatism are vision problems.
- Presbyopia which is often age related. Many people begin noticing in their 40-50s that it’s difficult to read in low lighting. As we age the lenses in our eyes gradually lose their flexibility making it harder to adjust to different distances. When people get to the stage where their arms aren’t long enough to hold a book or menu far enough away to focus on the text, they opt for reading glasses if they engage in near work frequently.
If you think your eyesight has gotten worse since you’ve started wearing glasses, you’re far from alone. But the truth is many eye conditions, including presbyopia, get worse over time by themselves, with or without glasses.
In other words, it seems you cannot do without your glasses, your glasses are not to blame but the ageing changes going on in your eye’s natural lens or the shape of your eyes..
What glasses have done to help you see clearly and comfortably. So when you take them off, the blurriness is very noticeable or your headaches/eye aches might return or become worse as a result of eyestrain.
So if you want to see well throughout life, wearing glasses or contact lenses is pretty much inevitable – and not harmful.
Wearing glasses does improve eyesight–but only while you’re wearing them. Wearing glasses however does not and will not make your eyes weak. Ensure you re-examine every 1-2 years or as advised by your Optometrist so that you are wearing the right prescription always.
