Are Your Eyeglasses Worsening Your Vision?
It’s often said that wearing glasses won’t worsen your vision, but there are cases when wearing glasses can cause problems with your eyesight
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It’s often said that wearing glasses won’t worsen your vision, but there are cases when wearing glasses can cause problems with your eyesight
If your eyeglass prescription is based on your vision at 20 feet, then when you’re working on something up close, like your computer, your prescription is actually 20 times too strong; so, wearing those glasses while working all day will make your vision worse
For presbyopia, commonly known as age-related farsightedness, I recommend avoiding reading glasses, as they may make vision worse
Your eyes are highly susceptible to damage caused by linoleic acid, which should be avoided to protect vision health
Carotenoids, including lutein, zeaxanthin and astaxanthin, are beneficial for your eyes and may protect against age-related macular degeneration, cataracts and other eye conditions
It’s a common concern that if you wear eyeglasses, your eyes may become "dependent" on them. Then, when you take off your glasses, your vision might seem worse than before you started wearing them. While according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology wearing glasses won’t worsen your vision,1 there are cases when wearing glasses can cause problems with your eyesight, even making vision worse.
This is particularly true if you wear the wrong glasses while doing work up close, such as on a computer. There are, however, a number of reasons why your vision may seem to worsen when you take your glasses off compared to before you started wearing them.
Why Might Your Eyesight Seem to Worsen After Wearing Glasses?
When you start wearing glasses, your brain adapts to the clearer and more focused vision they provide. Once you remove them, the sudden return to blurred vision can feel more pronounced because your brain has become accustomed to the clarity.
Further, glasses correct your vision by improving focus and detail. When you begin wearing them, you become more aware of what clear vision looks like. This increased awareness makes the contrast between corrected and uncorrected vision more noticeable. Glasses also help reduce eye strain by correcting your vision.
When you remove them, the strain from trying to focus without assistance can make your vision seem blurrier than before. The perception of worsening vision when you wear glasses can be more about your brain’s adaptation to corrected vision rather than a real decline in eye health.
Writing in The Conversation, James Andrew Armitage, professor of optometry at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, and Nick Hockley, director of Deakin Collaborative Eye Care Clinic, said, "Some people sense an increasing reliance on glasses and wonder if their eyes have become ‘lazy’ … Once we are used to seeing clearly, our tolerance for blurry vision will be lower and we will reach for the glasses to see well again."2
Reading Glasses for Presbyopia May Make Matters Worse
There are cases in which a reliance on glasses may worsen vision. For presbyopia, for instance, I recommend not wearing sunglasses and avoiding reading glasses. As you age, there’s a tendency to want to make font bigger to see text better, but I recommend resisting that temptation, as it’s only going to make matters worse.
People with presbyopia, commonly known as age-related farsightedness, have trouble focusing on objects close up. It commonly affects people beginning in their early- to mid-40s, progressively worsening until about age 65.3
If you have presbyopia, you may find that you need to hold books farther away in order to see them clearly. Other symptoms include blurred vision at a normal reading distance and eyestrain or headaches that occur after you’ve been reading or doing close-up work. The blurry close-up vision may be worse when you’re tired or in a dimly lit area.4
The conventional solution is typically reading glasses, which many keep with them throughout the day — in the kitchen, the car, the office and the bedroom — just to go about their daily activities. However, this may encourage your eyes to stay in one place instead of moving around — which is essential for healthy eyes.
Optometrist and eye health coach Taylor DeGroot uses a holistic, bioenergetic approach to eye health. In our interview, she noted, "Healthy eyes like to move a lot and they don't like to just stay in one place and stare. That's another bad habit people have. They stare and keep their eyes in one place. That's also what glasses train the eyes to do.
Glasses have an optical center, so there's one part in the glasses where you see most clearly. Glasses in a way are kind of visual confinement because they lock your eyes into one place."
There’s also evidence that training your brain, namely targeting perceptual learning by repeatedly practicing a demanding visual task, may improve visual performance in people with presbyopia. In one study, the brain training enabled subjects to "overcome and/or delay some of the disabilities imposed by the aging eye."5
A number of apps are available that offer this form of brain training for improved vision. In a study published in Scientific Reports, researchers explained that the vision benefits seemed to stem from changes in the brain — not in the eye itself:6
"This improvement was achieved without changing the optical characteristics of the eye. The results suggest that the aging brain retains enough plasticity to overcome the natural biological deterioration with age."
In addition to avoiding reading glasses, also avoid squinting and simply blink instead. Blink multiple times until the text becomes clear, then relax your eyes to refocus. Brighter light may also help you read without increasing the font size on your tablet or computer, or using reading glasses. You can also use nutritional approaches to help stop the progression of many eye diseases, which I’ll discuss below.
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