Exposing a Myth: Does Wearing Glasses Weaken Your Eyes?

It’s a quandary that has racked the brains of many a wearer of glasses.

Does the sheer fact that I wear glasses lead to my vision slowly depleting?

A bit of history to start with. The first eyeglasses are believed to have been invented in around 1290, in Northern Italy (though even then they were considered crude and clumsy to wear), and the usage of them by the general populace has seen exponential growth ever since.

There are those who are perfectly happy to wear glasses, a large percentage of those who do indeed do so, but also those who just feel uncomfortable or unhappy with having to do so.

This unhappiness could be solely aesthetic though some are of the belief that moving to glasses is the start of a rocky road downwards.

Now, I wouldn’t suggest that anyone with truly horrendous eyesight should ditch their spectacles, clearly that is not a wise move. However there are those who perhaps have poor vision, but not so bad that the act of not wearing glasses won’t lead to any real disasters, and as such they may well feel that wearing glasses will lead their eyes to ‘get lazy’, and that’s an interesting, and seemingly logical, conclusion to analyse.

The general sense that wearing glasses will lead to your eyes to overly depend on them is a solid one though most research into the matter is inconclusive.

Google searches on the matter are commonplace, such it seems is the interest of those who find themselves having to don a pair of glasses. As if the answer to the riddle may in some way alleviate the need to wear glasses at all.

Sadly, it seems that this is wishful thinking.

A simple fact of life is that one’s eyes will always deteriorate, so that even those who do not need to wear spectacles, will see their eyes suffer over the course of time, and of course that has not been caused by wearing glasses.

A habitual glass wearer will over the course of time have to upgrade to a new set every few years or so, this in turn leads them to believe that this injustice is a cause of the actual glasses themselves, which is seemingly an unfair assumption.

Most professionals in the field of optometry highlight the fact that wearers believe that the worsening of eyesight that they perceive is mainly down to the fact that because a wearer of glasses can now see (no pun intended) just how poor their vision actually was. This mirrors the maxim, ‘If I hadn’t seen such riches, I could live with being poor’.

Interestingly, it seems in many ways the opposite is true, and by this I mean that ‘not wearing’ glasses can in fact lead to advanced deterioration of your eyesight. This occurs, according to some in the optometry field, because the eyes get overly fatigued due to the stress heaped on them by those who refuse to admit defeat and wear glasses.

So it appears that glasses are very much a victim of their own successes, namely that those who wear them and remove them, can now see very clearly just how necessary they were in the first place.

Clearly there are those who just don’t feel all that confident in wearing glasses, which of course leads to the possibility of opting for contact lenses, such as acuvue oasys, and this might be a half-way house for those who can accept their failing vision but have issues with the use of spectacles.

More and more people are now wearing glasses, or contact lenses, in the UK for instance 6 out of every ten adults wears glasses of contacts, and the increasing use of mobile devices, and screens has led to an increase in those experiencing poor vision.  But you should also consider options like Orange County lasik Eye surgery Cost to see if the price is worth the time to do the surgery.

Basically in 2020 our eyes have never had to do so much work. We are being subjected to an unprecedented level of visual stimuli, or every kind imaginable, and this is very much over-working your poor eye balls.

For some there is of course the option to undergo laser surgery to correct the problem, but this window of opportunity isn’t available to everyone and isn’t by all means a final long term option, as even this correction will reduce in effectiveness over time.

Glasses are here to stay, so if you have issues with wearing them perhaps just look for a pair that is more to your liking.