The team at Allied Eye understands the importance of getting a good night’s sleep. However, do you know how vital adequate sleep is to your eyes? Give this nighttime routine a try to get a decent night’s sleep—and protect your eye health.

Good Night!

Take a moment to think about your nighttime routine. Does it involve reading a bedtime story to your kids? Packing a lunch for work tomorrow? Setting out your clothes that you are going to wear the next day? Brushing your teeth? Chances are that it involves all these things. However, you might be neglecting something that needs to be added to your nightly routine, which is making sure your eyes are protected.

First, if you wear contacts, it’s vitally important that you take out your contacts before going to sleep. While some contact lenses are marketed as being safe to sleep in, it’s still best to take them out. When you sleep in your contacts, you are preventing your eyes from getting enough oxygen. As a result, you increase your risk of infection, inflammation and even permanent eye damage. Therefore, it’s important that you take your contacts out every night before bed!

Second—and this is going to be a hard one for most of us—you need to put away your smartphone. You may already know that smartphones emit a “blue light” that throws off our sleep cycle by making our bodies think it is time to be awake and not sleep. However, smartphones pose a different risk to our eye health. Ever rolled over during the night and while unable to sleep grabbed your phone and started scrolling? You could risk damaging your vision. A phenomenon called “transient smartphone blindness,” which was discussed in the New England Journal of Medicine, can occur when you squint one eye closed and keep the other eye open while reading in the dark. The best option? When it’s time for bed, put your smartphone on the charger across the room or in another room altogether.

Is your eyesight giving you problems? Make an appointment at Allied Eye so that our knowledgeable ophthalmologist can examine your eyes to find the root of the problem and prescribe a treatment plan.