7 Ways To Take Care Of Your Eyes (And Why You Must)

Could you imagine yourself without using your eyesight or impaired vision, and how different your life would be and all the adaptations you’d have to make? Well, regardless of your age or your current eyesight, it’s one of the most important to protect as you get older — to the best of your ability. Everyone’s vision tends to diminish with age.

Still, you can slow down that diminishment significantly and protect one of the most important of your Five Senses by following these seven simple steps to allow you to see better and for longer.

Protect your eyes from sunlight

One of the most harmful things for your eyes is prolonged exposure to sunlight without proper shading. There’s a reason why your mother told you not to stare directly into the sun as a child.

The sun emits harmful UVA and UVB rays, and staring directly into it means that your eyes bear the brunt of these rays directly. They can lead to corneal inflammation, cataracts, age-related macular degeneration, and corneal growth. Wear sunglasses, always.

Wear safety glasses if you work in dangerous environments

Suppose part of your job involves cutting anything, welding, or doing anything else where flying projectiles could come into contact with your face. In that case, you must protect your eyes by wearing safety glasses. Most workplaces require wearing safety glasses before starting work, even when doing home renovation projects like trimming hedges.

Wear proper eye makeup

Sometimes, choosing the right eye makeup can be a real challenge, but if you’re looking out for your eye health, a few different types of eye makeup can sometimes cause an allergic reaction in your eyes — causing painful irritation.

For example, Mascaras that contain sodium benzoate, parabens, and Quaternium-15 (formaldehyde releaser) can cause eye irritation. Be sure to check the ingredients on all eye makeup before purchasing it.

Wash your face well around your eyes

Having dirt, dust, or other irritants in the atmosphere that get in or around our eyes is almost unavoidable, but you can wash the skin around your eyes well each day to cleanse the skin of those irritants.

This could also include using collagen eye masks that help plump fine lines and wrinkles and hydrate and nourish your under-eye skin.

Buy glasses with blue light filters

If you’re a bespectacled person doing plenty of work on their computer, you must purchase glasses containing blue light filters. These block out or significantly reduce the amount of blue light that enters your eyes from your computer screen.

These will be slightly more expensive than regular lenses, but at the end of the day, they will save your eyes from the damage caused by blue light.

Limit your computer screen time

For those of us who work from home, it may be that reducing your screen time is impossible — but the best thing you can do for your eyes if you do spend a lot of time in front of your computer is to reduce screen time elsewhere and take regular breaks.

So, every hour, take a ten-minute break from the screen. Or, in the evenings, don’t spend so much time on your phone or put your laptop away and spend it doing something else.

Eat a balanced healthy diet and practice healthy habits

One of the most important things you can do for your eyes is to practice a healthy lifestyle and eat a balanced diet. A healthy lifestyle means limiting the consumption of alcohol and drugs, not smoking cigarettes, and regularly exercising. It has to do a lot with the environment that you live in.

Healthy consumption of fruits and vegetables is also great for your eye health — no, eating carrots to help your vision wasn’t just a childhood bribe. However, bad lifestyle choices can have serious consequences for your vision, including early cataract development and more.

As you can see (pun very much intended), there are plenty of different aspects to maintaining your visual health, from diet and lifestyle choices to computer screens and work environments.

Taking care of your eyes is like taking care of any other body part. It needs to be a consistent effort to keep yourself seeing 20/20, or as close as you can get to it, for many years into your future.