Eating for two

Can Wearing Contact Lenses Overnight Improve Your Eyesight?

28 April 2019

Louis Stone

Standard contact lenses aren't generally meant to be worn overnight, although some extended life lenses can be left in for days at a time. Even if you can wear these lenses at night, they won't do anything to improve your vision However, there are some contact lenses that are only meant to be worn overnight. These lenses are used to improve your daytime vision. How do these lenses work, and will they fix your eyesight problems?

How Do Overnight Vision Correction Lenses Work?

Overnight vision correction lenses are used as part of an orthokeratology treatment. These lenses don't work like regular contacts. You wear these lenses overnight and not during the day. The premise here is that overnight correction lenses work on your eyes as you sleep to correct your eyesight defects on a temporary basis. The lenses typically change the shape of your corneas by using extremely gentle suction to put your corneas into the right shape to improve your vision.

When you get up in the morning, you take the lenses out. You should then be able to see clearly for a period of time without needing to wear regular contact lenses or glasses.

Will Overnight Vision Correction Lenses Fix Your Eyesight?

In some cases, overnight vision correction prescription lenses can slow down the development of short-sightedness in children and teenagers. This tends to work best for young people who are getting progressively more short-sighted over time. However, overnight corrective lenses don't necessarily give adults a permanent eyesight fix. They usually correct vision in older eyes for the following day. So, the day after the night you wear them, you may be able to see perfectly without corrective glasses or contacts.

During the day, however, your corneas will gradually go back to their normal shape. The changes that these overnight lenses make won't typically last forever. So, if you want to avoid wearing glasses and lenses permanently during the day, you may need to wear corrective lenses every night. Even if these lenses only give you a temporary break from wearing standard lenses or glasses, this kind of treatment could be worth a try. If you don't like wearing glasses and find contacts hard to deal with during the day, then you may benefit from this treatment.

Corrective overnight lenses don't work for everyone, and your eyesight will need to be assessed to see if these lenses will work for you. To find out more, ask your optometrist for advice.

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