Who here agrees that the eyes are some of the most important parts of our body?

Who here agrees that they’re also the most abused?

You were probably quick on answering the question but upon hearing the second one, your hesitations rose. Are they really? Do we unknowingly abuse them without a second thought? Well, let me briefly answer those questions for you.

Yes. We do.

If you don’t agree with me, allow me to show you the truth through realistic examples.

When you wake up in the morning, what is the first thing you seek? Do you do eye exercises? It’s like gently massaging the area surrounding your visual organ. I bet not. I think whatever you’re doing first thing in the morning; it has nothing to do with any eye exercises. You probably pick up your phone, check your Instagram to see how many hearts you’ve got and spend another 30 minutes or so skimming through your newsfeed. That’s abuse.

Or, think about your routine whenever you’re about to call it a day. The entire day you would complain about how sleepy you are and how exhausted your body is. You will then say “I’m going to bed early tonight. Try to catch up on some Z’s” But that’s not really what happens, right? What happens is that you do get to bed but you’d stay up another 3 or 4 hours doing absolutely nothing worthy of mention (click here). You marathon YouTube videos about bloggers you don’t even know the first thing about. You scan multiple times through your newsfeed (again). You spend a long time editing your eye bags out of photos you are planning to upload on the very next day. You end up not getting enough sleep and feeling even more tired the day after. Then, ironically, you repeat the same dialogue only to do the exact opposite later on. This, too, is abuse.

Lastly, even when you have all the time in the world to do your presentation or finish a work project, you wait until the very last day to do it. You end up cramming everything in only a few hours. On one window you’ve got your spreadsheets open. On the other window, you’re whipping up an entire Powerpoint presentation from scratch. And yet on another window, you open your social media tabs because you’ve got this insanely bad fear of missing out or FOMO. You could’ve finished all the work in three hours but you end up cramming for 7 hours – facing the front of an LCD screen less than a foot away from your eyes without any sort of protection. To top it off, you decide to turn off all the surrounding lights because “it’s too distracting.” What a horrible, abusive practice.

Your eyes suffer from your activities more than you know. And the effects of excessive social media use and online browsing can be observed (quite obviously, even) in the generation today. Children as young as 7 or 8 years old are wearing heavily graded lenses because their vision is starting to become problematic. They develop near-sightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism because of prolonged exposure to radioactive devices. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this is a secretly growing epidemic that people aren’t alarmed about.

I’m not saying that you should quit using computers (in all its many forms) entirely, but you should at least seek out preventative measures to protect your eyesight. Seeing an eye doctor REGULARLY can be one very effective solution. I know I searched for an optometrist near me the moment I knew of the danger.

Don’t just go to an optometrist when you have an eye problem already. Set consultation appointments even if your eyes seem perfectly fine. Once or twice a year is good enough and you don’t really have to spend much for a consultation. What you’re protecting, on the other hand, is very precious. It’s your vision and you only have one shot at taking care of it. When you fail, you fail. Eye donors are hard to find these days – and that’s supposing you’re eligible for a transplant too!

Take better care of your eye health. Consult with an optometrist regularly. We assure you; you won’t regret it.