Is your vision hazy or blurry? Do your eyes feel dry and irritated?
You may have dry eye, or dry eye syndrome. Dry eye occurs when your eyes don’t make enough tears or produce poor-quality tears.
However, it typically comes with a variety of symptoms beyond just dry eyes. Keep reading to learn more about whether dry eye can cause blurry vision.
What Causes Dry Eye?
Your tear film comprises three layers: a watery layer, a mucus layer, and an oily layer.
- Watery layer: The watery layer keeps your eyes lubricated, washes away particles, and prevents infections.
- Mucus layer: The mucus layer helps spread water evenly across your eye’s surface. In turn, this helps your eyes remain moist.
- Oily layer: The oily layer prevents tears from evaporating too fast and keeps the tear surface smooth.
All three layers work together to ensure your eyes remain comfortable and healthy. An insufficiency in one of these layers can result in dry eye syndrome.
What are the Signs of Dry Eye?
Blurry vision is a common sign of dry eye. It can present together with other symptoms, including:
- Redness
- Eye pain
- Watery eyes
- Eye fatigue
- Sensitivity to light
- Gritty or sandy feeling
- Burning or stinging sensation
- Trouble wearing contact lenses
- Stringy mucus around or in your eyes
How Dry Eye Causes Blurry Vision
Several factors can cause patients with dry eye to experience blurry vision. They include:
Overproduction of Tears
Dry, irritated eyes can lead to the overproduction of tears. This happens when your eyes try to overcompensate for the dryness by producing more tears.
However, these tears are usually of low quality. Poor-quality tears evaporate faster and, thus, don’t alleviate your dry eye symptoms.
Plus, the extra tears affect how your eyes refract light, causing blurry vision.
Eye Strain
Eye strain can often occur when you stare at your computer, laptop, smartphone, tablet, or TV for too long. Looking at screens reduces the number of times your eyes are blinking and leads to digital eye strain.
Two common symptoms of eye strain are dry eyes and blurry vision. You can keep eye strain, dry eyes, and blurry vision at bay by following the 20-20-20 rule.
According to the rule, take a break from your digital device every 20 minutes for at least 20 seconds and look 20 feet away. While resting your eyes, also remember to blink intentionally.
Deliberately blinking encourages the flow of tears, which lubricates your eyes and reduces irritation and dryness. These simple exercises will help your eyes relax and alleviate the uncomfortable symptoms of digital eye strain.
Wearing Contact Lenses
Contact lenses help bring the world around you into sharper focus. However, contact lens overuse can cause dry eyes.
This is because soft contacts depend on the moisture in your eyes to remain effective. When left in too long, these contact lenses may absorb water from the surface of your eyes and dry them out.
In turn, this can cause your contacts to not sit properly on your cornea, resulting in blurry vision. If you’re experiencing dry eyes and blurry vision, Metro Eye Care can help.
Their experienced eye doctors can get to the bottom of your dry eye symptoms and provide an effective treatment plan to address the root cause.
Do you want to get relief from dry eyes and say goodbye to frustrating symptoms like blurry vision? Schedule an appointment at Metro Eye Care in Paramus, NJ, today!
