It may seem harmless, but you are actually adding years to your appearance.
You feel exhausted after a long day of work. You are in your chair, leaning your head on your hands, when they start to slide slowly towards your eyes. The next thing you do is give your eyes a? Good massage ?, and for some reason, you start to feel better.
Turns out, it may sound pretty good, but it might not be the best for you. While you’re likely to give your eyes an occasional, brief massage to ease a mild itch, rubbing them around town could damage your vision and age.
WHY DOES YOUR EYES FEEL SO GOOD?
Usually we feel the need to rub our eyes when we feel itchy or irritated, or simply because we feel stressed, says Anupama B. Horne, MD, head of comprehensive ophthalmology at “Duke Eye Center.”
“Rubbing stimulates the production of tears, which can help moisturize dry or tired eyes and remove irritating particles,” says Horne. “It can also initiate the eye reflex, in which pressure on the eyeball causes a decrease in heart rate and leads to a feeling of reduced stress.”
That’s why you tend to feel better shortly after a quick massage: slowing down your calm heart rate.
That said, rubbing too hard and too often can damage the eyes and surrounding structures, Dr. Horne explains. If there is dust, eyelashes or foreign particles on the surface of your eye, rubbing can cause scratches on the cornea. A scraped cornea can hurt like hell. It feels like you have caught something with your eye and it doesn’t want to come out, and it often presents with tears, redness, and sensitivity to light.
Another problem with rubbing? You can break the blood vessels in the whites of your eyes, causing them to be bloodshot. Also, rubbing can darken the skin around the eyes, and bloodshot eyes with dark circles can make you look gaunt and old.
CAN RUBBING YOUR EYES AFFECT YOUR SIGHT?
“At a deeper level, in some genetically predisposed patients, excessive rubbing of the eyes can cause progressive thinning and corneal shape change, known as keratoconus,” says Dr. Horne.
Keratoconus can significantly decrease your vision. If that happens, you may even need surgery to improve it.
So how do you know if you’re rubbing too much? Take note of whether this eye rubbing is a habit for you. Do you rub your eyes every day? Hourly? If you wear contact lenses, be careful when rubbing them: you can move the contacts and end up scratching your cornea with the contact.
People who have had LASIK or laser surgery are also at an increased risk of infection by rubbing their eyes.
“LASIK procedures rip into the outer layers of the cornea, below which the laser is administered to correct vision,” says Dr. Horne. “It is possible that rubbing your eyes after LASIK could cause complications with the main corneal injury of the? Wound.”
In short: Mom was right. If your eyes are bothering you, try a few lubricating eye drops. And if you’re rubbing to relieve stress, try stress-reducing breathing techniques to calm yourself down.