Stress and eye health are more closely-linked than many people realize!

These days, with stress at levels higher than during the COVID epidemic, it’s more important than ever to understand the relationship between stress and eye health. Manage your stress, and you’ll help protect your eyes as well.

Five Links Between Stress and Your Eyesight

1 – Increased eye pressure

As your blood pressure goes up, so does the pressure on the fluid in your eyeballs. This won’t do damage immediately, but elevated pressure over months or years can start seriously damaging your optic nerve. In particular, the pressure can encourage development of glaucoma – one of the most common causes of blindness in older people.

2 – Blurry vision

That increased eye pressure, and other factors in stress, can also affect your vision itself. If your eyeball changes shape, even a little, that throws off its ability to properly focus. Over time, changes to the eyes’ shape can become permanent, and force you to get new prescriptions for your glasses/contacts.

3 – Twitching eyelids

The stressed eyelid twitch isn’t just a comedic gag in shows like Bob’s Burgers. It’s a real condition that can occur if a person is put under enough stress. Too little sleep and too much caffeine will make the issue worse.

Twitching eyelids aren’t actually harmful, but they are very annoying – which just adds to the stress.

4 – Light sensitivity

When a person is stressed, their body releases extra amounts of certain hormones – such as cortisol and adrenaline. These are the hormones which are supposed to help us escape danger, and trigger changes such as dilating your pupils to improve vision.

However, if your pupils are constantly dilated, that simply makes them extra sensitive to light. In turn, that can lead to difficulty seeing on bright days, or eye-strain headaches when looking at bright objects like screens.

5 – Tunnel vision

When people are under extreme stress, they can even develop tunnel vision – where your brain ‘ignores’ information from your peripheral vision, in favor of what’s directly in front. This is another survival adaptation that can be helpful in genuine life-or-death situations. Unfortunately, it can cause vision problems if it’s happening in regular everyday life, or even become dangerous if you’re driving.

In short, better stress management won’t merely make you feel better – it’ll help protect your eyesight as well! To learn more about the link between stress and eye health, or to have a vision checkup, just contact Valley Eyecare Center in Phoenix!