The Hidden Psychology of Wearing Glasses

That's really interesting!

I think this is the case whenever something gets simpler + more gratifying. We can remember the inconvenience of the old way of doing things, but we don't quite remember the experience- because the new experience becomes our default reality. I remember reading Francis Bacon's A New Atlantic, and thinking "This isn't really that revolutionary... it's just people doing things in a rigorous, scientific sort of manner."

(A product corollary– Consider how Google and Facebook often seem like they've always been around!)

As a person with -0.5/-0.75 I frequently switch between wearing and not wearing glasses. I usually wear glasses at work, when watching movies, at lectures while if I'm out at night, hanging out with friends, going out or doing anything like that I usually leave the glasses of.

I often forget my glasses at home in the morning because I don't really notice that I'm not wearing them and when I'm not wearing them I sometimes think that I'm actually wearing them (this is especially common when I'm accidentally using the computer or watching a movie without glasses).

However if I've been wearing my glasses for an extended period of time (say a couple of hours) I do notice a quite marginal difference when comparing having them on to not. I don't know if it's imaginary but it's almost like my vision without glasses gets worse if I've recently been wearing glasses extensively.

> That said, I've been wearing glasses since I was 9. By now they're a part of my face and I literally look weird without them.

I know the feeling. I got my first glasses with 5, then had a pause between 6 and 8 and have worn them since then all the time. If my eyesight would have been in your range ("can exist without glasses") I'm not sure if I would have done the surgery, but being blind without glasses convinced me that looking weird is a far lesser evil.

> What was the surgery like? The idea of something going in my eyes always terrified me.

I had the same thoughts, but the surgery was completely harmless. The "real" surgery took something like 20 seconds. The doctor said "now we insert the lens", then it got a bit bright, then dark and then he said "finished" and did the same thing with the other eye. The preparations were far longer. I had to take eye drops for a few days, then on the day of the surgery they have to lay an IV (for safety purposes - the surgery was done in local anesthesia, but there was the option of falling back to general anesthesia if they had to), then they have to attach all the monitoring equipment and so on .. so, the whole surgery was maybe an hour, but the part you would call surgery was very short.

Probably interesting: I didn't do LASIK, but this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implantable_collamer_lens - you cannot get LASIK if you are above -8 diopter on one eye (or at least my doctors said they wouldn't do it, too risky)

> I've been wearing glasses since I was 9. By now they're a part of my face and I literally look weird without them.

Try rimless glasses ;)

Careful at this age, as middle-age/"can't see up close" might hit you in a few years forcing reading glasses. While one person is an anecdote, I sent from 0 to 2.5 diopter correction in the 42-44 range, with 0.25/0.5 changes occurring every 6-month checkup. I'm currently watching a whole lot of coworkers making their offices brighter (greater depth of field) and wishing for larger arms, monitors and fonts. Get some good advice here to avoid disappointment.

29. My doctors warned me that I have to expect presbyopia from the age of 45-50 (like everyone else), so no idea if you think 5-10 years without glasses are worth the cost.

Sometimes and only on one eye (left). At the start the effect was very obvious, but now (1.5 month later) I've noticed that they've almost disappeared. Sometimes, I can still see them, then I blink and no more halos. My doctors said that this is to be expected: The brain learns to filter out such effects over time. Seems to work for me. :)

Do you perhaps have a good link about the halo effect? I've been trying to find a "Reliable" link about it, but all I'm getting are medical Q&A answer sites with peoples' experiences, etc.

It is significantly less than 1%, and most of the complications can be fixed with additional surgery or simple drug prescriptions. Most of the complications tend to happen with patients for whom pre-op examinations showed that everything wasn't perfect. All in all, catastrophic failures (worst eyesight than before the operation) are very, very rare. IIRC it is something like 0.0005%. Honestly, I think you should at least have a serious talk with your eye doctor about the possibility of having surgery. This doesn't commit you to anything, but at least you'll have given it a serious thought.

I did have laser surgery about a year ago, and it definitely changed my life for the better. I was only mildly short sighted, but it proved to be a huge inconvenience to practice sports, but also when breaking glasses, forgetting them, etc... Not to mention the huge boost to my self-esteem: I much prefer my face without glasses.

The surgery technique that was used in my case is femtosecond laser, and it is as close as a miracle as modern medicine can get: the surgery lasts basically 15 minutes during which you are put into 2 machines successively. You start seeing again after the effect of the anesthetic dulls off. You get back to your home, have a good night of sleep. The morning after, you have a perfect eyesights. 15 years ago, with less advanced techniques, you had to wait for about a week for the scars to heal. Compare that to the fact that I was back to work only 24h after the surgery.

Even without looking at the 1% catastrophic failures (forget your fears about losing an eye or going blind, I think you can safely rule them out. And in the case of LASIK, it's truly painless and quick, I can attest to that), the 99% success rate is suspect. Here "success" probably means "defect corrected". But many less than honest eye doctors don't take into consideration subjective matters (is the patient satisfied with the result? is he reporting any discomfort not directly related to the original condition?). So these doctors will report the surgery was a success if it corrected the defect, even when the patient reports other annoyances.

This happened to me and to other people I spoke with who had LASIK surgery. Nothing terrible; in my case it was a success. It's just that it's not perfect, I have minor annoyances, but for the statistics it probably counts as a success case.

Last time I looked, laser surgery for astigmatism was still in a quite experimental stage. Perhaps you should research it for yourself, or ask an optometrist.

I wear extended wear contact lenses, find them quite comfortable, and prefer them to glasses from a comfort perspective. They're much better than regular dailies or monthlies for comfort. The only downside is the maintenance. Although reduced for extended wear (I only have to mess with them every five days, or they get uncomfortable), I am meticulous about cleanliness to reduce infection risk and so it takes considerable time to get my hands clean and dry and to then thoroughly clean the lenses. This is a pain to do compared to no-maintenance glasses.

I do often wear glasses at home, but only because it's convenient to fit my extended wear scheduled breaks (five days on, two days off, replace monthly) around being at home. If I'm already wearing contacts, I don't choose to switch to glasses at home until my schedule requires it. If I could have the same experience I have for the first five days continuously and safely, I would never take the contacts out.

But I may be an exception. I used to suffer from recurrent corneal erosion. Perhaps this causes my eyes to be less comfortable than normal when not wearing lenses.

Counterpoint: If you are extremely nearsighted, contact lenses can give you much better vision than glasses. If I look at the red digits on an alarm clock from across the room while wearing glasses, and I tilt my head, I can see the numbers shift relative to the position of the alarm clock (think about light going through a prism and the colors separating). I had an old pair of glasses where the numbers would shift completely off of the clock and appear to be floating in the air, but my newer ones aren't that bad (I guess the lens material is better, or the lenses are just smaller so you can't look through them at such an extreme angle).

Well here's mine: I wore glasses for 1 year (mostly in class and removed them as soon as I could) then switched to contacts, never looked back (10 years now).

Glasses are a big disconfort when you wear them for the first time at 18 years old, always dirty (inadvertently putting my finger on them), can't look on the sides or at the top (especially in class when taking notes), you move your neck a lot more, sun from certain angles makes you blind, etc

I agree sometimes they can become uncomfortable given certain conditions and I keep a pair of glasses around but most of the time (must be 99% for me) I find the contacts to be a better solution.