You’re exhausted. It’s late. The thought of taking out your contact lenses feels like climbing Mount Everest. So you close your eyes and drift off to sleep, telling yourself it’s just this one time. No big deal, right? Wrong.
Dr. Amanda Redfern, an ophthalmologist at Oregon Health & Science University’s Casey Eye Institute, has a blunt message for everyone doing this: stop it immediately.
“It’s bad. It’s real bad. Don’t do it,” Redfern said during an episode of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast. And she wasn’t exaggerating for effect. This isn’t about mild discomfort or temporary irritation. We’re talking about potentially losing your eyesight.
The Russian Roulette You Didn’t Know You Were Playing
When you sleep with contacts in, you’re creating the perfect storm for a corneal ulcer, which is basically an infection on the part of your eye that the lens covers. Sounds bad? It gets worse.
“It’s not going to happen every time, but when it happens, it’s terrible,” Redfern explained. In extreme cases, you could actually lose your eyeball. Even in less catastrophic scenarios, you might end up with a permanent scar on your cornea. If that scar happens to sit in the center of your vision, congratulations, you’re looking at permanent vision loss unless you get a corneal transplant.
This applies to naps too, by the way. A 20-minute afternoon snooze with your lenses in? Still a gamble you shouldn’t be taking.
Swimming, Showering, and Other Contact Crimes
The trouble with contacts doesn’t stop at bedtime. Redfern emphasized that you should never expose your lenses to anything that isn’t sterile. That means no swimming in pools or lakes. No showering with them in. And definitely not rinsing them with tap water.
The reason is simple but terrifying: bacteria gets sandwiched between the lens and your cornea, leading to infection and all those complications we just talked about. Your eyes aren’t waterproof bags. They’re sensitive, vulnerable organs that deserve better treatment than we typically give them.
Even being on vacation and forgetting your contact lens solution doesn’t justify these shortcuts. When asked whether she’d choose between sleeping in contacts or using tap water to store them, Redfern refused both options entirely.
“Both of those are awful options,” she said. “I’d rather you throw the contacts out and just walk around a little bit blurry for the weekend.”
Let that sink in. An eye doctor would rather you ditch your contacts and embrace temporary blurriness than risk the consequences of these seemingly minor decisions.
The Stuff Nobody Talks About
Beyond contact lens hygiene, Redfern stressed the importance of eye protection during any activity where something could fly into your eye. Hammering, sawing, working with power tools, home renovations, anything really. She spends half her time dealing with preventable eye trauma from people who thought they didn’t need protection.
And if something does get lodged in your eye? Don’t play doctor. Don’t try to remove it yourself. Tape a paper cup over your eye and get to a hospital immediately. Pulling out a foreign object the wrong way could cause the inner contents of your eye to come out with it. That’s not hyperbole. That’s actual ophthalmology.
She also addressed some common myths about health and vision. Reading in dim light? It won’t ruin your eyes. Floaters? Usually harmless, but sudden changes warrant a doctor’s visit. The takeaway is that most of the stuff we worry about isn’t actually the problem. The real threats are the things we’re casually ignoring.
What You’re Actually Doing Right
Despite all the warnings, there’s good news hiding in here somewhere. Your eyes are incredibly resilient. They’ve evolved over millions of years to handle a lot of abuse. The issue is that we’ve invented contact lenses relatively recently, and they come with a specific set of rules that contradict our natural instincts.
It feels natural to take a quick nap with your lenses in. It feels reasonable to shower with them on. Our brains don’t immediately register these as dangerous because the consequences aren’t instant. But that delayed gratification between action and consequence is exactly what makes these habits so risky.
The good news is that the fix is simple. Actually follow the guidelines you were given when you got your lenses fitted. Clean them properly. Remove them before sleeping. Keep them away from water. These aren’t suggestions. They’re instructions written in the language of corneal biology.
If you’re looking for more information about maintaining your eye health and breaking bad habits, you can dive deeper into episodes of “Am I Doing It Wrong?” where experts tackle all kinds of misconceptions we’ve been carrying around. The full podcast episode with Dr. Redfern covers everything from floaters to myths about vision and tons more.
The real question isn’t whether you can get away with these risky behaviors. It’s whether maintaining your eyesight is worth the inconvenience of taking out your contacts before bed.
