How dangerous is sleeping with contact lenses? What should you do if you forget the container & storage liquid at home?

Every contact lens wearer knows this:

After parties or while traveling, you spontaneously want to stay somewhere else and are faced with a problem:

Most of the time, you don’t have a suitable container with cleaning fluid on hand and you have to leave the lenses in your eyes overnight.

The consequences are red and dry eyes

Anyone who has already experienced this situation knows what threatens after getting up: red eyes & an unpleasant foreign body feeling the next day.

  • The reason for this is the lack of oxygen supply. The veins dilate to supply blood (& the oxygen it contains) to the eye.
  • This causes irritation and often pain. You don’t have to be a scientist to see that something like this is not healthy in the long run.

In the long term, the lack of oxygen supply can damage the eyes and make the cornea more prone to injury.

Only remove the contact lenses hygienically

Also, be careful when removing contact lenses. A clean bathroom is not always available at festivals or on vacation.

When in doubt, keep an eye on the lens if you can’t find a way to wash your hands thoroughly enough.

Otherwise you not only transmit germs and harmful bacteria on contact, but can also seriously damage the cornea.

A replacement container is the best choice

If your eyes allow it, you should always remove the contact lenses before going to bed – hygienically of course – and start the next day without the visual aid. Even better:

Whenever possible, you should carry a spare container with you – there are countless variants for traveling that hardly take up any space.

That sounds logical, but who always thinks about taking the container and the liquid with them at every opportunity? Fortunately, there are other alternatives:

Oxygen permeable contact lenses for day and night

Many manufacturers now offer variants that you can leave in your eyes overnight without fear of permanent damage.

So-called day and night lenses are made of very oxygen-permeable material and thus keep the eyes from drying out.

If you are frequently out and about and have no way of removing the contact lenses from your eye, this type of visual aid could be the right solution.

Whenever possible, you should remove the lenses anyway.

Summary: sleeping with contact lenses

Unsurprisingly, keeping your contacts in your eyes during the night is not a good idea. Whenever possible, you should avoid staying overnight without a container or cleaning fluid.

I created Sleep Knowledge to share my interests and experiences on healthy sleeping with others. On this page I am therefore dealing with interesting questions about the optimal night’s sleep & everything else that goes with it.

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