Dehydration has negative effects for your health and that includes your eyes too. However, you should know that the last statement has two different meanings. First, it means when your body is dehydrated, it can affect your eyes. Meaning, when you are physically dehydrated, you can get symptoms like double vision or blurred vision. Another meaning of that first statement is that your eyes themselves can get dehydrated too.
In such situations your eyes become dry, get irritated, and can even lead to blurry vision. You should know dry eyes by themselves is an ophthalmological condition and requires treatment. Now that you know the effects of dehydration on your vision, you can assume how important hydration is for your eyes. However, to give you a complete picture, let’s dive deep and learn about all the different ways hydration can help your eyes and their connection.
Exploring The Connection Between Hydration & Eye Health
To understand the effects of hydration on your eye health, we’ll be looking at their connection from two distinct sides. First, let’s explore the importance of hydration for your eye health. Once you know that, we’ll focus on the other side, which would be what happens or what can happen if there is inadequate hydration for your eyes. The risk factors it exposes you to and the overall effects of dehydration on your eye health. There’s a lot of information to take in, so let’s get started.
Is Hydrating Your Eyes Necessary For Healthy Eyes?
Yes. That’s the short answer. But there’s a slightly longer explanation with reasoning too. Just like any part of your body, hydration helps you keep the parts of your body working properly. Whenever you blink a thin layer of tear spreads over the outer layer of your eye. It protects your eye from irritation, dryness, and dust or dirt.
This is the main purpose of your tears to ensure your eyes are well lubricated. Apart from your tears, there are a few other fluids that help your eyes function normally. The aqueous humor and vitreous humor are both fluids that are present inside your eye, which help maintain your eye health. Both these fluids are present to help your eyes maintain the shape they have and provide nutrition to your eyes.
When you don’t have enough of these fluids in your eyes it can increase your risk of several eye conditions. So yes, hydrating your eyes is crucial for maintaining your eye health. There are other reasons you need to hydrate your eyes too. Let’s take a look at them.
Eye Fatigue
Without proper hydration your eyes can be susceptible to fatigue. Fatigue leads to strain in your eyes, which can lead to headaches and migraine attacks. Why? This is mainly because eye fatigue makes it difficult for your eyes to focus, and you have to constantly strain your eyes to focus. When the strain goes beyond a certain limit, it leads to headaches and eye irritation. If you don’t tend to your eyes, it will increase your risk of getting eye infections.
Dry Eyes
Lack of hydration in the eyes can lead to dry eyes if not treated. Dry eyes is an ophthalmological condition that can cause symptoms like eye irritation, blurry vision, and redness in the eyes. As you can imagine, dry eyes are caused when your body is dehydrated. However, as it is a physical condition, it can also be caused when your body is not dehydrated. If your tear ducts are not producing enough tears or enough good quality tears, it can lead to dry eyes too. It is crucial to understand the underlying cause of the dry eye to appropriately treat it. And as for dry eyes caused by physical dehydration, having enough water can help you treat that.
Now that you know the importance of keeping your eyes hydrated, let’s take a look at the risk factors that you are exposed to when your eyes are not properly hydrated.
What Happens If Your Eyes Are Dehydrated?
If your eyes are dehydrated, you are put at risk of several eye conditions that can even lead to vision loss. Plus, dry eyes are very uncomfortable, which ensures that people take action and get their condition treated before complications can show up. However, in some cases where the dry eyes are caused by other eye conditions like inadequate tear production, you need to get medical treatment for them. For other causes using a simple lubricating eye drop is enough to ensure your eyes are not dehydrated and your vision is unaffected. With that being said, let’s take a look at the different conditions you are at a risk of when your eyes are dehydrated.
Eye Infections
The tears in your eyes keeps them safe from foreign substances like dust, dirt, and bacteria. Without adequate tear production, the bacteria, dust, and dirt can infiltrate your eyes and cause infections like pink eye and corneal infections. Infections like pink eye and corneal infections can affect your vision and if the underlying cause for your dry eyes are not addressed they can be recurrent.
Photophobia
Also known as light sensitivity, photophobia is a common side effect of dry eyes. When your eyes are dehydrated, they become sensitive to bright light or even the sunlight. This sensitivity can lead to pain in your eyes and give you headaches unless you treat the condition. Photophobia can disrupt your day-to-day lifestyle, so make sure you get the medical attention required to treat the condition.
Blurred Vision
Dry eyes make it harder for you to focus your vision on any source of light, this creates symptoms like blurry or hazy vision. This is a problem especially when you are outside and combined with the other effects, it can affect your vision to the point, you may be at risk when on the road. To protect yourself from the effects like blurred vision, you need to lubricate your eyes manually if they are not naturally lubricated, especially if you are behind the wheel. Blurred vision can be especially dangerous when you are driving, so make sure you can see properly when you are driving on the road.
Conclusion
Hydration is crucial to maintain your eye health and without hydration you put yourself at risk of irritation and blurry vision. Though these problems may seem trivial, blurry vision and irritating eyes can be very dangerous for you when you are on the road. So, it is crucial that you take your eye health seriously and make sure you stay hydrated both for your body and your eyes.
For physical hydration drinking water whenever you are thirsty is enough to keep you from getting dehydrated. However, if you have dry eyes that don’t seem to go away no matter how much water you have per day, you need medical help. And that’s where Sanjeevan for perfect eyesight is needed.
We specialise in treating all types of dry eye conditions with natural and non-invasive treatment options. We have helped hundreds of patients understand and treat the root cause of their dry eyes and we can help you too. For more information about our treatment options check out our website.