This is a normal process, called presbyopia, and is not a cause for concern. Good glasses and multifocal contact lenses and/or progressive lenses are now available to ensure that you can enjoy good quality vision across all distances.
It begins somewhere between the age of 40 and 50: The lens and the ring muscle inside your eyes starts to lose its ability to automatically adjust and zoom in on different distances. The loss of ability for the lens of the eye to adjust to the distance causes problems with close-up vision.
Far-sighted or hyperopic people may encounter this problem much sooner. Hyperopic people have excellent long range vision, but may struggle to see things that are close-up.
Short-sighted or myopic people might start to notice that they need to take off their glasses to see things in their immediate range of vision. Constantly putting on and taking off glasses can be quite annoying. Consequently, the best solution - regardless of whether you had normal vision before, or were already short or far-sighted is a pair of customised glasses.
Those who had great distance vision before will initially only need reading glasses.
However, over time as your eyes and needs change, progressive spectacles lenses will be the perfect solution; they offer the convenience of being able to see across all the different vision distances.
If you spend a lot of time working in front of computers, a special occupational lens will optimize your vision for the distances you need. Ie. Computer and phone.
Our optometrists are happy to discuss the options that will be tailored to your needs; whether it be a customised pair of Zeiss Individual progressive spectacle lens, Office lens or multifocal contact lenses.
