Don’t Do This When Looking at Your Phone in Bed

If you have a habit of looking at your smartphone or tablets while in bed in the dark, this is something you don't want to do or you could risk blindness.

I came across this article on WGN's website where two woman have reported a temporary blindness in one of their eyes and the link was from reading or looking at their smartphones while in bed in the dark.

Now if you look at phone like this the way you could cause temporary blindness to yourself is in the way you're looking at your phone. If your looking at the screen with both of your eyes you'll be ok. You're eyes adjust to the screens brightness in the dark and then they adjust again together when you turn your phone off and go to total darkness.

However, the risk of blindness comes into play when you're using one eye to look at the screen and the other is covered up. Which was the case of these two women.  They were both "using their smartphones while lying on their sides in the dark in such a way that only one eye was viewing the bright screen while the other was blocked by a pillow."

"This caused one eye to adjust to the darkness while the other was adapted to the brightness. When the smartphone was turned off, “the symptoms were always in the eye contralateral to the side on which the patient was lying”—that is, the dark-adjusted eye responds fine to the now-dark room, but the light-adjusted eye seemed to suffer blindness for a short period."

Yikes! The lesson to take away with is if you're going to look at your phone in the dark while in bed use both of your eyes.