You must have seen through the lens of a camera. Even on your cell phone camera, the scene you see is often blurred before the automatic focus, or manual in case of a regular camera, is adjusted. The focus, after adjustment, holds up a clear and defined picture of what you want to see and shoot. A very similar kind of mechanism is there in your eyes. Here, there are muscles associated with the crystalline lens of your eyes to focus light on the retina. Now, with age, these muscles are not able to function to the best of their ability.

As a result, your lens is not able to focus on things, making them appear blurry and hazy. With age, especially after hitting 40, this problem tends to crop up. So, when this happens, you find it increasingly difficult to read a book unless you hold it at a particular distance. While threading a needle, you have to constantly shift it near and far to bring to a point when you see the eye of the needle and the thread clearly. This manual adjustment is necessary because the muscles handling this function have stiffened.

To come to the question buzzing through your mind now, will this problem affect you? Let’s give it a name first: this problem is called presbyopia. If you suffer from myopia, that is you can see things clearly when they are near you (short-sighted), you may notice that you find it reading a book easier when you take off the prescription glasses you are wearing for long-sighted vision. As your eyes are favouring the near vision, taking off the glasses help. You can avoid taking off glasses if you opt for bifocals or varifocals.  

The next obvious thing to ask at this point is, how can you treat presbyopia? This being an age-related problem primarily, there is no real cure for it, except for wearing the right glasses. If you opt for one type of glasses, like one for myopia, you will have to look at faraway objects by peering over your glasses, like you must have seen people do.

Bifocals are your best option in this regard. They have clearly demarcated lines of near and far vision. Use it accordingly by getting them from a leading optician in Mauritius. Alternatively, pick up varifocal lenses which have no clear boundary but you can move your head up and down to adjust your vision for the right focus.