Getting used to progressive lenses

Progressives are the only lens that asks something of you before they start working. For the first week or so they feel strange, and almost everyone wonders whether they have made a mistake. Usually they have not.

Why the corridor is narrow

A progressive lens carries three prescriptions in one surface: distance at the top, intermediate in the middle, reading at the bottom. Those zones blend into each other without a visible line, and the blending happens in the outer edges of the lens. That is why the clear channel down the middle, the corridor, is narrower than you expect, and why the outer corners look soft.

You learn to point your nose at what you want to see rather than flicking your eyes across. Within two weeks most people stop noticing they are doing it.

What is normal in the first fortnight

• Soft or swimmy edges when you turn your head quickly.
• Being briefly unsure where the floor is on stairs, because you are reading the ground through the intermediate zone.
• Having to lift your chin slightly to read a phone.

All of that settles. Wear them full time rather than switching back to your old pair, because switching restarts the adjustment each time.

If a progressive is still uncomfortable after three weeks, the lens is usually correct and the frame has moved.

What is not normal

Persistent headache, one eye working noticeably harder than the other, or a reading zone you have to hunt for by tilting your head sideways. Those are usually fitting problems, not adjustment problems, and they are fixable.

Progressives depend on where the corridor sits in front of your pupil, which depends on the frame, how it sits on your nose, and measurements taken while you are wearing it. Bring them in and we will check it.

When a second pair makes more sense

If you spend most of the working day at a screen, progressives will do the job but never comfortably, because a desk sits exactly where the corridor is narrowest. Office lenses give you a much wider intermediate zone for that one task. They are useless for driving, so they are a second pair rather than a first. We would rather explain that than sell you a progressive and let you discover it.