Night Driving and Winter Glare: Why Your Eyes Struggle From October Onwards
16 September 2026
12:05
It arrives without warning, usually in a restaurant. You hold the menu at a comfortable distance and the words are soft. You move it further away and it sharpens. Somebody at the table makes the joke about arms not being long enough, and that is that.
What has happened is presbyopia. The lens inside your eye gradually becomes less flexible, so the ability to change focus for close work declines. It starts in the mid-forties for most people, it happens to everyone, and nothing you did caused it. It also cannot be prevented, exercised away or delayed by avoiding reading glasses, which is a persistent myth worth putting to rest immediately.
What you can decide is how you deal with it, and the options are wider than most people realise.
Option | Works well for | Where it falls down |
|---|---|---|
Ready readers (off the shelf) | Occasional use, spares, low demands | Same power both eyes; no astigmatism correction |
Prescription readers | Sustained close work, accurate correction | Only good at one distance; swapping pairs |
Varifocals | One pair for everything, all distances | Adaptation period; narrow intermediate for screens |
Bifocals | Simple near and far, clear division | Visible line; nothing at arm’s length |
Occupational / room lenses | Desk and screen work, wide intermediate | Not for driving or distance |
Multifocal contact lenses | Going without glasses entirely | Adaptation; not everyone gets on with them |
Two pairs | Screen workers, strong prescriptions | Carrying two pairs, remembering both |
There is no best row. There is the row that matches how you actually spend your day, which is why the conversation at the appointment matters more than the price list.
The pair from the supermarket has a legitimate place. As a spare in the car, a pair in the kitchen drawer, occasional use for a menu – perfectly reasonable, and we would not pretend otherwise.
Where they fall down is as a main solution, for three reasons.
If you are using them for an hour a day, that is a different proposition from using them for six. Our article on reading glasses after 40 covers the background.
A varifocal lens changes power gradually from top to bottom: distance through the upper portion, intermediate through the middle, near through the lower. One pair, no line, everything covered.
When they suit someone, they suit them completely and they never go back. The detail is in our varifocal lenses guide.
Expect a week or two. Early on you will notice some softness at the edges of the lens and you will need to point your nose at what you want to see rather than flicking your eyes across. Stairs feel odd for a few days. Almost everyone adapts; the ones who do not are usually the ones who gave up on day three.
When someone tells us varifocals did not work for them, the cause is almost always one of three things, and none of them is “varifocals do not suit me”.
If you have a pair of varifocals in a drawer that you gave up on, bring them in. We can measure them and usually tell you exactly what went wrong.
Standard varifocals are optimised for distance and reading, with a relatively narrow intermediate zone in between. A monitor sits precisely in that intermediate range, which means desk workers often find themselves tilting their chin up to find the right part of the lens, holding that posture for hours, and finishing the day with neck and shoulder ache they blame on their chair.
Occupational or room-distance lenses solve it. They sacrifice distance vision – you cannot drive in them – in exchange for a much wider intermediate and near field. For someone at a screen all day, they are frequently a bigger quality-of-life improvement than any other change we make.
Many desk workers end up with two pairs: occupational lenses for work, varifocals for everything else. That is not a failure of the varifocals; it is using the right tool for each job.
Less fashionable, and for some people still the right choice. The division is abrupt and visible, which some people dislike and others find reassuring because they always know exactly where they are looking. The gap is the intermediate distance, which means they are a poor fit for screen work but perfectly serviceable for someone whose day is distance and print with little in between.
Worth raising because people often assume presbyopia rules lenses out. It does not. Multifocal contact lenses work on a similar principle to varifocals, and some people do better with a monovision approach where one eye is corrected for distance and the other for near.
There is an adaptation period and a minority never fully get on with either, but for people who dislike glasses it is a genuine alternative rather than a compromise. We cover the options on our contact lenses page.
More consequential at this stage than at any other, because the lens depends on it.
We fit from a curated collection rather than a warehouse, which we would argue is an advantage at this stage: fewer options, but every one of them chosen. Have a look at our frame range and the brands we stock, or book a free styling consultation if you would rather have help narrowing it down.
This is a longer conversation than a straightforward prescription check, and a forty-minute appointment exists partly for this reason.
We will ask what your day actually looks like: how many hours at a screen, whether you read on paper or a tablet, whether you drive at night, whether you do close handwork. Those answers change the recommendation substantially, and they are the questions a rushed appointment skips.
If you want the resulting numbers explained, our article on understanding your glasses prescription breaks down what each figure means. And if night driving has become harder around the same time, that is worth raising too – it often has a separate explanation, covered in night driving vision problems.
Book your comprehensive eye examination or eyewear styling consultation with
Mosspark Opticians today.
It is called presbyopia. The lens inside the eye gradually becomes less flexible, so the ability to change focus for close work declines. It begins for most people in their mid-forties, it happens to everyone, and it is not caused by anything you did. It also cannot be prevented or delayed by avoiding reading glasses.
Not automatically. Varifocals give you one pair covering all distances, which suits many people completely. But for someone at a screen all day, occupational lenses or two pairs often work better, because the intermediate zone in a standard varifocal is narrow and a monitor sits exactly in it. The right answer depends on how you spend your day.
Usually one to two weeks. Early on you will notice softness at the edges of the lens and will need to point your nose at what you want to see rather than flicking your eyes across. Stairs feel strange for a few days. Almost everyone adapts, and the people who do not are usually those who stopped wearing them within the first few days.
Almost always one of three things: measurement, frame choice or lens design. Varifocals need precise measurement of where your pupils sit in the frame; a frame too shallow leaves no room for the reading zone; and cheaper lens designs have narrower usable corridors with more edge distortion. Bring the old pair in and we can usually identify which it was.
They will not damage your eyes, but they are a poor main solution. They carry the same power in both lenses when most people’s eyes differ, they do not correct astigmatism at all, and their optical centres may not line up with your pupils. That combination causes the eye strain people usually blame on reading too long.
Yes. Multifocal contact lenses work on a similar principle to varifocals, and some people do better with monovision, where one eye is corrected for distance and the other for near. There is an adaptation period and a minority never fully get on with either, but it is a genuine option rather than a compromise.
Bifocals give a clear, abrupt division between distance and near with a visible line, and no intermediate zone at all. Varifocals change power gradually with no line and cover intermediate distances. If your day involves a screen, bifocals are a poor fit. If it is distance and print with little in between, they remain perfectly serviceable.
Other Articles from Mosspark Opticians:
