This is a warning to those who sleep with their devices next to them, researchers have found two women who were affected by transient smartphone “blindness” — a condition where they went blind in one eye after gazing at smartphones in the dark. That seemingly harmless habit of yours of using your smartphone before bedtime can give you vision problems.

The first experience, A 22-year-old woman in England had these habit of gazing at her smartphone before falling asleep. She would lie on her left side and look at the screen primarily with her right eye. Her left eye was often covered by the pillow.

One day, she thought she was going blind in one eye. She could always see fine out of her left eye. But on some nights, the right eye failed her. All she could see out of it were vague shapes in the room. At first, it happened about two or three times a week. Then it started happening every night.

When she went to the doctor, her vision appeared normal. So did brain scans. But it was a disturbing trend.

The other Experience involved a 40-year-old woman, she usually wake up before sunrise and checked the news on her smartphone before sitting up. It had been going on for about a year, ever since she had injured her cornea. Around the same time, she bought a smartphone.

“They were looking at their smartphones and they just happened to have one eye covered because they were lying in bed,” Omar Mahroo, ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and an author reported in a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The retina is pretty amazing because it can adapt to lots of different light levels, probably better than any camera. So in both cases, nothing bad was going on, just that one retina was adapted to light and the other to dark.

To get to the root of the problem, the researchers asked the two patients to view the smartphone with just the left eye and then just the right eye on separate occasions.

They realised that the eye going temporarily “blind” was always the one that was being used to look at the bright screen.

To confirm this further, Mahroo went in a dark room and with one eye covered, looked at a smartphone for 20 minutes before turning off the screen.

“It did actually feel quite strange,” he said. “It would be very alarming if you didn’t know what was going on.”

After flashes of dim light, the retina that had been exposed to the screen took longer to adjust to new light settings.

According to Mahroo, several other patients have said they experienced concerning vision loss because of smartphone use.

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