This Is The 1 Thing An Eye Doctor Says You Should Never Do — And It's 'Bad... Real Bad'

The human eye is a wondrous thing.

It is considered the body’s most complex organ after the brain and contains over 2 million working parts. About 80% of all learning happens through vision.

So how can we keep our eyes in tip-top condition? And what should we never do if we want them to stay as healthy as possible?

That’s what we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, the hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — asked Dr. Amanda Redfern, an ophthalmologist and assistant professor at Oregon Health & Science University’s Casey Eye Institute, when she recently dropped by our studio.

Listen to the full episode by pressing play:

″[Sleeping with contact lenses in your eyes] is bad. It’s real bad. Don’t do it,” Redfern told us, adding that this even applies to naps. “It’s like a game of Russian roulette.”

That’s because you can get a corneal ulcer, which is an infection on part of the eye that a contact covers.

“It’s not going to happen every time, but when it happens, it’s terrible,” Redfern said. “It can be so bad you could, in really terrible cases, lose your eyeball.”

In less severe situations, Redfern said you could end up with a scar on your cornea.

“If that scar is in the center of your vision, that could affect your vision permanently, unless you get a corneal transplant,” she said.

Redfern also warned us not to engage in any activity that could cause lenses to become compromised or contaminated, including swimming in a pool or lake while wearing contacts or even showering with them.

“The problem with contact lenses is that it will sandwich bacteria between the lens and your cornea, and you can get infected and then have all the complications we talked about,” she said. “In general, we frown upon anything