Protecting Your Eye Health While Online

Raheleh Najafi

With the exponential progression of technology, the prospect of screen time has become a fundamental aspect of most people’s daily lives. However, our eyes were not made to take this much exposure to digital screens and there exists a prominent impact between the deterioration of eye health and the span of time spent in front of a screen.

Mainly, the biggest risk to spending so much time staring at your technological devices is straining your eyes and developing Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS). While not a particularly dangerous syndrome, This diagnosis is an umbrella term that stands for a group of related vision problems as a result of prolonged digital screen use that decidedly impacts one’s productivity and comfort. The involved symptoms include headaches, blurred vision, eyestrain, neck and shoulder pain as well as dry eyes.

The root cause behind these vision issues are comprised of various factors. Primarily, poor lighting, glare across the screen, improper viewing distances, improper viewing angles, poor sitting posture and uncorrected existing vision problems can all lead to CVS. Furthermore, eye discomfort and worsening of symptoms often increase with the amount of device use.

This is because each of the listed factors create obstacles that force eyes to work harder at reading the screen. Identifying and uncoding information that is on a screen is already much more difficult for eyes than simply reading a physical copy since the letters on a digital device are less precise and loosely defined and there lacks a distinct contrast between the target letters and their background. Additionally, the presence of extra glare, reflections and improper viewing angles heighten the difficulty of reading.

Consequently, the strength of one’s eyes is pushed to the extreme while translating visual information to mindful comprehension, especially when exerted for long hours which increases an individual’s susceptibility to CVS. This risk hits an apex after over two hours of continuous digital exposure. At this point, one’s ocular abilities can not meet the visual demands of the task causing an individual to no longer comfortably perform them.

While most of the visual symptoms following CVS are temporary and can decline with the discontinuance of excessive screen time, some residual impact from symptoms causing decreased visual abilities can proceed to affect computer users. Most importantly, if no strides are taken to solve the issue at hand and lower eyestrain, symptoms will perpetually reappear and even worsen with future computer use.

It would simply be unrealistic for me to follow these repercussions with a blank warning to watch your screen time and avoid spanning continuous lengths of time at the computer, as we live in the 21st century and technology has integrated itself into a quotidian essential. However, there are very simple guidelines and tips that one can follow to avoid putting excessive strain on their eye:

1. Wear appropriate blue light blocking glasses during computer use. Computer glasses often exclude magnification and use filters to reduce difficulty of reading which decreases the effort needed from eyes by diminishing glare and exaggerating contrast of the screen. The options for types of computer glasses include single-vision lenses, designed solely for computer work and taken off at all other occasions, bifocal lenses with different corrective goals on the top and bottom of the lenses, commonly with the top for computer use and bottom for close-up reading, and progressive lenses, another multiple correction lens with a designated, large middle section for computer use.

2. Adjust lighting conditions. By positioning the technological device away from other light sources such as fluorescent backlighting, overhead lighting, or windows, glare caused by external sources can be avoided. Blinds or blackout curtains can be placed against windows and lightbulbs can be replaced with lower wattage to limit excessive eye strain.

3. Position the device’s screen appropriately. It’s considered proper monitor position for the device to be tilted so that one’s eyes are downcast while looking directly at the screen. Optimally, the screen should be sat 15-20 degrees or 10-12 centimeters below eye level and 50-70 centimeters away from the face horizontally.

4. Lastly, avoid tiring out your eyes. To prevent CVS, regular breaks from the screen are necessary to reduce the risk of eye strain and fatigue. A common exercise encouraged by optical professionals is the 20-20-20 rule in which an individual is told to avert their gaze from their screen every twenty minutes by focusing at an object twenty feet away for at least twenty seconds. This exercise aims relax the focusing muscle inside the eye and decrease exhaustion.