If your parents ever told you to not sit too close to the TV as it will ruin your eye health, they had a point. Did you know that prolonged screen time can have damaging effects on your eyes if you don’t act carefully?
But, where there’s a problem there’s a solution. There are a handful of steps you can take to keep screen time from ruining your eyes. If your lifestyle involves spending a lot of time staring at digital screens, then this blog is definitely for you.
Let’s have a look at how screen time affects your eyes and how you can combat it.
Are You Always on the Screen?
Can you think of a day when you didn’t touch your phone or laptop? I bet it’s difficult. From waking up with your smartphone in hand to spending the entire day switching between different screens throughout the day, we all are guilty of spending plenty of screen time every day.
Not only this, the lockdowns made the situation made worse. From kids to adults, everyone’s screen time increased by a great extent. The sales of online specs with blue-blocking filters on the lenses also skyrocketed during the lockdown.
Although screen time can be unavoidable sometimes, your posture and distance from the screen make a big difference when it comes to warding off eye strain.
How Do Screens Affect Your Eyes?
Computer vision syndrome is a term used to describe a bunch of problems that arise from too much screen time. If you spend a lot of time staring at bright digital screens, your eyes can experience pain and fatigue from time to time. It also leads to blurry vision, dry eyes, headaches and neck and shoulder pain.
Make sure your screen is placed at a constant distance so your eyes aren’t blasting with blue light. If you don’t know this, blue light is an artificial light that’s emitted from your screens. It reaches your retina and threatens the light-sensitive cells which affect your eyes in many ways. Well, all this can be avoided if one remembers to have blue light filters on their men’s and women’s glasses.
Talking about your posture, most people slouch their backs and don’t position their devices high enough when sitting in front of a screen. It causes neck and shoulder problems and affects your natural posture over time.
What’s the Solution?
Blue light glasses are effective in protecting your eyes from screen time. Make sure you get an eye exam to get the right corrective lenses with appropriate add-ons. If you experience a sudden change in your vision, then don’t delay and get blue light glasses as soon as possible. Some retailers even offer same-day glasses delivery so you don’t have to deal with eye problems for long.
You can also try out the 20-20-20 rule where you look away from your screen every 20 minutes and focus on something 20 feet away for 20 seconds.
Also, working on digital devices in close proximity for long hours can make your eyes lose their focusing ability. This can bring about the problem of myopia where your eyes are only good to focus on nearby objects and not distant objects.
When you’re looking at screens, you don’t blink as you should. It’s because your eyes find it so hard to focus on the screen that they actually have to lower the blinking frequency. Thus, prolonged screen time can also cause your eyes to go dry.