Raise your hand if you use a computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone for more than 8 hours a day? For those of you who didn’t, give yourself a pat on the back! For those of you who did, stick around for this article and I’ll teach you most of what you need to know to prevent those 3:00 headaches at work or school!
Today, we will be talking about what you can do to protect yourself from all of those screens we all have to look at all day long for school and for work. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for those who like it, the COVID19 pandemic forced a lot of us to start working from home and it forced students to do online/hybrid school. Now don’t get me wrong, people have been coming in for years for eye strain before the pandemic, but the upsurge in the amount of people now complaining about headaches really popped up in 2020. It was something we couldn’t escape from, and even now it’s something we deal with every day with how digital our world has become!
So what can we do to protect our eyes from becoming so tired throughout the day? One of the best things you can do is to get a very nice non-glare coating on your glasses. A non-glare coating will eliminate a good amount of glare coming from any digital screen and also eliminate a lot of glare from car headlights and ceiling lights. The more glare that enters our eyes, the more it causes our eyes to strain past that excess amount of light; and the more we strain our eyes, the more tired our eyes are mid-day.
Piggy backing off of the previous point, blue blocking lens or night time filters on our devices also helps out with glare. Fortunately for us, blue blocking non-glare coating does exist so that it acts as a double protection against digital screens! If you recently just bought some glasses, another way to eliminate a lot of blue light from digital screens if you didn’t get the blue blocking non-glare is to enable the night time filter on our devices. That’s when our screens become a permanent amber color. For a lot of people, unfortunately our work or school doesn’t allow us to always have it on because it will saturate a lot of different colors on our screens, but it does work in a pinch when color isn’t important to our work!
The next option we will talk about to reduce digital eye strain would be anti-fatigue lenses for our glasses or contact lenses specifically made for working on digital screens all day long. When we are working up close on a device or reading something all day long, our eyes are having to focus on these things and keep it clear. Have you ever noticed that when you look at something far away after focusing on your screen for an hour that your vision seems to go in and out? That’s our eyes unfocusing itself from up close and re-adjusting to looking at something far away. These specially designed lenses are specially made with a boost to the prescription that allows our eyes to stay relaxed and unfocused on the screens while the glasses or contacts do the focusing for us. These lenses look just like regular glasses and contacts, and the added benefit is that they come built in with the non-glare technology to triple protect our eyes from strain and fatigue.
The last bit of advice we can offer you, and this goes for anyone with anti-fatigue lenses or blue blocking non-glare coating, is to take a break from the screens if we are able to. There is a rule called the 20/20/20 rule that says: every 20 minutes, if you can take a 20 second break, and look at something 20 feet away, it will help our eyes break that up close focusing we are doing and just let our eyes breath and relax every so often. I personally followed this rule while typing this exact article you are reading and my eyes are feeling all the better.
If you still have more questions or want to learn more about any of these products, give us a call or visit us in person at Cypress Family Eyecare!