People differ in lots of ways, but there’s one thing a lot of people have in common. It’s the fact that they love their screens. From laptops to tablets to phones, many of us spend a lot of time scrolling our screens for work, entertainment, or personal needs.
While tech can absolutely make life easier and more convenient, there are drawbacks, too. Specifically, spending hours a day staring at those glowing screens can take a toll on your eye health and comfort, leading to a condition called digital eye strain.
The good news is that you don't have to give up your screens to relieve your symptoms and protect your eyes. At Vision and Ortho-K Center, Curtis Frank, OD, offers special lens treatments to reduce eye issues and make screen time more comfortable.
Digital eye strain happens when we spend a lot of time staring at lighted screens. Over time, eye strain pushes your eyes beyond their comfort limits, causing symptoms such as:
So why does it happen?
First, when you stare at a screen, your eyes need to continually maintain focus at a relatively close viewing distance — kind of like a perpetual gym workout with no time to recover.
Glare and reflections can make the display harder to see, while poor lighting puts even more demands on your eyes.
There's one more important factor you probably don’t even notice, and that is decreased blinking. When you're concentrating on a screen, you blink less often, resulting in eye dryness and irritation, in addition to blurry vision.
Visible light exists on a spectrum from the long red wavelengths to the really short blue wavelengths. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with blue light, screens emit a lot of it.
Over time, excessive blue light exposure could take a toll on your eyes and contribute to uncomfortable symptoms.
Blue protection lenses incorporate a specialized lens coating designed to filter a portion of blue-violet light.
At Vision and Ortho-K Center, Dr. Frank can add these blue-light filters to everyday eyewear, so you can rock fashionable lenses while still enjoying the benefits of advanced filtering.
If you use your screens a lot, it’s definitely worth discussing the potential benefits of blue-light lenses to decrease eye issues and give your eyes added protection for the future.
When it comes to digital eye strain, blue light isn’t the only factor you need to consider. Glare and reflections can make it harder to see your screen comfortably, leading to more eye fatigue and other vision issues.
While light-filtering lenses address blue light issues, anti-reflective lens treatments do the same thing for reducing glare.
Combined with adjusting the brightness of your screen, repositioning your monitor, and adding ambient lighting around your workspace, anti-reflective coatings offer additional protection and extra relief for uncomfortable symptoms.
Screens are an essential part of everyday life for many of us, and that means avoiding them altogether isn’t an easy task, and it’s probably not even realistic or desirable.
Optimizing your lenses for screen use is a choice you can make to improve your eyes without causing major disruptions in the rest of your life.
To learn more about the lens that helps protect your eyes and your vision, request an appointment with Dr. Frank and the team at Vision and Ortho-K Center in Boston, Massachusetts, today.
