Computer vision syndrome is a health condition caused by focusing your eyes on a computer monitor for a long time without looking away. It’s a form of asthenopia caused by dry eyes and eye muscle fatigue.
Dry eyes are caused by not enough blinking. Blinking lubricates your eyes. When intensely focused on a computer monitor, blinking rate can go down by up to five times. As such, the tear coating of your eyes dry out during the lengthened phase between blinks, causing dry eyes.
Eye fatigue is caused by continuous flexing of muscles because letters on a computer are not as well defined as printed letters. Therefore, reading on a computer makes it difficult for your eyes to maintain focus.
Some of symptoms of eyes that are dry and fatigued are:
- headaches
- blurry vision
- double vision
- itchy, burning eyes
- refocus issues when look away
These symptoms can be exacerbated by certain environmental conditions, like bright lights, glare or air blown past your eyes. And shoulder and neck pain often accompany dry eyes symptoms because you may be maintaining an unnatural position for a sustained period.
There are several options for relieving your computer vision syndrome’s dry eyes and eye fatigue. For dry eye relief, make an effort to blink more often. In the alternative, use OTC artificial tears. Don’t use the ones that claim to take the red out, they’re not formulated to reduce dryness and may cause your eyes further irritation to boot. Use the lubricant type only.
For fatigued eyes, you can initially try to relieve focusing problems by wearing a small plus powered OTC reading glasses (+1 to +1.50). They help regain your ability to focus on close objects.
Yet, a better option is to ask your eye health care professional to prescribe a customized pair of computer glasses. Computer glasses offer relief by optimizing your vision for the distance you sit away from the computer. Computer glass lenses reduce the constant accommodations your eyes are making to maintain focus. And for maximum viewing comfort, your computer glasses should have an anti-reflective coating on the lenses.
Be sure to bring the measurement of how far you sit from your computer with you to your eye health care appointment. That’s the distance from the bridge of your nose to computer screen.
Also, adjust monitor display settings to:
- higher resolution
- higher refresh rate
- brightness same as surrounding
- text size & color that are comfortable for you
- contrast between background & screen characters high
A couple of other computer vision syndrome relief alternatives include:
- use “full spectrum” fluorescent bulbs>
- turn off fluorescent lights over work space
- close your eyes for 20 seconds every half hour
- use indirect incandescent or halogen light bulbs
- alternate looking far & close ten times for 10 seconds each
- use liquid crystal display (LCD) monitor of .28 mm dot pitch or less
- 20-20-20 rule ~ look at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes
Anti-glare filter screen may relieve discomfort from the glare of the computer screen reflections, but they’re not relief for dry and fatigue eye problems related to computer vision syndrome.