How to Prevent Eye Strain
Eye strain occurs when you use your eyesight intensively – such as when using a computer, driving a car, or reading for hours without breaks. Here’s how to prevent eye strain while engaging in these visually intensive activities.
Why Prevent Eye Strain?
Aside from being a real nuisance, eye strain creates negative effects such as:
- Frequently dry or itchy eyes
- Pain looking out the corner of your eye
- Headaches, neck ache and pain behind your eyes
- Problems shifting focus between tasks
- Increased sensitivity to light
- Difficulty focusing up close
- Gradual vision deterioration over time
Indeed, experts have stated that the eye strain resulting from near-point stress is a major cause of vision problems like myopia (nearsightedness).
So if you’re suffering from tired eyes and blurry vision, now’s the time to look at how to prevent eye strain and save your eyesight for life.
Distant Night / Palming
Here’s a quick and easy eye relaxation exercise to do when you’re feeling the effects of eye strain at the computer or any other near-point task.
Distant Night can be used for several minutes to reduce eye strain and fatigue. It works by allowing your ciliary muscles to relax and prevents the eye muscles from becoming fixed in a near-point focus. As a result, you may notice less tension and headaches caused by eye strain.
Step 1: Warm your hands up by rubbing them together for a few moments.
Step 2: Sit down, relax, and place your elbows on a solid surface, either your knees, or on a table. Slightly cup your palms and place them over your eyes. Your fingers will overlap across your forehead.
Step 3: The cups of your palms should gently rest above and below the bone surrounding your eye and cheek. Don’t let any part of your hand touch your eyeball (although your eyelashes may make contact).
Step 6: Open your eyes and make sure that no light is entering the sides.
Step 7: Close your eyes again and imagine that you are looking into the distant night. Allow your eyes to relax as deeply as possible. Imagine the distant stars and galaxies out in space, focusing as far away as possible.
Step 8: Allow the flashes of color to disappear as relaxation sets into your eyes. Your goal is to see nothing but black as you gaze into the distant night.
Step 9: Distant Night is a powerful eye relaxation exercise and can be used during times of eye strain for 1-2 minutes or more.
Teach this way to prevent eye strain to your kids when they are engrossed in hours of video games, computer work or study. In fact, people of all ages can benefit from it to stop eye strain and entrain better vision habits.
More Ways to Prevent Eye Strain
Many people spend hours at computer screens or pouring over paperwork without a single thought to their vision. These are the ones who are most likely to succumb to eye strain and, as a result, long term visual deterioration.
That’s why staying on top of eye strain means having awareness of how you treat your eyes habitually throughout the day. You must pay attention to when they feel strained, and take the time to address the issue. Here are some tips to help you reduce eye strain as soon as you notice it creeping on:
- Use Eye Drops – To combat dry eyes, such as Similasan Computer Eye Relief eye drops from Amazon.
- Follow The 10-10-10 Rule – When using a computer, look at an object 10 feet away, for 10 seconds, every 10 minutes. This relieves stress on the ciliary muscles and prevents the progression of myopia.
- Blink More Often - Remember to consciously blink every now and then to replenish the tear film and prevent dry eyes.
- Use Proper Lighting – Eye strain is often caused by extreme light contrast, such as excessively bright light from a window or the glare of a computer screen. Close drapes or blinds and reduce ambient lighting to lower levels.
- Upgrade Your Computer Monitor – Modern LCD monitors are less likely to cause eye strain than the old bulky CRT monitors. They have anti-reflective surfaces and a higher refresh rate so you don’t have any flicker. Choose a screen size of at least 19 inches.
- Relax with an Eye Mask – Give your eyes a rest after a long day of intensive work. Wear a therapeutic eye mask that can be cooled or heated for fast and effective relief of eye strain, headaches and muscle tension.
- Do Eye Exercises – If you are already suffering from blurry vision and worry about further vision deterioration, I recommend doing an eye exercise program. This can help strengthen and relax your eye muscles, which can increase your natural flexibility and focus without glasses.
Eye exercises can help treat the underlying symptoms of eye strain, as well as potentially reversing the effects of nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism and aging vision. Over a period of time, you can improve your natural vision by following these eye exercises and good vision habits.
Improve Your Vision – Naturally
Eye exercises must be the best kept secret in optometry.
It’s a tragedy that we are brainwashed into wearing glasses (which studies show weaken vision over time) or having LASIK eye surgery (which comes with real risks like corneal damage).
Don’t give up on your eyesight just because you started wearing glasses all those years ago… try eye exercises right now for free.
