Shield Your Eyes! Tips to Help Prevent Digital Eye Strain

From one screen warrior to another

If you happen to have a job that requires you to stare at a computer screen for 8+ hours/day, or if you’re a full-time student, or if you’re an average adult human living in 2020 (…OK, so basically all of us), you have probably felt the painful, productivity-threatening effects of Digital Eye Strain (also known as Computer Vision Syndrome) as a result of all those screens. In fact, odds are you know these symptoms well:

Your head aches.

You feel a dull, straining pain deep within your eye sockets.

Your eyes are blotchy, red and dry.

Your vision may become blurry.

You feel the life drain out of you during each subsequent screen session.

You feel jealous of hibernating bears, wishing you could crawl into a dark hole and avoid all things bright for months at a time.

I feel your pain. In a previous role, I found myself experiencing screen fatigue daily as I oversaw label artwork for a brand, spending countless hours meticulously proofreading teeny, tiny ingredient text in English, French, Japanese, Russian, and more. Constantly straining my eyes resulted in all of the annoying and painful aforementioned symptoms, leaving me feeling physically drained and bleary-eyed by each afternoon, wondering how long my eyes would hold out before I needed glasses like my predecessor eventually did.

C’est moi

In an attempt to save my weary eyes, I began to research different tips and tricks for preventing Digital Eye Strain and found some of them to be super helpful in lessening the side effects of staring at a screen all day. Now that I’m working in the creative technology space, all-day screen sessions are inherently inescapable and these preventative measures feel more crucial than ever to practice daily.