The Impact of Excessive Screen Time: Screens are an inevitable aspect of everyday life in today’s digital environment. Many of us spend hours in front of computers, smartphones, tablets, and televisions for both work and leisure. Although there are advantages to using technology, excessive screen time can harm your vision and cause a variety of unpleasant symptoms. Long-term vision protection can be achieved by knowing how screen time impacts your eyes and what symptoms to look out for.
The effects of excessive screen time on your eyes
- Digital Eye Strain: Overuse of screens can lead to digital eye strain. It can show up as headaches, dry eyes, impaired vision, and shoulder and neck pain. The eye muscles are strained by prolonged screen gaze, which causes discomfort and exhaustion m
- Dry eyes: Your blink rate dramatically drops when you look at a screen. Reduced blinking might result in dry, itchy eyes. Blinking is necessary to distribute tears uniformly throughout the eyes.
- Myopia (nearsightedness): Excessive screen usage is associated with a higher risk of myopia, particularly in children and young people. This circumstance causes close objects to be clearly visible while distant objects appear fuzzy. According to the World Health Organisation, 50% of people Worldwide will have myopia by 2025. All because of excessive screen time.
- Blue light effects: Blue light from devices can be harmful to your eyes and disrupt your sleep cycles. Long-term exposure may increase the incidence of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and cause eye strain.
- Migraines and Headaches: Due to eye strain and the constant need to focus on small text or images, prolonged screen usage can cause migraines and Headaches. Inadequate lighting and bright screens can make these problems worse.
- Diminished Attention Duration: You may find it more difficult to focus for prolonged amounts of time if you are constantly flipping between things on displays. Both productivity and general cognitive function may be impacted by this.
- Elevated Glaucoma risk: According to some research, there may be a connection between excessive screen usage and a higher chance of developing glaucoma, a disorder marked by elevated intraocular pressure that can harm the visual nerve.
- Sleep pattern disturbed: The hormone that controls sleep patterns, melatonin, can be disrupted by computer time, especially before bed. Poorer sleep quality and trouble falling asleep may result from this.
Three easy tips for screen time
There are three easy guidelines for screen time that you should think about in order to protect your eyes and lower your chance of developing myopia.
- The elbow rule: This is the time to try to maintain an elbow-to-wrist gao between your eyes and anything you are looking at up close. This helps prevent very close viewing distances (less than 20-30 cm), which are linked to myopia development and increased visual exertion.
- 2-hour rule: The goal is to restrict screen time for pleasure to fewer than 2 hours daily. Time excluding study or work.
- The 20/20 rule: Every 20 minutes, you should try to take a 20-second break from reading or using a screen. Before starting to read to use a screen again, take 20 seconds to look across the room to relax your relax your eyes’ concentrating muscles. This is to prevent prolonged close-up vision. It is associated with myopia and can cause eye strain.
How much time should you spend in front of the screen?
Almost every young adults utilise digital screens in work and study environments. This is a challenging question to address.
- Try to take regular breaks from your screen when working or studying. After a few blinks, glance out of a window or across the room. This may lessen the likelihood of dry eyes and digital eye strain.
- Try to keep your daily recreational screen time to no more than 2 hours. It’s for the time you’re not working or studying. Since there are no formal recommendations for adults. This suggestion is based on those for children and teenagers.
Why blue light matters?
Blue light exposure is one of the main issues with extended screen time. Blue light from digital devices has been demonstrated to have an impact on your sleep habits and eyes.
By interfering with melatonin production, excessive blue light exposure, particularly in the evening, might upset your body’s normal sleep-wake cycle. This makes it more difficult to fall asleep and may have an impact on the general quality of your sleep. Wearing blue light-blocking eyewear or utilising blue light filters on their gadgets helps a lot of people.