Continuous smartphone and computer use fatigues your eyes and puts your health at risk. Here are some tips to avoid long-term damage
How many hours do you spend in front of a screen, be it PC, smartphone or tablet? And what do you actually do to protect the health of your eyes while looking at these screens? These are two questions you should be asking yourself more often and finding answers to: the time we spend in front of screens today is much longer than in the past and eye health can suffer.
This is true not only if you already have vision problems and use glasses or contact lenses, but also if you have perfectly healthy eyes but spend hours and hours in front of the PC. Fortunately, there are some very practical and simple tips to put in place to limit the damage that screens can do to the human eye and the first, as always, is also the simplest: limit the risk factor, reduce the time during which you are in front of a computer monitor or you are looking at smartphones and tablets. Or, at the very least, give your eye some breaks by looking away from the screen.
Protect your PC eyes with the right light
The quantity and quality of light, not only that emitted by the display but also the ambient light, are fundamental to protect your eyes when you are in front of the PC. Ideally, the ambient light should be as close as possible to the light emitted by the screen: there should be no darkness behind the monitor, but no strong light source either. And the ambient light should also be well diffused and not "shot" towards your eyes.
Protecting your eyes at the PC if you wear glasses
If you wear glasses or contact lenses you also have to deal with the slight (sometimes not so slight) distortion caused by the lenses. It follows that you have to find a good position for the monitor, so that your eyes can look straight ahead and not get tired. It gets more complicated if you use progressive lenses, which may lead you to take unnatural positions that are harmful to your neck and shoulders. As a general rule, the PC screen should be slightly lower than your eyes and the screen of smartphones and tablets should be about 60-70 centimeters from your face.
Choose the right glasses and contact lenses
If you have small vision defects and for work you are forced to spend several hours a day in front of the computer, then you should consider buying a pair of glasses or specific lenses to decrease eye fatigue. Even if you don't normally wear glasses, because the visual defect is not that severe. Ask your eye doctor, he will be able to advise you on the best solution for your eye.