Screens & Digital Eye Strain

Key overview

• Screens dry your eyes by changing how you blink: the rate falls, and more blinks become incomplete.
• An incomplete blink leaves the lower eye unresurfaced and the lower oil glands under-expressed.
• A monitor above eye level holds the eyes wider open and increases the exposed surface area.
• Most of the remedy is behavioural and environmental, and costs nothing to try.

Screens dry your eyes by changing how you blink. Concentration reduces blink rate substantially, and the blinks that do happen are more often incomplete — the lid does not fully meet the lower lid, so the lower part of the eye is never properly resurfaced and the oil glands along that margin are never properly squeezed.

The consequence is a surface left exposed for long stretches, with an oil layer that is under-expressed. Add the air conditioning that most screen work happens in, and a monitor positioned above eye level so the eyes are held wide open, and you have an efficient machine for producing evaporative dry eye.

The encouraging part is that the mechanism is behavioural and environmental, so a good deal of it responds to changes that cost nothing.

In this section

• The 20-20-20 rule, and what works better — What it fixes, what it does not, and the change that matters more.
• Setting up your desk for dry eyes — Monitor height, distance, air and light.
• Do blue light glasses help dry eyes? — What the evidence actually says.
• Dry eyes in air-conditioned offices — Why conditioned air dries your eyes, and what helps.
• Gaming and dry eyes — Long sessions, high focus, and low blink rates.

Guides in this section

1 articles, grouped by what they answer.

• Dry eyes from screen time: why it happens and what helps

Where our products fit

Screen-driven dry eye is evaporative, which means the oil layer is the thing to fix. A heated mask at the end of a screen day addresses the glands that a day of incomplete blinking has under-expressed. E-Heated Eye Mask.

Related sections

• Dry Eye Treatment — Every treatment that works, what each one actually does, and how to tell which applies to you.
• Contact Lenses & Dry Eye — Wearing lenses comfortably when your tear film is already struggling.
• Meibomian Gland Dysfunction & Heat Therapy — The blocked-oil-gland mechanism behind most dry eye, and the heat therapy that treats it.