Screen Time and Your Eyes: What You Need to Know
Digital eye strain is real, common and largely fixable. Here is what helps and what does not.
It is mostly about blinking
Staring at a screen cuts the blink rate by roughly half, and an incomplete blink does not resurface the eye properly. Almost everything people describe as digital eye strain — the grittiness, the burning, the blur that clears when you look away — starts there.
What actually helps
The 20-20-20 rule is the one with real evidence behind it: every twenty minutes, look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds. Lowering the monitor so you look slightly down at it helps too, because a lowered lid exposes less of the eye surface.
- Look twenty feet away, every twenty minutes
- Set the monitor below eye level, not above it
- Match the screen's brightness to the room, not to itself
"Nobody has ever solved dry eyes by buying a brighter monitor."
Leo Carter
Where blue-light lenses fit
A blue-light filter takes the edge off glare and helps some people sleep better after an evening of screens. It is not a treatment for eye strain, and any lens sold as one is overselling itself — the blinking is still the problem.
