Smartphones affect your Eyes more than you Imagined

Most of us know that smartphones and other screens affect our eyes in an adverse way, but still we don't care. The basic reason behind this ignorance in lack of information and understanding. Eyes are the most used external organ in our body, yet most neglected as well. We care about our weight, obesity, blood pressure, biceps, hairs and lot of other things but eyes. In this age of smartphones, if we still continue this ignorance then both our generation and our kids will face issues related to vision.

Always remember that if you are staring a screen (such as TV or Smartphone) for more than 2 hours per day then you can easily develop some vision related issue sooner or later.

How smartphones affect our Eyes

Dry Eyes: On an average normal human eye blinks 15 to 20 times in a minute. But the blink rate is greatly reduced when we continuously focus on an object. Continuously staring at your smartphone for hours can affect your blink rate drastically. When we blink our eyes, a drop of tear wipes down our eye to clean its surface and keep it moist. Reduced blink rate causes dry eyes which is most common issue among smartphone users and can be treated easily by reducing smartphone usage.
Computer Vision Syndrome: This health issue is known since computer age, as it commonly occurred due to over usage of computers. But still this syndrome is affecting people due to over usage of smartphones. Symptoms of this disease are eye strain, dry eyes, headache, blurred vision, and neck and shoulder pain. Computer Vision Syndrome is also connected to some other facts listed below.
Blue Light : Blue light is often linked with eye problems because blue light regulates the release of melatonin. Release of melatonin tells our body that it is still daytime and thus usage of smartphones in night time disturbs our sleep, especially if you operate your smartphone just before sleeping. Apart from this side effect, blue light damages and kills the cells of retina, which is the worst side-effect of using smartphones.
Brightness: Brightness of screen is often set to maximum by most of the smartphone users, so that you can watch the screen clearly in daytime. More brightness also helps in viewing photos and videos clearly and thus preferred. But this more brightness put stress on our eyes.

Understand your Eye

Usually we ignore what our eyes try to say us in everyday life. We neglect the stress they go through due to over usage of smartphones and due to lack of relaxation. Minor symptoms like tiredness in eyes, minor headache, dryness in eyes, burning sensation and shoulder/neck pain should not be ignored as they can lead to some serious health issue with our eyes. Apart from consulting a doctor in case of such symptoms, you should also give some time to your eyes from your busy life. Our eyes don't demand a particular time slot, you can perform some simple yoga for eyes at any point of time in a day. These yoga exercises just take a few minutes and provide enough relaxation to your eyes for the remaining day.

Some tips for Smartphone users to keep their eyes healthy

• Keep your Smartphone at about an arm's distance while operating
• Use increased text size
• Take frequent breaks while using your smart phone for long duration.
• Don't use smartphone in a position where screen glare is caused due to some lighting in room.
• Try to use low brightness settings.
• Use smartphone in light, using it in a dark room can be harmful.