How I Manage Eye Strain (Tips and Eye Exercises)

0:00 so we all spend so much time in front of a computer screen our tablets our cell phones it's just part of Modern Life at this point but if you're somebody who struggles with eye strain eye fatigue or just kind of a tired feeling behind your eyes then in this video I'm going to be sharing some of my top tips and eye exercises that have helped me and that you can try now for number one this one always sounds way too simple but is honestly probably the most important which is to take frequent breaks especially when just being on the computer or your smartphone for long periods of time or from just even reading a book even just to focus and read something up close you have to engage three different groups of eye muscles you have the eye muscle inside of the eye called the ciliary body which you use to focus and keep objects clear then you also have the extra ocular muscles

0:50 the muscles on the outside of your eye to turn your eyes Inward and converge so that you can keep that object single and clear and then you have your pupillary muscles to focus and keep things really sharp when you're looking up close and all of these muscles all work together to help you read and focus and if you're spending hours and hours looking at something just close in front of your face you know like the eight hours a day you spend staring at a computer screen plus the additional maybe six to eight hours staring at your phone throughout the day yeah the eye muscles get tired so every 15 to 30 minutes try to stand up get out of your seat look at something off in the distance like maybe out of a window for example or do what I like to do which is to stand up go for a short walk maybe grab

1:36 a drink of water from the water cooler and then just do some light stretching while at my desk this will again give you a quick moment to at least look away from your screen and get you out of just a sitting position all day tip number two is to blink your eyes research has shown that we blink about two to three times less when we start a digital screen than just in normal conversation and that's because we tend to hyper focus at what whatever task we have at hand right in front of us and not only do we blink less frequently but our eyelids tend to not fully blink meaning we incompletely blink and our eyelids only come down about two-thirds of the way just enough to cover your pupil and then your brain kind of thinks that you have blinked but in reality your eye is still technically exposed to air leading to your tear film to dry out causing dry eye symptoms and dry eye is also

2:26 a component of the symptoms of eye fatigue two easy things you can do at home if your eyes are feeling dry is of course use lubricating artificial tear eye drops preservative free if you can and then you can try doing a warm compress which will give heat to the eyelids melting any of the solidified oils and the oil glands and that'll help release oil and moisture naturally to your tear film and help prevent tear film evaporation I personally also like to take a break once in a while and just like to consciously blink my eyes a few times to make sure I am fully blinking my eyes and then I encourage you to do kind of a cell Health check-in to make sure that you're not hyper focusing on your tasks on your computer screen because again research has shown that the more hyper focused your task is you're less likely to Blink as often and just trying to relax a little bit may

3:13 be able to help with that tip number three is of course if your vision is blurry or you're having a hard time maintaining Focus then talk to your eye doctor about getting updated glasses prescriptions or maybe even consider getting specific computer glasses or glasses with prisms in it now not everybody out there really needs a set of dedicated computer glasses and certainly not everybody needs prism put into their glasses which is something that can be put in to help for some people who have trouble using their eye muscles so that's something that could be out there enough done videos on that if you want to learn more about computer glasses or anything special you can check out those videos I'll put links in the description below but of course having an updated prescription or even some of these special magnifying glasses or prisms could help relax the needed demand from your own

4:00 eye muscles and can help with a lot of your symptoms but again not for everyone so talk to your doctor and tip number four is of course adjust your screens for the proper height so they're not too high not too low that the screens aren't too bright and that you're just set up to make your eyes as comfortable as possible and I have done several videos on how to adjust that whether you're using a desktop or a laptop and again I'll put links to those in the video description below the like button so you can find those now let's talk about eye exercises that may help with eye strain and eye fatigue but first a quick word from today's video sponsor today's video is brought to you by the hilah wipe from our friends at tier restore if you've never heard of the Hilo white before the Hilo white provides an irritation free experience for people to clean their eyelids on a daily basis and unlike

4:45 other kind of cleansers on the market that use detergents the Hilo wipe has been formulated with a very gentle concentration of tea tree hyaluronic acid green tea extract and aloe which provides not only a cleansing effect and makeup remover but also helps soothe and moisturize the delicate skin of the eyelid and now these wipes can even be found at Target and Walmart stores nationwide here in the US if you want to check out the Hilo wipe yourself I'll put a link in the video description below otherwise huge shout out to tier Restore for their own dedication to Eye Health and for teaming up with us to help make eye health education possible otherwise let's keep going all about eye exercises for eye strain now when it comes to eye exercises for eye strain there's in fact a lot out there that you could possibly do that's in the literature but we're going to focus on just three major things

5:35 that you can try today the first one is going to be more on ways you can relax your eye muscles to help with symptoms that you may be experiencing right now and then the last two are going to be eye exercises you can do to kind of strengthen the teeming between the muscles inside of the eye and the muscles on the outside of the eye to hopefully kind of strengthen the system and improve your conditioning so that you don't end up with worse eye strain in the future now the first first exercise here is a little bit more anecdotal but the whole point is you want to relax your eye muscles because you've been focusing on something right in front of your face for hours and hours you got to learn to relax those muscles and let them go just like setting a weight down if you've been at the gym so you want to do this by first try to get outside look off in the distance go for a walk or

6:21 maybe play a sport that involves a ball like either playing catch or basketball or even just tossing a ball against like a far off wall outside something you can track the ball that way you're going to be using your eye muscles differently than how you've done just staring at a screen all day otherwise another simple thing you can do that's a little bit more anecdotal is just kind of doing eye rotations this is really just a matter of looking upward toward like a 12 o'clock position and then slowly rotating your eyes to different clock hours all the way around 360 degrees and then doing this a few times clockwise and counterclockwise the whole idea is that you're going to be kind of stretching your eye muscles looking in different positions of gaze to hopefully just kind of give your eye muscles a bit of

7:06 a rest from again focusing up close for hours and hours now the next two exercises have a lot more scientific validity a lot of Publications talking about this basically every eye doctor learns about these when they go through their training and education the first one I took my glasses off just so you can see my eyes a little bit better but it's usually best to keep your glasses if you have a prescription pair of glasses on for this but what you want to do is something called a pen or pencil push-ups this is just a matter of focusing on a near object in front of you holding it at a distance and then bringing it in toward your face toward toward the center of your nose eventually as you bring it in closer you'll notice things start to go a little bit blurry especially if you have something that has writing on it so you can see letters and when you get to the point where they just

7:53 start to go a little bit blurry you try to hold it there until your eyes are able to focus focus and clear it up you should be able to make those letters clear again sometimes you have to push it a little bit further away and then try to push yourself a little further and then try to clear it up again and then once you've held that for a few seconds you then just kind of push it looking off into the distance and giving your eyes a little bit of a rest and you can do this for a few minutes just pushing yourself and seeing how far you can go the idea is that you would be training not just the eye muscles but hopefully improving the flexibility of the lens inside of your eye and that may improve the range of Clear Vision for your focus for somebody who's over the age of 45 however this may

8:41 start to become very difficult and you may not even be able to bring it in close much at all and that's just due to aging changes of the crystalline lens inside of the eye however there are people I know who have done this sort of training enough where they've maybe been able to postpone they're really kind of reliant on things like reading glasses or bifocals eventually with time almost everybody's going to basically be needing some sort of reading glasses or bifocal due to that aging change but perhaps doing this enough May again improve the flexibility improve your focus and may even help lose kind of lessen the demand of needing those I'll also mention that for some people while you're doing this one eye May kick out or if you ever start to see double then you've probably gone too

9:28 far or as always ask your eye doctor if you're doing it right or if they recommend that you should even be doing them at all but for most people you should be able to bring those in pretty close and hold it steady and start to clear up some of those letters if there's a letter on your pencil now for the third eye exercise while the pencil push-ups helped us with our focusing ability and control of the muscle inside of the eye this third one is going to help us with our virgins ranges which is the control of the muscles on the outside of the eye to focus on a near object and keep it clear and single and that is with probably my favorite eye exercise which is called a brock string essentially a brock string is just a long string with some beads on it you can purchase these either from a local eye clinic or even online or if you're really crafty you could maybe make one at

10:13 home however I do encourage you to try to buy one just because it comes with a nice set of instructions and I think that's really helpful if you are going to go ahead and try this but just for a quick demonstration I'll walk you through the very Basics here to set up a block string you first need to tie an end to a doorknob and then you stand so that the string is held fairly taut going up toward your nose with the beads running right in between the eyes the beads you want to have one end right toward the end by the doorknob with the other beads kind of randomly spaced out with the closest one to your face just maybe an inch or two from your nose and the idea is that while you're holding it in front of your nose you're focusing on the farthest bead and slowly moving your eyes toward the closer and closer beads and hopefully getting to the point where you can see right in front

10:59 front of your nose and you can observe and appreciate the kind of images of what looks like the string coming from both eyes and forming an X right in the middle of where the bead is this is usually pretty easy for somebody with normal binocular vision but for somebody who has maybe a convergence insufficiency or some other kind of binocularity issue using their eye muscles this can be very challenging but once you're able to focus on that near bead you can then shift your focus to the different beads going just kind of jumping from Far bead to closer bead to even the closest bead back to a further bead and then you can try doing that with very gentle controlled movements focusing on the X of the strings

11:47 as it passes in between the beads all the way down and all the way back up toward your face and being able to do that in quick and slow controlled movements and doing this for several minutes over and over and over time can help strengthen your coordination of these different eye muscles again I compare it to lifting weights it can be like lifting a heavy weight once or twice or it can be like lifting a weight very slow controlled movements with good technique and then as people get really good with this you can start changing your direction of gaze you can start doing the same thing while turning your head just a little bit to each side and even kind of rotating it to different angles again these sort of steps get a little bit more complex which is why I do encourage you if you're going to try the Brock string make sure to get something that has instructions with it or again talk

12:35 with a local eye care professional especially if they specialize in vision therapy or Vision Rehabilitation as these are all different eye exercises that are used in formal training for people who've had head injury or against some sort of binocular vision issue but again Brock string is probably my favorite I think it's just a little bit more stimulating and sometimes even fun to do but other than these tips and eye exercises listed here what are some of the things that you you've tried that have brought you success with reducing eye strain let us know in the comments because sharing what has worked for you may help other people as well but at least these tips here are ones I've used myself and do help me with my eye strain or whenever my eyes are feeling tired from a long day in front of the computer if you do want to learn more about computer glasses or any sort of special glasses for

13:20 helping you with eye strain then check out our video coming up over here to the side otherwise thank you so much for watching. Dr. ALlen here from the Dr Eye Health Channel, keep your eye on it and we'll see you in that next video see ya