Experiencing Eye Fatigue with Computer Use?

We all can relate to hours spent each day on our smart phone, tablet and computer. The average adult American spends close to 4 hours a day on an electronic device (excluding television). You start off each day seeing well, your eyes feeling good, but that all changes as the day wears on. By the end of the day, your eyes are now feeling tired, going in and out of focus, maybe feeling dry and needing to blink a lot to focus and even have some degree of a headache around or behind your eyes.

Let’s face it. Computers are an ever present, integral part of our daily lives. Even in my profession as an optometrist where twenty years ago the only computers in the office were at the front desk or in highly sophisticated testing equipment, I now have a computerized eye chart, computerized patient records, displays in each room to educate or document, one in my pocket to keep me in contact with my front desk and testing equipment galore with digital display screens.

Most of us have an understanding that overexposure to ultraviolet (UV) light is bad for our eyes. We’ve learned to shop for sunglasses that have “100% UV Protection”. This is still good advice. However, due to a dramatic increase in our use of electronic devices and energy-efficient lighting, there’s increased concern about our exposure to another part of the visual spectrum... blue light.

Blue light itself is nothing new. It’s been present in natural sunlight and in artificial light in varying concentrations since the beginning of time. It’s actually very close to UV light in the visible light spectrum (Ultraviolet = 10-380 nm, Blue-violet = 380-455 nm). The difference is the level of exposure to blue light that we’re receiving in our modern world. The majority of this increase comes from our growing dependence on electronic devices, and how quickly this trend has occurred. Let’s look at a few dates that we can probably all relate to: