Computers and laptops have become the centerpiece of our daily work chores and there’s no escaping it. No matter if you’re a software developer, tester, support technician, sales executive, or a cashier at McDonald’s, you must work with PCs, laptops, and smartphones almost every day. The extensive usage of computers has been the major culprit in the millions of eye-strain cases reported. Many studies have revealed that around 70-90% of visual symptoms are seen among computer dwellers.
Computer Eye Strain is a major complaint among most employees all over the world and it eventually leads to worse headaches and sometimes sleeplessness. Like most people, I have also fallen prey to this troublesome problem and had to visit an Eye specialist. The doctor has suggested a few of the things that I can do to reduce the eye strain, of which, few are possible to practice without fail. Here’s the “Golden 20-20-20 rule” that can be simply implemented to help you reduce eye strain and relax your sore eyes.
The 20-20-20 rule suggests that “After every 20 minutes, the person using a computer should take a short break of 20 seconds and look at the objects that are 20 feet away”. This works if you implement it without fail. The logic behind this is “Computer displays are bright which will impact your eye, so if you don’t blink or look around for a few seconds, you’ll get a headache due to eyestrain. The other symptoms are dry eyes, redness, and pain in the eyebrow region. It’s a good practice to look at distant objects for a few seconds, blink your eyes, and then resume your work.”
However, everyone can’t implement this perfectly as we tend to forget it due to work pressure. So, we recommend two programs that will constantly remind you of these eye exercises. Below are some of the useful free tools to reduce computer eye strain.
- Eye Defender: Eye Defender is a freeware rest reminder designed to prevent Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) resulting from prolonged working hours on a PC. It will let you control the level of eye strain in the system tray and set up the period for a pop-up reminder. It can be entirely controlled from the taskbar and can be started at boot.
- Eye Relax: Eyes Relax is a free tool that reminds you about taking regular breaks. You can specify the type of breaks (long or short), the length of the breaks, notification sounds, and many other settings.
We will cover more tools and tricks in our coming posts which will help you reduce various health-related problems that result due to extensive PC usage.
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