Tips And Tricks for Maintaining Eye Health

[Peter CINERAMAX]

http://m.wikihow.com/Exercise-Your-Eyes

[Peter CINERAMAX]

Here's the list of things I try to do. Some have been mentioned, but others I've added based on the concept of preventing fatigue. In my mind, the more you often you fatigue your eyes, the faster they deteriorate.

-Take breaks, go outside, and take in some natural light (or darkness), focus at a variety of distances for a change.
-Keep your monitor brightness-to-ambient light ratio as low as possible. A very bright monitor in a dark room is hard on your vision.
-If you wear glasses or contacts, keep up with your prescription.
-If you're a reader, use non-emmissive devices, i.e. a book or a Kindle/Sony reader with an eInk display that requires external light.
-If you're doing long sessions at work, avoid looking at displays everywhere else. Try cutting out television, surfing the web, and other activities that require a display. Think of your eyes as having a fixed, lifetime allotment of critical viewing hours. Once you use them up, you're done.
-Make the text on all the displays you use (computer, phone, tablet) 10-20% larger than it needs to be for comfortable viewing. Reading small text on an emissive display is probably second only to monitor/ ambient brightness ratio for wrecking your eyes.

I like the suggestions listed above, but many of them (drops, warm compresses, massage) treat eye strain that's already occurred. That's very "western medicine" if you will. To me it's better in the long run to prevent strain as much as you can in the first place, but like everything that's always going to be less convenient than simply going after symptoms.

Just a theory, but I wouldn't be surprised if in several years, long term monitor (and cell phone) use turns out to be the new smoking.