The Importance of Blue Light Eye Protection for Digital Screens

The Importance of Blue Light Protection for Digital Screens In today's modern age, many of us spend hours upon hours staring at computer screens. Whether it's for work or leisure, our eyes are constantly exposed to the glare of digital devices. This can lead to eye strain. While eye strain may not seem like a serious issue, it can have a significant impact on our daily lives. This makes it difficult for you to focus on tasks and can cause a decrease in your productivity. In this blog post, we'll explore some of the causes of eye strain and offer some tips on how to prevent it. What is digital eye strain? Digital/Computer eye strain is a condition caused by looking at digital devices for a long time. Specifically, digital devices that emit UV and HEV blue light. Examples of these are common household items. Items like, smartphones, TVs, computers, tablets, gaming consoles, and even LED lights. The strain happens because, over time, our eyes get tired. They have to work harder to focus and adjust to the fast flickering movements of a screen. This can cause symptoms like eye fatigue, dry eyes, blurry vision, headaches, and neck pain. Blue light emitted by screens can also disrupt our sleep patterns. Is digital eye strain permanent? You might be wondering if digital eye strain can cause permanent damage to your eyes. The good news is that digital eye strain is not believed to cause any long-term damage to the eyes. UV and HEV blue light, is a different matter. Harmful blue light exposure can cause permanent damage to your eyes. So how bad is it really? How bad is blue light for my eyes? Being constantly exposed to blue light could damage your retinal cells. This can lead to vision problems like age-related macular degeneration. It can also cause cataracts, eye cancer, and growths on the clear part of the eye that covers the white part. How do I prevent digital eye strain and blue light damage? Lucky for you, there are tons of things you can do to prevent eye strain. You can take more breaks from digital devices, increase the font size, use eye drops, and blink more. Those are a few proven methods. The easiest by far, is to wear blue light blocking glasses to protect your eyes from harmful blue light. This will lower the strain on your eyes and protect them from blue light! Bonus: To remove most of the harmful blue light from your iPhone go to: settings -> display & brightness -> night shift mode Set the slider all the way to "more warm", this will lower your exposure by 50-60%! To remove almost all of the blue light from your iPhone settings -> accessibility -> display & text size -> color filters. turn on color tint, select the red pencil, scroll "intensity" to the max, this will lower your exposure by nearly 97%! Manually removing all blue light is an extreme solution, but it certainly does the trick. Blue light glasses will solve your problem without you having to change the color of your phone. Are blue light glasses effective? Blue light glasses are becoming increasingly popular as a way to protect our eyes from the harmful effects of blue light emitted by digital devices. Blue light glasses do not filter out all blue light, this is because not all blue light is bad. This is nice, because you can still see shades of blue while wearing the protective glasses. The level of blue light protection depends on the manufacturer of the lenses. Here at Johnny Fly, our blue light lenses are made by BluGARD. BluGARD lenses absorb the following levels of harmful blue light: For reference, the highest levels of blue light your phone can emit is between 400-490 (nm). BluGARD blocks this harmful light while letting through essential blue light (blue-turquoise). Blue-turquoise has positive effects on a patients’ sleep patterns, cognitive function and memory. BluGARD is not a coating, but the UV and HEV protection is inherent in the lens material. This means you aren't going to wash off your protection when you clean your glasses. Summary To summarize, in this modern age, most of us spend a large portion of our day in front of a digital screen. While technology is wonderful, it comes with its own set of unique problems. Blue light damage on your eyes is a real issue. Luckily, the problem can be simply solved by protecting your eyes with a pair of blue light blocking glasses. This will lower your eye strain and help prevent permanent eye damage.