It’s a routine at your annual eye exam that your optometrist asks you 3 things: Do you drive? Do you want to be dilated? Do you stare at any type of digital screen for long periods during the day? Then they will proceed to incorporate a prescription to either help when you’re driving at night, dilate your eyes to check for any eye diseases, or recommend blue light glasses to protect your eyes from the damage that comes with staring at a digital screen all day long. We all know that prescriptions are beneficial to everyone who needs it. They help with driving and dilating the eyes to check for any abnormalities, but what about blue light glasses? Are they really helpful? Do they really work?
If you are someone who works on a computer screen for more than five hours a day, there’s a possibility that you suffer from dry eyes. One of the main reasons why you suffer from dry eyes is because you stare at a screen for hours at a time. It doesn’t even have to be for work-related purposes, it could simply be someone who is on their phone for hours and hours, scrolling through social media.
Regardless of which one describes you daily, prolonged screen time is very harmful to your eyes, so that’s where blue light glasses come in to help.
Blue light glasses were created for eye protection. From what we were taught, blue light-blocking glasses were created to protect our eyes from the blue light that emits from digital screens.
They have been marketed by doctors from all over who claim that these glasses will help prevent digital eye strain when using them. Doctors even say that the glasses are safe to wear for long periods of time, so how do they work?
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The blocking glasses have a specific type of lens that blocks out or filters the blue light that comes from your computer, cellphone, tv screen, etc.
Blue light, sabotages your internal clock, disrupting your sleep schedule, so using blue light glasses when winding down for the night can be beneficial. They are also supposed to help reduce the damage that can be caused to your retina from too much blue light exposure.
So what are the benefits of using blue light glasses? Well from what was explained earlier, these blocking glasses help with scrolling on your phone at night and protect your eyes by preventing and reducing retina damage, but is that true?
According to this recent study, blue light filters can help with certain ocular issues such as helping with prolonged screen viewing but there is very little evidence that using blue light-blocking glasses can help with digital eye strain.
Why? Because digital eye strain doesn’t necessarily come from the blue light on screens.
Computer vision syndrome also known as digital eye strain is when your eyes experience constant discomfort and strain. The constant movement and shifting of your eyes while looking at a screen on top of the glare coming from the digital screen can be extremely taxing on the eyes if done for a long period of time. It can cause headaches, dry and watery eyes, blurry vision, burning and itchy eyes, concentration difficulties and more.
So when staring at a screen for too long, you don’t even realize that you don’t blink as often as you should, which causes most of the symptoms listed above. Once you stop looking at a screen, your eyes will then relax.
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With everything that was stated before, we can come to the conclusion that blue light glasses can be helpful but they don’t do much. They’re helpful in blocking blue lights but they do little to nothing when it comes to helping with computer vision syndrome (digital eye strain).
In the event that you need help with CVS, it’s best to use other devices such as over-the-counter eye drops which will help with dry eyes. Wearing light-sensitivity glasses can also be a better method to help with eye strain because they focus on fixing light-sensitivity eye problems.
With that being said, blue light-blocking glasses are great when filtering out excessive amounts of blue light and using them as a cute accessory but they are mostly just for show. They don’t offer many eye benefits.
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