4 Ways You May Be Able to Improve Eye Health Without Surgery

After age 40, most of us will experience changes in vision. This is why investing in the health of our eyes at every age is so important. Here are four ways you may be able to improve your eye health:

1. Take a break from the screens. Focusing on brightly-lit screens all day without a break can negatively impact eye health. Put a reminder on your computer keyboard or monitor that compels you to refocus your vision every 10-15 minutes on objects which may be further away, such as the writing on a white board, an office plant in another cubicle, or the view out the window. Forcing your eyes to re-focus to see middle and longer distance objects is a great exercise for reducing eye fatigue.
2. Use it or lose it. If you spend most of your time doing close, detailed work you may find that your long-range vision begins to suffer. While some of these changes may have to do with overall health or age, you may be able to reduce eye strain by focusing on objects at a distance – without corrective lenses – for 15-30 minutes a day. This can be something as simple as taking a sheet of paper with writing on it and holding it out in front of you until it begins to blur, then focusing and re-focusing as you move the page.
3. Invest in better light. Reading or doing other types of work in dim or low light has been shown to tire out your eyes more quickly. Simply put, the more light that falls on an object, the easier it is to see. Investing in a powerful reading lamp that delivers full-spectrum light as natural feeling as the sun can help prevent eye strain and the headaches that often accompany it. Ensure that you place the light directly over the reading material or project you are working on to reduce glare.
4. Spend more time outdoors. Some studies have found that children who spend more time outdoors tend to suffer less from myopia. It doesn’t appear to matter what types of activities children engage in outside, so the theory is that the benefit to vision may be that their eyes are exposed to more sunlight during the day. This may improve depth of field perception and the ability to focus.