The Real Reason Your Eyesight Keeps Getting Worse (& How to Relieve It)

Digital eye strain can affect far more than just your eyes. Discover what happens to your eyes and brain after 8 hours of screen time, how screen use can contribute to myopia, and the best strategies for eye strain relief.

Let’s talk about what 8 hours of screen time does to your eyes. Today we’re going to discuss what happens hour by hour, not just to your eyes, but to your brain. Because the retina in your eye is actually brain tissue that’s extending outside your skull. So, when we’re fixated about 18 inches from our eyes, we’re not just straining the eyes, we’re straining the brain. 80 to 90% of children now have myopia.

This is a condition where they’re having trouble seeing in the distance, okay? Myopia. When I was a kid, we didn’t have that. Why? Because we didn’t have the computers, we didn’t have cell phones, we didn’t have screens.

So, today I’m going to show you what happens hour by hour, but then I want to show you what to do to counter this. The real problem is a little muscle in your eye called the ciliary muscle that controls the lens of the eye. So, the only job of that tiny ciliary muscle is to change the shape of the lens to allow you to focus far away or near. So, if you’re looking at like 18 inches or 12 inches in front of you, it’s like you making a fist, you know, not just temporarily, but for 8 hours. So, go ahead and make a fist right now and hold it there for 8 hours.

Let’s see what happens. Let’s get into hour by hour. The first hour of staring at your computer, what happens? The squeeze begins, but you really don’t have very many symptoms because that ciliary muscle can contract and hold a certain position for a period of time. Let’s go to 2 hours, right?

Your blink rate crashes. So, normally when you’re outside looking at various things, you’re blinking about 15 to 20 times per minute, okay? But as soon as you start looking at a screen and you don’t have that depth or the peripheral type movement of your eye, that blinking goes down to five or six times a minute. That blinking reflex is a physical pump that coats your eye with protective moisture. And maybe you might feel like a little burning or kind of something in your eye at that point, but that’s what’s happening.

Your eyes aren’t getting the proper lubrication. All right, hour three, static clock mismatch. Way back in the day, our eyes were designed to look far, close, left, right, all over the place, everything in 3D. Now they’re very, very static. And there’s a lot of cognitive load, but your physical eyes are fixated in this frozen state.

So that’s a big mismatch. So what this is doing, it’s creating a strain on the nervous system and the brain. And you’re going to start feeling mentally tired, okay? So a lot of people ask me, “What supplements do I recommend? ” Now, of course, I’m not biased with my own high-quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr.

Berg Supplements, you’ll find more information. All right, hour four, the retina starts going dark. Let me explain. When bright light hits the retina, it triggers a very critical neurotransmitter called dopamine right there inside the eye itself. And dopamine has many functions, but one of the big functions with the eye is it’s actually a structural job.

In other words, there’s a pigment in your eye that triggers dopamine that controls the shape of your eyeball. And what controls the pigment is lux. What’s lux? That’s bright light. Now let’s do a comparison.

Going outside in the sun, what is the lux or brightness of that sunlight? A hundred thousand units versus inside your office, 300 to 500. So you get a lot more lux when you’re outside. And this is what our body was designed for and evolved from. It’s even more important for children to be outside being exposed to this light.

I’m not talking about looking directly into the sun, but I am talking about allowing that sun to get into the eye. And this is why people that wear sunglasses are creating another layer of deficiency of that bright light because we need that bright light for several things. Number one, to trigger dopamine to create the normal shape of the eyeball. Number two, to control the circadian rhythm. Being able to go to sleep at night, sleep through the night, and wake up feeling refreshed.

And number three, if you’re deficient, it can create seasonal affective disorder. And this is why people during the winter get depressed. And so they might end up stumbling on buying a light that they sit in front of an hour in the morning to get this intensity of lux so they can actually reverse this depression because they’re deficient. They’re not getting out as much. Hour five, focusing muscle locks.

What is that? When you contract a ciliary muscle for five hours in a row, held in continuous contraction, the eye doesn’t just get tired. It begins to lose its ability to let go. This is a clinical problem where even when you stop looking at the screen, your ciliary muscle is still stuck. It can’t turn off.

So it’s acting like a cramp like you would get in your leg. At five hours, they might take a break and start looking at other things and like, wow, I need my glasses. I can’t see that well. It’s taking longer and longer to adapt to focus on certain things. All right.

Hour six, the balancing system. Sitting behind a computer, your head is kind of fixated in one location and the distance is fixed as well. This is why so many people after a period of time of sitting there looking at the computer feel kind of like out of it, dizzy, disoriented, that type of thing. If your environment is off, everything else struggles. It’s like a fish tank.

Pollute the water and the fish gets sick. You could feed them the best food. You can treat every single symptom, but if the water stays toxic, nothing recovers. The body runs on 10 signals like insulin, cortisol, inflammation, sleep quality, gut function. Every one of them affects how you feel, but there is always one signal that is more broken than the rest, and until you fix that one, everything else stays stuck.

I built a free 2-minute quiz that finds it for you. It tells you which one of the main signals is holding your body back right now. Click the link in the description, take the quiz, and stop guessing. Our seven, shrinking tunnel. What does that mean?

When you are outside navigating the world, there’s all these things in nature that you would look at, but when you narrow that focus in, you collapse the peripheral vision, okay? So, instead of operating at 180°, you just only have this 30° of focus. And so, your sensation of peripheral vision is way down, okay? Especially over years of doing this. And then at 8 hours, we start developing damage with the shape of the eyeball, and this is called near-sidedness, in which you can’t see far away as much as you used to.

They did an experiment with kids, and they had them spend 80 additional minutes outside per day, and the myopia statistics just plummeted with these kids. And so, we know what myopia is. It’s not a mystery of how people develop it. All right, let’s talk about what to do with this, okay? I can’t just not work on the computer.

This is what I do. I research information for videos. I’m sure you have to do computer work, but what can we do to neutralize the damage? Maybe you’ve heard of this 20 20 20 rule before, where every 20 minutes you would look at something 20 ft away, which is the exact distance where there’s no more tension in the ciliary muscle, for about 20 seconds. While that’s a really good concept, it’s kind of useless if you’ve been doing this for a period of time.

It might be a good thing to maintain your eyes, but for most people, that’s not going to even be close to what you need to do, okay? It’s going to take a lot more than just a 20-second shift every 20 minutes. If you only have time for one thing, you need to do this. Step outsid