Eye strain is an eye condition that you can experience when your eyes become tired due to intense or prolonged use. When you perform your daily activities like reading, watching the television, using a computer or driving a car for extended periods of time, you may be susceptible to experiencing eye strain. While it can cause you some discomfort, this eye condition is rarely serious. You can notice that its symptoms go away once your eyes get sufficient rest.
Symptoms
Here are some common symptoms that are associated with eye strain:
• Watery eyes
• Blurred vision
• Sore back
• Extreme sensitivity to light
• Difficulty in shifting focus between documents and your computer’s monitor
• Eye discomfort
• Double vision
• Sore eyes
• Burning eyes
• Tired eyes
• Itchy eyes
• Dry eyes
• Sore neck
• Shoulder pain
• Seeing color fringes when you look away from your computer’s monitor
• Headache
• Noticeable change in vision.
While eye strain is a fairly common condition, you need to monitor your symptoms closely as they may be indicative of a more serious underlying condition.
Possible Conditions Associated with Eye Strain
Here is a list of some conditions that may be associated with your eye strain:
• When you exhibit symptoms such as headache, tired and painful eyes and blurred vision, this can mean that the cornea and the lens of your eyes are not working together properly to focus images on the retina at the back of your eye. This then forces the small muscles of your eye to work harder, resulting in eye strain. This may be corrected by wearing prescription glasses or contact lenses.
• If you are experiencing headaches, those may be due to excessive squinting and overworking of your eye muscles to attain better focus in your vision.
• When you exhibit symptoms like headache, that may be caused by internal pressure and swelling within the structures of the eye. The pain felt therein can be transmitted to other parts of the head.
• Glaucoma is another condition that may be associated with your eye strain. It is a group of eye conditions that can damage the optic nerve or the nerve that carries visual information from your eyes to your brain. Most of the time, the damage is due to increased intraocular pressure or the pressure inside the eye. This condition should be detected and treated at the onset to avoid complications like blindness.
• Presbyopia occurs when your lens become inflexible and hard as you age. This may be accompanied by difficulty in focusing closely, changes in focus when looking from one distance to another, headaches and sore eyes.
• Hyperopia, also called long-sightedness, occurs when the image you see is focused to a point behind your eye, instead of focusing it on the retina at the back of your eye.
• Astigmatism happens when your cornea does not have a regular shape. At certain angles, the object you look at appear blurry. As a result, you tend to squint a lot to obtain better focus in your vision.
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