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Comment by camhart | Hacker News Reader

A big thing not often spoken about with eye strain is dry eye caused by the lack of blinking due to focusing on screens too close to our face. This is an evolutionary phenomenon--close dangers cause extreme focus without blinking. Extreme focus on close items reduces our blinks.

Our eye lids have glands in them that release oils on your eye with each blink. These oils help prevent the watery part of your tears from evaporating. When it evaporates your eyes dry out causing discomfort and potentially pain.

If you don't blink enough, the oil doesnt get on your eyes and eventually, in extreme cases, the glands can even die. A lack of oil in tears can cause extreme eye fatigue and even pain.

This is why dry eyes is on the rise. Remember to blink!

I actually built a little web app to count my blinks. See https://dryeyestuff.com/. Not perfect, just a prototype. 100% free.

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I used to have this dry eye problem a lot, but turning down the brightness of the display really helped with that. The eyes can adapt to very low settings, almost at the bottom of the range on macs at night for example.

I find it is also important that whatever is behind the screen is lit indirectly equally to the brightness of the display. A bright screen in front of a dark wall is a perfect recipe for dry eyes for me.

Optometrist recommended I take daily fish oil and give it a month to see result. Sure enough, roughly a month later, I stopped having dry eyes. My eyes feel good even now during winter, when both outside and inside air is quite dry.

btw, if you have 2 different monitors on different lengths from your eye you change focus more frequently and your eyes feel better.

A laptop + big monitor is less irritating for the eyes as long as they aren't put exactly on the same line.

When you get old enough, your eyes stop focussing.

I, too, experienced dry eyes and found it challenging to consciously blink regularly. A few years ago, someone gifted me one of these "3-D puzzles" (similar to this: https://www.amazon.ca/Bookend-Miniature-Bookshelf-Birthday-B...). I kept it on my desk and it helped me somewhat regulate my constant focus on the screen by prompting me to glance at it occasionally. That's just something that worked for me.

Pretty nifty, except that it also detects "winks" as "blinks".

This is a great idea, and it seems surprisingly accurate.

I know it's a prototype, but in case you're interested in feature requests: if I have multiple webcams, it seems to just choose the first one without a way to select another.

Wouldn't an app that randomly turns the screen black for a split second every few minutes be able to induce blinking as a response?

Cool web app but doesn't work unless I take my glasses off, sadly.

Interesting. Could an external stimulus trigger a subconscious blink?

I'm not aware of any triggers to cause subconscious blinking. That'd be fantastic if there was an option though.

The web app can trigger a notification if your blinks / minute drop too low. Only challenge is modern browsers throttle websites that aren't visible, so the blink counting gets messed up.

Maybe you could set up the conditions for a Pavlovian response.

E.g. let your app give a signal (e.g. beep or buzz) every 30 seconds if you don't blink. Then train yourself to blink if you hear the signal.

Edit: Yes, it can be done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyeblink_conditioning

You could also lie less often, because you blink less frequently when you lie. ;)

https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/23166678/HICSS47_Do_Liars_Bl...

Someone just shared an extension that inserts random jump scares onto social media sites that you want to avoid. Maybe adding jump scares to work applications can help people blink more often, too.

> Could an external stimulus trigger a subconscious blink?

you could set something up where a water gun squirts you on a random interval between 2-5 minutes. heh i think i would kill someone if they did that to me.

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