Do you get sore eyes from doing a lot of reading and looking at screens? I had perfect eyesight for most of my life, though in the last few years this had declined. Here are a few things I found helped a lot, and my eyesight (and especially my close focusing) is much better now than it was a year or two ago.

If you're going to be doing a lot of reading, this is something you may run into problems with.

Reading Under Really Bright Light

This tip has really helped my eyesight a lot. I'd been reading more books since I started studying again a few years ago, and many of them at a desk. I found that using two separate desk lamps, both quite strong, on the high setting, hugely helped my eyes. It took a few weeks to really notice the difference.

This sounds so simple, almost too simple to bother with. But it really did (and still does) help my eyesight a lot. (A photo can't capture nearly as much range of contrast as the human eye, so the book in this photograph looks completely white.)

Reading under really bright light noticeably helped to improve my eyesight.

It's also a helpful idea to have screens with a decent amount of brightness.

It's also a really helpful idea to spend time being in situations of bright light, including daylight, outside (see below).

Spending Time Outdoors in Bright Daylight

This is something else that I'm sure helps a lot with eyesight in general. Also, varying the distances you look at, such as looking out the window sometimes, can help a lot. Driving seems to be good for this also. Especially on sunny days. Too much UV rays can damage the eye, but this is the year 2020 (and I'm writing this while in lockdown for COVID-19), and more people spend more time indoors than perhaps any other time in the history of the world. I think that some amount of UV light is healthy for the eyes. I don't mean looking right into the sun, but just being outside and looking around normally in full bright daylight. Just as some amount of UV light on the skin is needed to get natural vitamin-D, and improves your mood, but too much will give you sunburn.

About 17 years ago, I was living in a downstairs basement room with very little natural light. As an experiment to save electricity, I tried not having the ceiling lighting on all day long in the daytime, like I had been. I found that after weeks of living in constantly dim light, my eyesight was noticeably worse. Things looked blurry sometimes, and it was hard to focus on things sometimes, and my eyes hurt sometimes. After I started lighting up the room more, these eye problems went away after a week or two and didn't return for about 15 years.

Dr. Ray Gottleib's Presbyopia Eye Exercies

I've found these help me massively also. You don't even have to do them very often (it says that on the PDF itself) and I find that they still make a very noticeable difference to how well I can focus, especially close-up.

You can get them from this link, which is working as of the time of writing this page.

If that link fails at some time in the future try searching Google for ray gottleib presbyopia exercies pdf.

You're meant to print them out on paper as a hardcopy, though now that I've learned how to do them, I can do them (but noticeably less well) looking at the PDF on a computer screen. I printed them and got the main page laminated, mainly to help the page not get crushed up with use, but it also helps to hold it flat while doing the exercises.

There are two types of exercies, and both use the same chart. To begin with, use the upper section with the paragraphs that begin with the largest writing, that says "Cross your eyes to clear this print...".

One of the two types of exercises is called converging. Here you basically go cross-eyed, and read the text while doing so. This causes the page to take on a 3-dimensional look, where the middle column of text appears further away than the rest of the page (it looks about a centimetre further away, as if the text is floating above or below the page itself). This is the one the instructions ask you to try first. It took me a while to get the hang of the converging exercise, especially doing the converging exercise without using a pencil. Now I can do it pretty easily. At first (as the PDF explains) use a pen or pencil or some object to focus your gaze on, between your eyes and the page, to get your eyes working in the cross-eyed converging mode.

The other type of eye exercise you can do (with the same PDF chart) is called diverging. Here your two eyes move in the opposite way to cross-eyed, so that the point at which they would meet at is further away than the page itself. The instructions say to try this after trying the converging exercises, though I found when I first tried that my eyes naturally went into diverging mode very easily. It's the exact same action that you do with your eyes to see those computer-generated 3-D artworks that were popular in the 1990s, where the picture looks like a whole lot of random blotches of different colours, and then when you stare at it for a while, in the right way, suddenly you can see a 3-D image of a dinosaur or something. When these first came out it took me a long time before I could see them, but once I got the hang of how to do the right "look", I could see them easily every time after that.

Click here for the PDF I've been using which contains the eye exercises.

The PDF is three pages long. The first two pages are instructions, and the eye exercise sheet itself is on the third page.

There are some other PDFs with different eye exercises found from a Google search. Some of these are also by Dr. Ray Gottleib. I haven't tried these ones, though they may also be quite good. This PDF is a longer one, also by Dr. Ray Gottleib, which I haven't tried yet — though it does contain on one page the same chart from the PDF above (the one I've been using myself) which is on page 16 of the longer PDF. However it doesn't have as detailed instructions on how to use that particular chart as the three-page one in the link above.

I tried the cross exercise on page 14 (of the longer PDF) just then, right after discovering it, looking at it on my desktop compute screen. I found that I could do both converging and diverging with it (after having much previous practice at doing these on the shorter version of the eye exercises PDF). I also noticed from the cross exercise that one of my eyes was focusing perfectly clearly and the other was a bit less than perfect.

Spend Time Looking Into the Distance

This is something I used to do a lot of — both being outside and looking outside through the window when inside. I definitely think it helped my eyes to keep functioning as well as they did, for as long as they did, considering how much reading and on-screen and other close-up work I've done over the years.

Cover image by Shutterstock

Share This Page

If you liked this page, please share it with others! You can use the links to share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Email. Ther is also an RSS feed to get updates for the website.