Back to School – getting your eyes prepared

It’s August – for us easeeans this is business as usual. For the student population, however, the new academic year starts soon. Instead of relaxed summer days and gazing into the sea all day, it’s now time again to focus on blackboards, screens and densely printed textbook pages.

When going back to school, your vision is probably the last thing on your mind. However, every student should be putting an eye test at the top of their to-do list to prevent issues that could negatively affect their learning ability as well as cause significant discomfort. To get you prepared, we listed the most common student eye problems:

Eye strain

Many students experience eye strain as a result of the reading and staring at screens that is usually required from students. If you do this for a long period of time, with non-ideal lighting and ignoring ergonomic principles, you can expect your eyes to become watery, irritated and/or itchy. The other possible symptoms include but are not limited to light sensitivity, difficulty focusing and blurry vision, accompanied by possible headaches, back-and neck problems as well as sleeping difficulties.

Uncorrected refractive error

You’re more likely to encounter the above-mentioned problems if you already have eye trouble. Such issues occur if you have myopia or hyperopia, but don’t wear glasses, or if you wear the wrong prescription.

Eye infections

The other potential eye problem for students involves bacterial, viral and parasitic infections. These can spread quickly in classes, cafeterias, gyms, shared housing, parties and other crowded areas. Falling asleep with your contact lenses in when you’re not supposed to, or lacking hygiene while using lenses can increase your chances of catching a nasty infection.

Dry eyes

Air-conditioners decrease humidity in the air. Studying at the library or classroom in a climate-controlled building can be a major cause for dryness of the eyes. In addition to similar symptoms as mentioned with the eye strain, dry eyes can cause inflammation and damage to the surface of the eye.

By now you are probably wondering on what to do when you have no other choice than a study marathon at an air-conditioned crowded library wearing outdated contact lenses. Getting regular eye tests and updating your eyewear when needed will help you avoid loads of these issues. Add to this adjusting your ergonomic environment as well as using moisturizing eye drops for dry eyes, you may just end up fine.

In our next blog post, we’ll give you the best tips on how to adjust your study environment for better vision!