Due to the new type of coronavirus affecting our world, the number of cases and deaths continues to increase day by day. Countries that want to protect their people from this virus, on the other hand, prohibit flights, as well as to close public areas or prohibit curfews. People who continue to live under quarantine in their homes spend their time; The series spends watching movies, playing games, reading books or continuing their work from home. Being imprisoned all day long brings with it looking at digital screens all day long. Screen times have more than doubled. A feature called ‘Screen Time’ inside the iPhone smartphones that Apple owns shows you how many hours and how many minutes you spend during the day, how long you have been on the screen and how many notifications you have received. ‘Screen Time’, which stores this data for 1 month, allows you to compare other weeks according to your weekly average screen time. IPhone users all over the world shared their systems on social media that their screen times exceeded 2 times after coronavirus. What is harmful to look at the screen for a long time? When we spend on electronic devices while staying under quarantine due to coronavirus, it causes great irreversible damage to our eyes. Reducing our blink reflex while looking at the screens causes the eye to dry and cannot be cleaned, renewed and moistened accordingly. The screen we are looking at has a flat structure. However, the shapes we see on the screen, the videos we watch or the games are designed to be 3D. Seeing shapes with depth in a flat shape greatly affects our perception of 3D. Constantly looking at the screen for a long time makes our feelings and reactions less difficult to distinguish between distance and closeness. What can we do in this process? First of all, we can start by not using the screen brightness at the highest level. Adjusting the brightness of the screen to less than the level you normally use, looking at the screen at a distance of at least 40 cm and remembering to blink your eyes more often will reduce your eye dryness. The muscles in the eyes are not conducive to looking somewhere steadily for a long time. For this reason, the risk of developing eye defects such as myopia (not seeing clearly) and astigmatism (blurred vision) in the eyes that get tired by looking at the same place for a long time also increases. For this reason, experts recommend applying the 20-20-20 rule. The 20-20-20 rule: This rule, which is recommended for people who spend most of the day in a closed environment and across the screen, helps the eye muscles to move at certain intervals and helps to reduce the damages mentioned above. The 20-20-20 rule, which is quite simple to do and remember; It means “looking at a place 20 meters apart, 20 minutes apart, for 20 seconds.” With the application of this rule, dry eyes can be prevented and the eyes are rested. Following the above suggestions will be extremely useful to protect our eye health in the days we spend almost all of our time in our house due to coronavirus. You can share with us how your screen time has increased in the comments section.
