Will Your Phone's Dark Mode Save Your Eyes?

With so much time spent on our screens, how does it affect your eyes, and is there anything you can do to help?

The Nearsightedness Epidemic

Nearly a third of Americans said they are online “almost constantly”, a statistic that has risen substantially across age groups since the study was conducted the year before.

With American adults spending all this time per day staring at mobile devices, you might have wondered if staring at a screen can damage your eyes. The answer is yes—and no. Screens don’t harm your eyes any more than other activities that require you to see close up, like traditional books. However, close-up activities do cause eye strain, dry eyes, and tired eyes, which can lead to myopia or nearsightedness. And since we’re looking at things close up—computers, smartphones, video games—far more often than we used to, it’s affecting our eyesight.  

In fact, since 1971, the incidence of myopia has nearly doubled in the U.S. and occurs in 30 to 40 percent of adults, and in up to 80 percent of the Asian population. Myopia is disproportionately affecting young people. While there’s clearly something going on, ophthalmologists aren’t aligned on exactly the cause. Is it the increase in time spent focusing on screens? Or the blue light from screens interacting with circadian rhythms and influencing eye growth among children? Or perhaps it’s a lack of natural sunlight? Or something else entirely? The jury is still out on the exact cause, but there’s no doubt it’s happening.

Executives at Apple and Google unveiled on-device features to help people monitor and restrict how much time they spent on their phones. Facebook and Instagram, two of the biggest time sucks on the planet, also rolled out time spent notifications and the ability to snooze their apps — new features meant to nudge people to scroll through their apps a little less mindlessly. Tech giants have responded to this growing concern with new features. Apple released Dark Mode, which enables a dark background on the iPhone and is aimed at “making every element on the screen easier on your eyes." Google is doing the same with Android. Experts, however, aren’t convinced this feature will help, and a year after Big Tech rolled out their time-well-spent features, it doesn’t seem like they’re working: The time we spend on our devices just keeps increasing.