How Does Stress Affect Your Eyes?

how does stress affect your eyes
Unfortunately, stress can affect us both physically and mentally. When we are seriously stressed or anxious, our vision can be affected and make us experience some irritating issues with our eyes. Eye strain during the day and night is a common enough issue, nowadays and affects thousands of people from all over the world. So, how exactly can stress affect your eyes?

When you are experiencing high levels of stress, your body produces large amounts of a hormone, named adrenaline. Increased levels of this compound can result in blurred vision since it causes high pressure on the eyes. People suffering from long-term anxiety, for example, due to their job's tough working environment, are usually complaining that they feel a constant strain on their eyes. Another common consequence of feeling stressed out is your eyes experiencing sensitivity to light and movement. Light can make you feel unable to focus on your daily habits and you may also, fin difficulty in concentrating on simple tasks, like reading a book.

If you become sensitized to even slight movements, your other senses will be strained, as well. That will gradually result in the appearance of headaches and muscular tensions. Excess stress can also, make your eyes feel swollen and tight all day long. The feeling is quite uncomfortable and in some cases, it can even lead to your eyes feeling very dry or very wet. Eye twitching, eye floaters, and on more serious occasions, eye spasms are also, common stress-inducing vision issues.

How stress affects vision

When you feel stressed, your eye pupils dilate in order to allow more light to reach the base of your eyes. That can instantly make your eyes more sensitive to outer stimuli, including potential threats. That is actually a normal process and it doesn't affect our eyes negatively. However, if you are stressed for no reason or overly anxious about an upcoming event, then your body produces adrenaline in large amounts. The pressure on the eyes caused by this hormone is what we should try to avoid at any cost. In 2018, a scientific article published in the EPMA Journal explained the relationship between psychological stress, increased level of cortisol, and the deterioration of vision in humans.

Being stressed out for a long period of time means that your eyes will normally be under constant dilation. That can make you sensitive to light and most importantly, in the long run, the muscles in and around your eyes will tighten causing soreness and excessive twitching. Thankfully, stress-related eye issues are, in most cases, temporary and quite easy to fix. However, if you feel like you are constantly on edge, then you may wish to talk to your doctor to make sure you are emotionally, as well as physically healthy.

How to ease your eye stress

Since stress is, unfortunately, an inseparable part of our modern lives, it is paramount that we learn how to reduce it effectively. Regular exercising, following a healthy diet, and spending more time outdoors are simple, yet effective ways of getting rid of excessive stress. Those approaches are effective ways of living our blessed lives without too much stress and anxiety. However, inevitably, at some point in our lives, we are going to suffer from stressful situations. During those times, eye strain or fatigue will probably make our vision feel stressed, as well. A good way to improve that situation is to try and change daily habits that further strain our eyes.

Our focus on screens, like the ones found in laptops, tablets, and smartphones is definitely putting extra pressure on our eyes. Using a dark mode extension while browsing websites, like Night Eye, can truly help you reduce eye strain. The smooth dark theme of the extension along with the variety of filters, including the blue light filter promise to help you relieve some of the tension while watching your favorite movie online or just surfing on several websites.
It is true that once you have found how to deal with stressful conditions, your eyes will turn back to normal. Adopting a healthier lifestyle and making sure you avoid further straining your eyes can be the true keys to coping with this health condition. Most importantly, you need to make sure that whatever stress you may experience at times, there are always ways that can help you fight it off.

Install Night Eye dark mode now

No credit card, no names, nothing is required - install Night Eye on your preferred browser and enjoy it completely for free for 3 months. Subsequently, you can stick with the free Lite version or subscribe for $9 per year. You can see for yourself how this dark mode browser extension can help you fight with eye strains.
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Images used:

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor
Photo by Quinten de Graaf