If you look at screens a lot, you might be doing the wrong kind of blinks.
I learned this when I had to be seen at the dry eye clinic, but there’s two kinds of blinks you can do. When your eyes get overly dry or you get something in your eye, the way that you blink is more deliberate or forceful. You can tell if you’re doing this kind of active blink by gently placing your fingertip in the top outer corner of your eye socket, and seeing if you can feel movement there when you blink.
The position for each person is slightly different, so just try different positions for your fingertip and do deliberately strong (but not too forceful) blinks until you can feel the muscles underneath moving. It’s quite subtle. For me, the location is just below the bone of my eye socket, directly up from the outer corner of my eye.
The other kind of blink is more passive, and is what the vast majority of your blinks should be, and people who use screens a lot tend to not do enough of these because they keep their eyes open for too long while using a computer, drying out their eyes and necessitating those big blinks I described above. The small blinks are important because they stimulate the lipid secreting glands in your eyelid rim, which can lead to dry eyes.
Put your fingertip at the corner of your eye like I described above, and this time, try shutting your eyes gently and slowly, as if you’re trying to stay awake but you’re unable to stop yourself from drifting off. If you’re doing it right, you shouldn’t feel muscular movement as you blink. You might need to finetune your fingertip position by a few millimetres, because if you’re too far out, you won’t feel muscular movement even if you’re blinking wrong. Once you’ve got the feel of how to discern between the two kinds of blinks, then you can see if you can do the passive blinks but at normal speed, as if you’re just a normal person and not sitting there with your finger on your eyes feeling silly.
I find that I’m way less likely to get dry eyes if I make sure that I occasionally do “sets” of passive blinks when I’m taking breaks from screens. I do like 20 of the normal speed passive blinks, and then 10-20 passive blinks that take longer, with my eyes remaining closed for a second or so after each one. I’ve found that now that I have the knack of it and don’t need to feel with my fingers whether I’m doing it right, it can sometimes be a fun way to fill the time.
Edit: this will not give you more muscley eyes, but is an actually useful skill to build if you are someone who has unknowingly built a habit of blinking in the bad way
If you look at screens a lot, you might be doing the wrong kind of blinks.
I learned this when I had to be seen at the dry eye clinic, but there’s two kinds of blinks you can do. When your eyes get overly dry or you get something in your eye, the way that you blink is more deliberate or forceful. You can tell if you’re doing this kind of active blink by gently placing your fingertip in the top outer corner of your eye socket, and seeing if you can feel movement there when you blink.
The position for each person is slightly different, so just try different positions for your fingertip and do deliberately strong (but not too forceful) blinks until you can feel the muscles underneath moving. It’s quite subtle. For me, the location is just below the bone of my eye socket, directly up from the outer corner of my eye.
The other kind of blink is more passive, and is what the vast majority of your blinks should be, and people who use screens a lot tend to not do enough of these because they keep their eyes open for too long while using a computer, drying out their eyes and necessitating those big blinks I described above. The small blinks are important because they stimulate the lipid secreting glands in your eyelid rim, which can lead to dry eyes.
Put your fingertip at the corner of your eye like I described above, and this time, try shutting your eyes gently and slowly, as if you’re trying to stay awake but you’re unable to stop yourself from drifting off. If you’re doing it right, you shouldn’t feel muscular movement as you blink. You might need to finetune your fingertip position by a few millimetres, because if you’re too far out, you won’t feel muscular movement even if you’re blinking wrong. Once you’ve got the feel of how to discern between the two kinds of blinks, then you can see if you can do the passive blinks but at normal speed, as if you’re just a normal person and not sitting there with your finger on your eyes feeling silly.
I find that I’m way less likely to get dry eyes if I make sure that I occasionally do “sets” of passive blinks when I’m taking breaks from screens. I do like 20 of the normal speed passive blinks, and then 10-20 passive blinks that take longer, with my eyes remaining closed for a second or so after each one. I’ve found that now that I have the knack of it and don’t need to feel with my fingers whether I’m doing it right, it can sometimes be a fun way to fill the time.
Edit: this will not give you more muscley eyes, but is an actually useful skill to build if you are someone who has unknowingly built a habit of blinking in the bad way
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