5 Phone Screen Settings You Should Change To Keep Your Eyes Healthy

If your eyes feel tired, dry, and irritated after using your phone for an extended period of time, you have digital eye strain (DES). When it gets too bad, you can even experience blurry vision and headaches. What usually helps is putting the phone away and giving your eyes enough rest. While DES will not cause any permanent damage to your eyes, it can become extremely annoying and uncomfortable if you have no choice but to power through in situations where you can’t put your phone down.

Prolonged device usage isn’t the only factor, though. The way your device is set up can have an impact, too, including the levels of brightness and blue light emission from the phone. Even the distance at which you hold the phone can contribute to eye strain. Luckily, there are settings you can tweak on your phone to prevent or reduce these negative effects of DES.

There’s no exact science here, and you have to go according to what feels comfortable. But if optimizing your screen settings doesn’t work for you, don’t power through. Give your eyes the rest they need. Also, while the paths to tweak these settings are the same on iPhone, they might differ on Android devices since these have different manufacturers. However, you should still be able to follow along.

If you’re in a dark room, a bright screen can be hard to look at because it creates a harsh contrast that forces your eyes to focus harder due to the glare. Lowering the brightness can help reduce eye strain in this scenario. You don’t have to do this manually because modern phones have an auto-brightness feature. It uses the phone’s built-in light sensor to automatically lower or raise the brightness depending on the ambient light around you (brighter in good lighting conditions and vice versa). If you have noticed your phone’s brightness slider automatically adjusting itself, you probably have it enabled, which some phones do by default. To enable auto-brightness manually on iPhone, do the following:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Accessibility.

3. Tap Display & Text Size.

4. Toggle on Auto-Brightness.

If you’re on an Android phone, do this instead:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Display.

3. Toggle on Adaptive Brightness.

Just keep in mind that auto-brightness is not perfect and can make the screen harder to look at or even drain the battery more in certain scenarios. If you find that this is the case, you might want to turn off auto-brightness and control the brightness yourself from the Control Center on iPhone or Quick Settings on Android.

Even after turning the brightness all the way down, you might still find that the screen is too bright. This can happen when you’re in bed with the lights off, making the room pitch black. It is here that the minimum brightness cap can fail you and lead to eye strain. The good thing is that you can lower the brightness further by lowering the intensity of the bright colors, making the screen appear dimmer. To do that on iPhone, do the following:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Accessibility.

3. Tap Display & Text Size.

4. Toggle on Reduce White Point.

5. Drag the slider that appears below to the right to dim the screen further. A good stopping point is 90% so the screen isn’t too dark to see.

On Android, it’s called Extra Dim, and it’s one of the features you should try. Here’s how you turn it on:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Accessibility.

3. Tap Vision enhancements.

4. Tap Extra Dim.

5. Turn on the toggle.

Moving the Intensity slider to the right will increase the intensity and vice versa, so be sure to leave it on a level that still allows you to see. Unfortunately, it might not show the percentage like on the iPhone, so you have to make your best guess on where 90% is.

According to a study published by the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology (via ScienceDirect), blue light makes up about 25% of the sun’s rays, with 6% to 40% of that making it indoors. Blue light is energizing and keeps you alert during the day. However, your phone also emits it. Even if it’s not as intense as the sun’s, it can disrupt your sleep by inhibiting the brain from releasing melatonin (the body’s sleep hormone). Lack of sleep can make your eyes tired, leading to DES. Your phone has a built-in blue-light filter for lessening its intensity, and it’s best to schedule it to turn on in the evening and turn off in the morning.

If you’re on an iPhone, do the following:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Display & Brightness > Night Shift.

3. Toggle on Scheduled.

4. Tap From/To.

5. Select Custom Schedule.

6. Set when it should turn on and off.

7. Adjust the Color Temperature slider. The warmer the color, the less blue light the iPhone emits.

If you’re on Android, here are the steps:

1. Tap Settings.

2. Tap Display.

3. Tap Eye comfort shield.

4. Turn on the toggle.

5. You can leave it as Adaptive so the phone automatically adjusts the screen’s colors during the day. The colors will be warmest at night. But if you want more control, tap Custom.

6. Tap Set schedule.

7. Select Custom.

8. Choose the start and end times.

9. Adjust the Color temperature slider to match your level of comfort.

Something else you should do in poor lighting conditions is turn on dark mode. It inverts the colors of the screen by making the text white and the background black. This will reduce the eye-strain-inducing glare, making the screen more comfortable for your eyes to look at. On top of that, dark mode uses less power, which can increase the battery life of OLED displays. Just keep in mind that dark mode isn’t for everyone, and can lead to eye strain if you are short-sighted or have astigmatism. So if you find that dark mode isn’t helping you out, stick to light mode, along with the other screen adjustments.

To enable dark mode on iPhone, do the following:

1. Swipe down from the top left corner of the screen to open Control Center.

2. Tap the brightness slider.

3. Tap Dark Mode (make sure it says “On” below it).

If you’re on Android, follow the steps below:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Display.

3. Tap the Dark Mode or Dark Theme radio button or toggle to enable it.

Looking at your phone too close changes the shape of the eyes’ lenses by forcing them to converge (move toward the same point) in order to focus the image. For your eyes, converging means they turn inward, which is not a position you want them to be in for too long, as it can lead to eye strain. Not only that, but it can also increase the risk of developing myopia (short-sightedness), especially in children.

If you’re an iPhone user, there’s a feature that can warn you if you’re holding the phone too close called Screen Distance, but for it to work, the iPhone needs to have the TrueDepth camera (basically iPhone X or newer). When on, you will get a warning whenever you hold the phone closer than 12 inches for too long. When the Screen Distance alert pops up, you will be unable to use the phone until you move it further than 12 inches.

To enable Screen Distance, do the following:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Screen Time.

3. Tap Screen Distance.

4. Turn on the toggle.