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 a prolonged period of time, you have digital eye strain (DES). When the situation becomes too severe, you may even experience blurred vision and headaches. What usually helps is putting the phone away and giving your eyes enough rest. Even though DES won’t cause any permanent damage to your eyes, it can become extremely annoying and uncomfortable if you have no choice but to feed in situations where you can’t put your phone down.

Prolonged use of the device is not the only factor, however. How your device is set up can also have an impact, including the phone’s brightness and blue light emission levels. Even the distance you hold the phone can contribute to eye strain. Fortunately, there are settings you can change on your phone to prevent or reduce these negative effects of DES.

There is no exact science here and you should proceed according to what feels comfortable to you. But if optimizing your screen settings doesn’t work for you, don’t bother. Give your eyes the rest they need. Additionally, although the methods for changing these settings are the same on iPhone, they may differ on Android devices because they come from different manufacturers. However, you should still be able to follow along.

If you’re in a dark room, a bright screen can be difficult to look at because it creates a harsh contrast that forces your eyes to focus harder due to glare. Reducing 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 dim or increase brightness based on the ambient light around you (brighter in good lighting conditions and vice versa). If you’ve noticed that your phone’s brightness slider adjusts automatically, you probably have it turned on, which some phones do by default. To manually enable auto-brightness on iPhone, follow these steps:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Accessibility.

3. Tap Display & Text Size.

4. Enable auto-brightness.

If you’re using an Android phone, do the following instead:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Display.

3. Enable adaptive brightness.

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

Even after turning the brightness all the way down, you may find that the screen is too bright. This can happen when you’re in bed with the lights off, making the room completely dark. This is where the minimum brightness ceiling can fail you and cause eye strain. The good news is that you can reduce brightness further by lowering the intensity of bright colors, making the screen appear darker. To do this on iPhone, follow these steps:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Accessibility.

3. Tap Display & Text Size.

4. Enable Reduce White Point.

5. Drag the slider that appears below to the right to darken 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 to activate it:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Accessibility.

3. Tap Vision Improvements.

4. Tap Extra Dim.

5. Enable the toggle.

Moving the intensity slider to the right will increase the intensity and vice versa, so be sure to leave it at a level that still allows you to see. Unfortunately, it may not show the percentage like on the iPhone, so you have to make a best guess as to 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, of which 6-40% is scattered indoors. Blue light is energizing and keeps you alert during the day. However, your phone also emits it. Although it’s not as intense as sunlight, it can disrupt your sleep by stopping the brain from releasing melatonin (the body’s sleep hormone). Lack of sleep can tire your eyes, leading to DES. Your phone has a built-in blue light filter to reduce its intensity, and it’s best to program it to turn on in the evening and off in the morning.

If you’re using an iPhone, follow these steps:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Display & Brightness > Night Shift.

3. Enable Scheduled.

4. Tap From/To.

5. Select Custom Program.

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 are on Android, here are the steps:

1. Tap Settings.

2. Tap Display.

3. Tap Eye comfort display.

4. Enable the toggle.

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

6. Tap Set schedule.

7. Select Custom.

8. Choose start and end times.

9. Adjust the color temperature slider to suit your comfort level.

Another thing you should do in poor lighting conditions is to enable dark mode. It inverts the screen colors making the text white and the background black. This will reduce the glare that causes eye fatigue, making the screen more comfortable to look at. Additionally, dark mode consumes less power, which can increase the battery life of OLED displays. Just keep in mind that dark mode isn’t for everyone and can cause eye strain if you’re nearsighted or astigmatic. So if you find that dark mode isn’t helping you, stick to light mode, along with the other screen settings.

To enable dark mode on iPhone, follow these steps:

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

2. Tap the brightness slider.

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

If you are on Android, follow the steps below:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Display.

3. Tap or turn on the Dark Mode or Dark Theme radio button.

Looking at your phone too closely changes the shape of the lenses in your eyes, 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 stay in for too long, as it can lead to eye strain. Not only that, but it can also increase the risk of developing myopia (nearsightedness), especially in children.

If you are an iPhone user, there is a feature that can warn you if you are holding the phone too close called Screen Distance, but for this to work the iPhone must have the TrueDepth camera (basically iPhone X or newer). When this option is enabled, you will receive a warning whenever you hold the phone within 12 inches for too long. When the Screen Distance alert appears, you won’t be able to use the phone until you move it more than 12 inches.

To enable screen distance, follow these steps:

1. Open Settings.

2. Tap Screen Time.

3. Tap Screen distance.

4. Enable the toggle.