Video gaming is no longer just a hobby. Thanks to the rise of competitive tournaments that require world-class skills, hard work, and perseverance to win, professional e-sports is a growing career option among younger generations.
That dream is made even more successful by the rise of e-sports scholarships. Countless colleges and universities now fund students on their journeys to become professional e-sports players—to be eligible for a scholarship, you just need to be a highly skilled gamer. In preparing for your application, you may find yourself spending hours building your knowledge of various game mechanics, honing your strategies, and improving your team coordination skills in the competitive title of your choice.
However, doing so will involve clocking prolonged periods of screen time, which can negatively impact your physical well-being. Researchers already link e-sports to health risks like musculoskeletal pain, disturbed sleep, overuse injuries, and metabolic disorders leading to weight gain. Given the highly visual nature of the sport, however, you may want to pay closer attention to your eyes.
The excess near work—or looking at something close up—involved in e-sports training can eventually strain the eyes, leading to symptoms that can worsen your gaming performance. If you’re keen to avoid this, here’s what you need to know about overcoming eye strain in e-sports.
The Link Between Eye Strain and e-Sports Performance
Digital eye strain, also known as computer vision syndrome, comes part and parcel with excessive device use. That’s because you’re essentially locking your eye muscles in a single position, tiring them out over time—one of the reasons why eye strain is the most common condition experienced by elite mobile-gaming athletes who play on smaller screens. Some symptoms you may experience include blurriness, dryness, itching, and even burning or stinging sensations. If you’re playing e-sports on a dedicated gaming setup, the wrong environment can also cause other issues like neck and back pain.
Though these symptoms may seem like minor issues you can brush off, they can actually negatively impact your esports performance. Eye strain can reduce your focus by blurring your peripheral vision and making it harder for your eyes to quickly track what’s on screen. In turn, that can significantly affect hand-eye coordination and reaction time. You may thus find it more challenging to spot enemy positions in your environment, respond to any in-game threats, and coordinate your actions with your team’s—all things that can impact how well you play over time.
Overcome Eye Strain to Reach Your e-Sports Potential
Fortunately, taking a few simple steps can help you relieve eye strain and help you play even better to improve your e-sports training outcomes and career prospects. Here are the three factors you’ll want to focus on:
Your Gaming Environment
One of the easiest ways to prevent and relieve eye strain is to ensure your body stays in a natural position while gaming—a position from which your eyes don’t need to work harder just to see what’s on screen. Use a gaming chair that promotes natural posture, like the Secretlab TITAN EVO, and set your monitor at eye level. That way, you can easily lean back and still see everything clearly without craning your neck forward and squinting at your screen. You’ll also want to think about lighting by matching the brightness of your monitor and its surroundings. That’s because your eyes will strain harder to clearly see screens if they’re brighter or darker than the rest of your gaming setup—which may be the case if you practice your e-sports skills in dark rooms at night, for example.
Blue Light Exposure
Another key factor that exacerbates eye strain is exposure to the high-energy blue light emitted by digital displays. Though it can improve your focus and alertness in moderation, excess amounts can strain your eyes by overwhelming them with glare. This means minimizing blue light exposure is one of the most effective ways to prevent eye strain during long gaming sessions. You can do this by getting yourself a pair of blue light glasses from brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley. Their lenses come with both blue light-blocking filters and anti-reflective coatings to prevent excess glare from causing eye fatigue and discomfort. At the same time, they let enough blue light in for you to reap its benefits. You can also invest in a gaming monitor from brands like ASUS, which combines high-resolution, anti-glare, and blue light-filtering displays to make looking at screens even easier on the eyes.
Consider Wearing Contact Lenses
If you don’t like wearing glasses while gaming, it’s worth considering contact lenses to prevent clamping from headphones and to improve the overall comfort factor. Unfortunately, despite the convenience compared to glasses, contact lenses can also pose a risk to your eye health. Some contact lenses may dry out during long gaming sessions and cause irritation or eye strain. Therefore, if you rely on contacts for vision correction, it’s best to look for contact lenses designed to keep your eyes moist and lubricated.
Acuvue’s daily Moist and Hydraluxe™ contact lenses, which you can easily pick up at your nearest Target Optical, offer all-day comfort while keeping your eyes feeling fresh. These lenses also provide the highest level of UV blocking in a daily disposable, which can also help alleviate blue light exposure symptoms. It’s essential to take frequent breaks and hydrate yourself to prevent your eyes from drying while gaming as well. You can set alarms on your phone or computer to remember to pause and drink water, use contact lens-compatible eye drops, or rest your eyes every hour.
Screen Break Intervals
Simply giving your eyes a break can help their muscles change positions and relax after looking at screens for prolonged periods, effectively preventing fatigue. For this, most eye care professionals recommend the 20-20-20 rule, which involves looking at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. As an aspiring e-sports professional, however, you know that may not always be feasible, especially if your matches last for more than 20 minutes at a time. In these cases, try doing the rule between matches, instead. You can also buy a heated eye mask like the Eyedration from Bruder Healthcare. It’s designed to melt the oil in your inner eyelids to address dryness and provide warmth that relaxes the eye muscles, helpful for relieving strain once you’re done with e-sports practice for the day.