so another premise of this video may be silly how to Blink but this may be one of the more
important videos you can watch to help you with your eyes your dry eyes now and in the future
let's focus in [Music] dry eye disease is significantly increasing and we're finding it more
and more in younger Generations as well and part of this can be contributed from computer iPad and
phone use in fact when we're using digital devices our blink rate decreases by 60 percent this can
cause the surface of our eyes to dry out redness irritation it can also cause problems with our oil
glands in our eyelids which can lead to more dry eye problems in the future so to fight this I'm
going to show you how to do blinking exercises hopefully helping tone your eyelid muscles to
improve the quality of your blink and increase the frequency of your blink as well then I'll
go over if they actually work and why blinking is important and at the end of the video I'll show
you some programs that you can get on the computer and on your phone to help remind you to Blink and
the one on the computer is actually pretty helpful it's free I've actually used it for a while now
and I think it's something you should look into so make sure you stay towards the end of the video
for that one there's actually a few different ways you'll find online how to do these blinking Acts
exercises the principal is the same you're trying to tone and improve the eyelid muscle so you have
full complete blinks now I'm going to show you two different ways the first one is really simple and
straightforward this simple way you're going to actually focus on completely shutting your eyelids
so both of your eyelids are actually touching each other so when you're going to do them you're going
to close your eyes count to two one two open close one two open and then repeat it five times the
second way I find that it's actually a little bit better it actually feels like you're doing
some type of eyelid exercise same principle you're going to close your eyes and count to two but this
time you're actually going to use your eyelids and actually squeeze squeeze and count to two
one two and gently open and then do it again close squeeze one two and gently open now you're going
to repeat this five times now the tricky part here is knowing that you're actually using your eyelid
muscles and so one tip that you'll find online is actually to use your finger and put it right
on the side of your orbital bone and you'll feel which muscles that you are using you want to make
sure you're using your eyelid muscles to close your eyelids if you feel like you're going to
use your cheeks or your forehead to kind of force your eyelids closed you'll kind of feel the spasm
of the muscles on this side you want to make sure you're feeling the muscles near your eyelid so
it's a little tricky to First figure out in fact when I was doing it I was making sure that I was
like okay yeah that's the muscle right there but sometimes you'll find that your cheek and your
forehead will scrunch down and it'll still do that but make sure that your eyelid muscles are the
ones that are actually flexing and forcing those eyelids closed you can actually do a combination
of these where you close your eyes one two open your eyes and then close your eyes and do the
squeeze one two and then open your eyes and so you can kind of mix it up a little bit repeating
it five or six times so you'll have a gentle close and then a squeeze eyelid muscle tone close
and like I said the perfect time to do these is if you incorporate the 20 20 rule every 20
minutes you take at least 20 second break looking 20 feet away this is the perfect time to do that
you're blinking and blinking exercises before you go back to using your digital device now
the blinking exercise is actually help your dry eyes or improve the quality of your tears
now I actually did dive into studies on this one and the majority of the studies did show
that it did improve the quality of your blink now let me focus in on that one so a lot of
the studies took a sample of people and they did questionnaires on them to know where they
stood with their dry eyes and dry symptoms they measured how long their tears actually stayed on
the surface of their eyes that's the t-but the tier breakup time they also measured how many
incomplete blinks they had in a certain amount of time so they kind of videoed them blinking
and tried to see how many of those blinks didn't actually touch each other where the eyelids didn't
touch each other then they had them go through a certain period of time where they did periodic
eyelid exercises to see if improved any of those sections that they were studying and at the end of
the study it actually showed that it did improve those different sections the questionnaire that
they filled out after words of doing blinking exercises scored better on their dry eye symptoms
also the quality of their blink how many times they had full blinks did improve and did improve
significantly a lot of the studies that I read show that blinking did play a significant role
in The increased dry eye disease and they found it twofold one it contributed to meibomian gland
Dropout where your oil glands and your eyelids started to atrophy because they weren't properly
functioning very well and number two it caused a poor quality tear film over the surface of
the eyes how the eyes are supposed to work is when you blink your eyelids will touch each other it'll
grab the oil from those oil glands and spread a thin layer of oil right over the tears the lipid
layer and that lipid layer is there to protect the tears and the eyes and it keeps the tears
from evaporating off the surface of the eyes so Not only was incomplete blinking causing current
dryness as people were staring at their screens but also in the future because of that meibomian
oil gland Dropout was going to cause more dry eye problems more dry disease in the future so even
telling people to Blink more might sound silly and maybe one of the key factors to help people
put their dry eyes especially in the future so this is something you want to incorporate into
your daily life to see if it's going to help you let me show you some programs that you can get on
the computer and your phone to kind of help you remind you to do these blinking exercises now if
you want to look for apps on your phone they have free apps for Android and Apple to help remind you
to Blink so if you're using your phone a lot and you know you're not blinking enough you could look
into these apps now they are pretty simplistic they'll just have kind of a picture of an eye
or an eyelid show up and blink kind of giving you that visual reminder to Blink and that's pretty
much all it does it's kind of annoying but it's probably designed that way so it gives you that
reminder on Android there's an app called blink it's pretty simple just the blink app and on Apple
it's the Donald Korb blink training app and I'll put the links to all these in the description so
you can check it out now if you're working on the computer all day long definitely the best one by
far that you should look into and it's free is from blinkingmatters.com now the reason why this
one's so helpful and if you feel comfortable with this it actually uses your computer camera and
records and watches your eyes and your blinking rate so it measures how many incomplete blinks
you have how often you're blinking in a minute and it kind of tracks and gives you a graph you
can also set reminders every 20 minutes to remind you to do the blinking exercises and
every once in a while if it notices that you aren't blinking enough while you're doing your
work an eye and eyelid will pop up saying hey hey you know remember to Blink and so it's actually
really really helpful again it can be annoying kind of like the computer apps a little bit but
I found it to be the best one to remind me to do the blinking exercises to remind me to Blink and
actually kind of supports and tracks data a little bit so you can actually see improvement over time
now I don't ask this very often but if you could like and share this video I do think this video
could be helpful for a lot of people now and in the future now one thing I'd like to say if you
don't blink it can cause your eyes to be dry but it actually can cause your vision to be blurry
and if you're wondering how that actually happens I have a full video explaining how
dry eyes can cause your vision to be blurry right here I'm Dr Neal Guymon, Dr. EyeGuy, stay focused