With so many of us glued to digital devices, our eyes are working harder than they ever have before. Not surprisingly, more and more people now experience eyestrain, mental fatigue, and headaches on a regular basis. What a lot of people don’t know is vision has as much to do with how your two eyes work together as it does with how clearly you see. Read on as a Camarillo, CA optometrist talks about a different type of vision problem and how it can cause headaches.

Your Eyes and Headaches – What’s Connection?

Your eyes are made up of an intricate network of blood vessels, nerves, and connective tissues. In fact, the back of the eye contains some of the smallest blood vessels in the body. Unfortunately, the smallness of these vessels makes them highly sensitive to stress and strain. For instance, if you spend hours at a time looking at a computer screen, this places a strain on your eyes. After a certain point, the blood vessels start to constrict and become even smaller. When this happens, your eyes don’t get enough blood, which provides needed oxygen and nutrients to the eyes. These conditions set the stage for a headache to develop behind your eyes.

How Vision Problems Can Trigger Headaches

While the phrase “vision problems” makes most people think of visual acuity or clearness, if your two eyes don’t work together as they should, this can cause vision problems of a different sort. If the two eyes don’t work together as a team, they’re unable to send a clear image to the brain. When this happens, your eyes have to work harder to create a clear image. This condition is known as binocular vision disorder. This type of vision problem can become especially apparent when doing close-up tasks, such as working on a computer screen. Close-up tasks require the eyes to focus on text, and follow lines of text, not to mention the likely glare you get off of a digital screen. Before long, eye strain sets in, causing headaches, blurry vision, cloudy vision, and even double vision.

Signs That Your Vision Is Triggering Headaches

• Your eyes are sensitive to light
• You experience throbbing or stabbing pain around the eyes
• Headaches impair your ability to remember things
• Headache pain situates along your brow-line
• You experience dizziness
• Unable to carry out daily tasks because of headache pain

 

Vision Therapy – A Direct Treatment Approach

Vision therapy is specifically designed to train your eyes to work together more efficiently as a team. The overall goal works to improve communication between your eyes and your brain. An optometrist assesses your eyes to determine your treatment needs. From there, he or she will put together a personalized optometric vision therapy program that will help eliminate the underlying conditions that cause headaches.   If you have more questions or wish to schedule a consultation with an optometrist, feel free to call our Camarillo, CA optometry office today.