Are Our Devices Making Us Ill?
A better question to ask might be, Were our devices designed to make us ill? Regardless, what are you going to do about it?
Have you or anyone you know been dealing with any of these issues the last couples of years?
Blurry vision
Floaters
Dry eyes
Eye strain/pain
Headaches or migraines
Neck pain
Dizziness
Vertigo
Nausea
Fatigue
Insomnia
These are some of the more common symptoms of cybersickness. When I first started researching the matter, resources kept telling me that cybersickness is caused by excessive use of AR or VR, playing video games for long stretches, or configuring the wrong settings on your phone.
I call bullshit.
Do a search for “i have vertigo” on social media and you’ll see how many people are afflicted with this issue. Or look up “why do i get dizzy looking at my screen” or “can my computer make me sick” in your search engine and you’ll find endless forum posts of people desperate to find answers.
Our devices are doing this to us. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they were designed to do this to us, too.) It was all exacerbated during the COVID lockdowns and mandates. And these bad device habits haven’t gone away even as governments have loosened their grip on us.
Why am I writing this? For one, because I’m now dealing with the side effects of cybersickness and I want to warn others so they can (1) watch out for the early warning signs and (2) start weaning themselves off of their devices.
If you’re interested, here’s my story about how the choices I made during the “pandemic” destroyed my eyes and literally brought me to my knees:
How the Cybersickness Started
A little over a year ago I began experiencing issues with my eyes.
At first it manifested as floaters. Little dark spots worming their way through my vision.
Next, I began to feel lightheaded and dizzy any time I looked downwards for long stretches. It was usually when I was on my laptop or looking at my smartphone, though it also happened when I’d read a book.
Then, I started to experience visual migraines. They always occurred in my left eye and looked like a spinning kaleidoscope. Within minutes, I’d go blind in that part of my eye and I’d need to lie down in a dark room for about a half-hour to restore my vision. I’d then deal with intense nausea for the next few hours.
I initially wrote it off. I had just escaped the hellhole that was Rhode Island and was working extra-long hours to try and recover the business I lost from COVID lockdown insanity. I figured the computer was just doing funny tricks to my eyes.
I started using a Pomodoro timer to force myself to take breaks away from the screen.
It seemed to help somewhat. The floaters and migraines didn’t occur as frequently.
The start of this year, I stopped using the timer. I was about to go on vacation, so I ramped up my work so that I could make up for the time and money I was going to lose. Very stupid, but it is what it is.
Not long after in January, my eyes went haywire on me while I was driving. I had worked all morning long and decided to run out and get some lunch. As I sat at the stoplight, my right eye moved towards the left one… and just didn’t move back. I managed to get myself into the parking lot, shut my eyes for a few minutes, and everything went back to normal.
I nearly forgot about it until shit went off the rails in March.
How the Cybersickness Escalated
I sat down at my computer one morning and realized I couldn’t see out of my left eye. It was as if the lens in front of that eye was gone. The next morning I woke up and my vision was restored in my left eye and then gone in my right. And the morning after that I couldn’t see out of either eye. That persisted for a few days.
Then the vertigo began.
If I dared look at my computer or phone screen for more than 20 minutes at a time, I’d feel as though the world was spinning. In some cases, I would catch myself and get it to stop before it went any further. In most cases, though, I’d fall and end up crawling along the floor in search of my couch or bed. The vertigo and nausea would stay with me the rest of the day and would revisit me later in the week if I spent too much time with my devices.
I put my work and life on hold and made an appointment with my eye doctor.
After the exam ended, I asked what was wrong.
“Oh, your eyes are perfectly healthy.”
Ummm… Okay. Then what’s going on?
“It sounds like you had a stroke. You need to see a neurologist.”
She said it just like that. Super nonchalant as she was ushering me out of the exam room.
I obviously didn’t understand why she’d jump to that assumption. The issues occurred when I was staring at a screen or directly after I’d spent a long stretch in front of one. Why would a stroke only cause issues for me in front of devices?
I ran into some problems with her referral since she didn’t know any neurologists or neuro-ophthalmologists in Tampa (which should’ve been a red flag). So I had to find one on my own.
Turns out there are only three neuro-ophthalmologists in that area. And they were all booked out more than 6 months in advance because, you guessed it, there are a lot of people dealing with these issues right now. I tried contacting neurologists in the area, but they wouldn’t see me until I had visited the eye specialist first.
I was in the process of moving to Jacksonville, so I had to wait until I moved to find a neuro-ophthalmologist. However, I started to get hit with vertigo every time I drove and occasionally on my dog walks in July. Again, it was only on days when I’d been at my computer all morning.
I also was dealing with severe dry eye and headaches every time I tried to work. I write articles about web design for a living, so it’s not like I had a way to work around this issue until it got fixed.
So I found an eye care center in Clearwater that specialized in blurriness and dry eyes issues. I figured, at the least, she could provide me with some relief until I could get in to deal with the bigger issues.
After a 2-hour session, she told me that I still needed to see a neuro-ophthalmologist, but that she at least knew what was going on with my eyes. They weren’t working together anymore. Because it was taking my eyes time to focus on the same object at the same time, it had thrown everything out of whack. And the blurriness, vertigo, and all that jazz was the result.
I asked her what caused it and she said it must have been a head injury or car accident. The only thing was, I haven’t had any head injuries since I was a kid and I’ve only been in one car accident which was back in 2005.
When I asked if it could be due to the last glasses prescription I’d gotten or excessive screentime, she insisted that wasn’t the case. It was a head injury and I needed to see a neuro. In the meantime, though, she could give me glasses with prism correction.
My Life in a Funhouse
A few weeks later, I’m in Jacksonville and I suddenly feel like I’m walking through a funhouse. You know those tunnel-like rooms where a cylindrical wall spins around you and makes you feel dizzy?
Yeah, that’s what the world felt like. And it didn’t go away. Like at all. I’d be sleeping and still feel like I was spinning. Going to the store had become a nightmare, too. Every time I looked upwards, it felt like the floor had fallen was about to fall out from underneath me.
I couldn’t get a neuro to see me until I had a local referral, so I found a doctor here to check me out. To try and make this already long story shorter, the doctor I saw in Clearwater was right in that I needed prism correction. However, she’d ordered a very bad prescription for me. Rather than make my eyes work together, it was forcing both of them to point in the wrong direction. Hence, the funhouse effect.
What I Learned from All This
I found a doctor who specializes in my specific eye problems and I finally got my diagnosis: Binocular vision disorder. I also have the right prism glasses and I’m about to begin vision therapy. The fact that I can even sit here and look at my screen as I type is a miracle.
Now, my case is a severe example. But I can trace it back to choices I made during COVID. Not the car accident I was in when I was 22. My new doc says my eyes are the problem, not the head, so there’s no need for a neuro. Thank fuck.
So, basically, I was wearing a shitty glasses prescription for two years. I had gotten them just before COVID started. When I complained to the doctor about how dizzy I felt, he told me there was nothing wrong and I just needed to adjust. The truth was, he didn’t want to fix it because they were scared to have people in their offices. I couldn’t get any kind of in-person doctor visit in Rhode Island for the remainder of the time I lived there. So I just dealt with it.
Side note: When the issues got bad this year, one of the first things I did was switch my glasses to a very old backup pair I had. The vertigo stopped for a time, which was what clued me into the glasses being part of the problem. But the dizziness and blurriness would occasionally come back when I worked. So I thought, maybe it wasn’t the glasses? I put them on and 6 hours later I felt like I was falling… and falling… and falling. Dramamine finally got the free-fall sensation to stop, but I wasn’t able to walk upright for the next day.
It wasn’t just the glasses though. Over the last couple of years, I was spending insane amounts of time on my computer and smartphone doing work, Twittering, researching stuff for my moves, and generally trying to find a way to connect with people because friends were too scared to see me in person.
My glasses may have damaged the way the muscles in my eye, but the screens were the trigger for the cybersickness issues. Going forward, I’ll be reducing the time I spend in front of my computer even more, reducing my dependency on apps, and also migrating away from my smartphone and towards a flip phone. Nothing good can come from these screens.
What Should You Take Away from This?
My case is a bit different since I had the bad hardware contributing to my eye issues. However, the damage done by screens is nothing to brush off.
Cybersickness as a permanent or temporary condition can be very harmful. Loss of work, increased accidents, inability to get on with your day in a normal way, what have you.
I’d say that if you’ve experienced any of the symptoms of cybersickness or are generally wary of the effects of smartphones, 5G, Meta, and all the other digital devices they want us to live in front of, start breaking away from it all now. It’s only going to get worse.
Also, don’t ignore your health. No matter what doctors tell you or how they brush you off. You know your body better than anyone else. If something feels off, then it most definitely is. Do your research and inform yourself. Because doctors most certainly won’t do the work or advocate for you unless you force them.
One last thing I want to say is this:
It’s really fucked up that when it came to something like COVID that was dangerous for a very small portion of the population, medical professionals were calling for a COVID-zero approach. We had to do everything in our power to keep everyone safe until we could stick the clot-shot “cure” into everyone’s arms.
When it comes to cybersickness and other visual/neurological disorders that are on the rise, medical professionals aren’t advocating for less screen time and reducing our dependency on devices. What they want to do is give you a fix so that you’ll one day be able to use all of the technologies readily available to the population without fear of puking, passing out, or being unable to earn a living.
As the World Economic Forum tells us:
“[D]on’t let cybersickness get you down. As researchers continue to find ways to mitigate and prevent cybersickness across all devices, people may one day be able to enjoy advancements in innovative technologies without feeling dizzy.”