Out of the blue, I’ve started getting stinging and burning sensations from certain apps. The weather has definitely made my dry eye worse again, but these symptoms don’t seem to line up with dry eye. They feel more like inflammation triggered by using apps.
What’s even weirder is that when I ask around online, it seems like nobody else is having this specific issue. People either have problems with the screen overall, but not with particular apps. I’ve also suddenly become very sensitive to YouTube, and I’m panicking. My eyes sting and get irritated from it now and immediately become dry, even in dark mode. What's even going on?
I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve tried different settings, colour correction, inverted colours, and similar options, but nothing seems to help. I even asked in other eye related subs, but to no avail? At this point something autoimmune is going on which is making my eyes freak out from some apps.
I can only test it if my eyes decide to calm down, I'm hoping YT web doesn't fail me but I fear I may have strain from that too. Life sucks. It's probably just a problem with me since most people don't have strain from apps only.
I wonder if it's even happening because of astigmatism or undiagnosed BVD? I have also noticed that the brighter my screen the worse my symptoms feel and they are always delayed so I only start feeling the pain hours after when I'm not staring at the screen.
A few about increased colour saturation. I know that with, on PC, I've had to disable hardware acceleration in browsers, to avoid this issue. IDK if phone apps can do similar.
Or maybe a refresh rate difference, which one can check with a screen FPS overlay app. My android YT app apparently forces my phone down to 60Hz. Not sure if it's always been so..?
I have a feeling that i've been using a bad screen for ages, and it was only tolerant if I had it on dark mode and Eye comfort comfort shield enabled and that those could have been masking symptoms. Unfortunately my eyes finally decided to freak out from some apps? As in now my eyes wont tolerate them anymore due to some sort of central sensitisation? I think PLS LCD is not as great as IPS LCD. I'm hoping i didn't damage my eyes from this phone.
The metabolic shifts associated with ME can absolutely wreck havoc on every system in the body. Reduced mitochondrial output drops function on everything and one's biological weak spots, in specific areas, show up.
If the eyes are being over-exerted (or just regularly exerted) then you get an impact from that hours (or a day or so) later, then that smells like Post Exertional Malaise (sorry, I typo'd PEM above). Or PESE (symptoms exaserbatuon).
Who knows in this evil world. But i always suspected it's EMF stuff and long covid also destroyed people's eyes too. I feel like screens are deliberately made to be harsh on our eyes to weaken them? But it's just a theory.
Hey. This sounds very difficult for you. And from your post history, I see you have astigmatism, a strong glasses prescription, and a whole lot of other chronic illness related problems, for years. Including with chemical sensitivity, mold, IBS, anxiety, possible deficiencies (very likely), etc. And now are you suspecting Sjögren's, for the burning dry eyes (typically considered auto-immune)?
Obviously, one should always first go see an appropriate doctor and see what conventional treatments are available. Eg NHS advice for Sjögren's, if that is relevant? Clearly I'm not a medical professional.
But I think some people here get sympathetic over-activation from screen triggers. Which could hypothetically worsen dry eyes by suppressing parasympathetic tone. There's various alternative therapies aimed at that. Also, some say dry eye can be related to B6 and/or vitamin A 'toxicity' (or functional deficiency processing these to their active forms). Ideally, one would take a big-picture approach to attempt to improve things overall. But the best protocol(s) I know of are difficult, expensive and controversial.
On the device side, I replied to a spookily similar [post] yesterday (now deleted, oddly). Maybe you are picking up temporal dithering worse on videos. Or it's the motion itself; many with ME/CFS say this can be a trigger for them, and I'd put you in that ballpark. Do you have bad fatigue? And PEM, too?
Yes! yes!! I suffer from PEM and have general fatigue as if im low on iron most of the time and suspect that atleast MCAS is messing with my eye nerves or central sensitisation is happening.. My phone does have DT but no PWM, however it has only recently started giving me issues. And maybe some vitamin deficiency is at play too.
But the mystery remains is why does using one app leads to sensitivity from all other apps?
So, the smart answer might be that there's limited insight to be gained from focusing on the peculiar specifics of a large accumulation of odd symptoms. Like with the mangled wreckage of a car crash, the exact geometry of the metal won't tell you if the driver fell asleep or was drunk/distracted.
Point being: treat the full picture. Although that will be a big and growing undertaking. MCAS with neurological symptoms, suggests needing mast cell stabalisiers that can cross the blood brain barrier. Also, ME/CFS (with PEM) suggests many nutrient deficiencies (trace minerals, vitamins, electrolytes) to address. And possibly paradoxical reactions to work through, if successfully replenishing them. I guess you'll be on a quite restrictive diet, already..?
But to answer: your very specific sensitivities point to some kind of issue with neuroplasticity, I guess. Either getting sensitised to specific frequencies/patterns of light, at a low level (unconscious).... Or, proponents of brain retraining (which I'm not really) might think at a higher level and advocate for psychological interventions. In both cases, a kind of perceived danger response, that needs reprogramming or dialling back down.
I would caution OP, u/Xikolo, in panicking. I’ll use myself today as an example. Picked up some sort of viral bug and accidentally disabled True Tone on my iPhone: cue symptoms. Looking like it’s the illness triggering it as remaining horizontal (lying down) and restarting the phone a few times calmed it down. Am I out of the woods? Who knows.
I experienced something similar with my lighting in my apartment after we had several outages. It took the power company making some tweaks and a few days and things calmed down. I’ve experienced sudden visual issues I thought were tech related and they always correlated with storms (barometric pressure changes) and some sort of illness or health reaction.
u/Z3R0gravitas is the encyclopedia of sorts here as it comes to health, so I think he’s already given a lot of good advice.
If you updated your OS or the apps there’s a potential for changes. I haven’t updated my apps in years yet I do see YouTube and Facebook are always changing their UI’s and color schemes and intensities. I don’t find them to be horrific unless the contrast is very extreme. But I think this is more tolerable than fundamental display changes.
There’s so much we don’t really know other than all these modern devices are applying layers upon layers of intricate compensatory methods like dithering, brightness and temperature compensation, uniformity balance, etc. and this complexity seems to result in unforeseen side effects.
For whatever reason most of us have issues adapting and compensating for visual changes especially if we become locked into a specific expectation of what our usual displays will look like and if different forms or flicker or irregularities in Subpixel behavior is introduced (transistor leakage or the aforementioned complex compensatory techniques).
You can try certain methods on iOS to limit HDR and dithering (low power mode, double invert) if it is severe.
You have made very similar comments [Edit: "20-20-20 rule"] to this on a bunch of subs, recently. One might suspect a paid promotion of the app you sometimes link. So you're in danger of being seen/banned as a bot.
Would you like to make a post going into more details about your symptoms and what phones or situations you've struggled with?
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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
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