Sleep Lab · Eye & light · 5 min read
Eye strain before bed: a 10-minute wind-down
By the last ten minutes of the day your eyes have been held on one near, bright surface for hours. A wind-down is not something you add to them. It is the part where you stop asking them to focus at all.
What do the last ten minutes ask of your eyes?
Through the day your eyes change distance constantly: a face across a table, a window, a page, the road. The last hours of the evening are the opposite. One distance, one bright plane, and always a next item on it. What you notice at bedtime is not really about the light alone — it is that nothing in that hour has asked your eyes to change what they are doing. You can check this tonight: set the screen down, look at the farthest corner of the room, and the difference arrives before any product could.
We are going to stop the explanation there. There are plenty of confident numbers and named conditions attached to screens in the evening, and we have not verified any of them to the standard we would need before printing them on a page with our name on it. A claim we cannot stand behind is worth less to you than no claim at all. Everything below is behaviour you can try tonight and judge for yourself.
What are we not going to tell you?
We make no claim about what any of this does for your eyes. We do not name a condition, we do not quote a percentage, and we do not repeat anyone's story about their own eyes as evidence. A single person's experience is not a rate. There is also nothing to buy in the ten minutes below: glasses, drops and devices all belong to a different question, and this page is not that question.
What happens in the ten minutes, in order?
- Change the distance first. Put the screen down and look at the farthest thing in the room, or close your eyes. The demand to hold one near focus ends the moment the distance changes. Do this before you touch the light — dimming a screen you are still using solves the smaller half and leaves the larger one running.
- Then lower the light. Switch the overhead light off and leave one warm lamp low. The room should get darker before you are asked to fall asleep in it. This is about the room, not about a setting on the device.
- Take away the next thing. A feed, a reply you are waiting on and a series that offers the next episode all hand you one more item. A finished chapter does not. If you need something to do in the last ten minutes, choose the kind that ends.
- Let the surface be quiet. If you wear a mask for the night, nothing should press on your eyelids, and the strap should not have to be tight to stay put. Keeping light out is the main job; pressure is only a passenger. Comfort you have to clamp on is not rest.
None of this is medical advice. If discomfort in your eyes lasts into the day, that is a doctor's question rather than a bedtime one.
About AERÉ
AERÉ is a sleep and everyday-wellness home brand based in Hangzhou, China, designing twenty things for the hour before bed.
Questions people ask next
We would not start there. The order is distance, then light, then the next thing; glasses touch only a small part of the second. Sort the ten minutes first — it costs nothing — and decide about the glasses afterwards.
No. It is a length of time you can actually keep at the end of a day, not a dose. Two minutes with the screen set down beats an hour of dimming it while you keep scrolling.
We are not recommending anything on this page and we are not naming a product. One thing is worth saying: anything that presses on your eyelids is not rest, and keeping light out is the part that matters.