The tools I use to save my eyes with dry eye

1. Type and stare less: Wispr Flow & Text Blaze

This is the big one for me. Wispr Flow is voice dictation that works inside any app, on Mac, Windows and your phone. You just talk, and it types for you. I use it constantly: emails, messages, brainstorming, even writing these articles.

Why it helps your eyes so much: instead of staring at a screen and hammering a keyboard, you can look away, or even close your eyes, and just speak. It genuinely cuts down how long I spend locked onto a screen, and it makes me far more productive at the same time.

And it's the best one I've tried by a mile. Older voice-typing tools put the wrong words in and leave all your "ums" and "ahs" in. Wispr Flow actually strips those out and tidies your words up, so what comes out reads properly. Honest note: I'm on the free tier and it's generous, so you may never need to pay. If you use it as heavily as I do, there's a paid plan, but try the free one first.

Text Blaze: stop typing the same things over and over

If a lot of your typing is repetitive (the same emails, the same replies, forms, stock phrases), Text Blaze is a brilliant companion to voice dictation. It's what's called a "text expander." You save any chunk of text you type a lot and give it a short shortcut, then, wherever you're typing, you type that shortcut and the whole thing appears instantly.

Say you send the same marketing email over and over. You'd save it under something like /marketing. Then, instead of typing the whole thing out for the hundredth time, you just type /marketing and it fills the lot in for you. You can do it for anything you repeat: a standard reply, your address, a bit of boilerplate, a paragraph you always paste in.

The point for your eyes is the same as dictation: it means far less typing and screen time, especially for repetitive work. There's a generous free version to start with.

2. Remind yourself to take breaks: the eyeCare extension

The eyeCare - Protect your vision and health Chrome extension (search "eyeCare" in the Chrome Web Store) is the one I use to make myself take breaks. It gives you a little notification, by default every 20 minutes, telling you to look away and rest your eyes. You can set it to whatever interval you like, but the recommended habit is the 20-20-20 rule: every 20 minutes, look at something about 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

It sounds trivial, but when you're absorbed in work you simply forget, and forgetting is exactly when your blink rate crashes. Having something nudge you genuinely helps.

3. Do the blink exercises: the MyDryEye app

This one is lovely, and free. The MyDryEye app was made by Professor James Wolffsohn's team at Aston University (the same place I did my amniotic membrane trial, funnily enough). It's built on their actual research into the best blinking exercises.

It walks you through the clinically-tested routine (close, squeeze, open, 15 times, three times a day), lets you track your symptoms, set treatment reminders, and even find a specialist near you. If you only download one dry-eye app, I'd make it this one. It's on both the App Store and Google Play, just search "MyDryEye".

4. See how much you actually blink: Eyeblink

Eyeblink is a clever one. It uses your webcam to count your blinks and tells you whether you're blinking enough, which is genuinely eye-opening if you've never thought about it. It checks in every so often and builds up a picture of your blink rate over the day.

A reassuring privacy note: this kind of tool processes the camera on your own device. No video is recorded or sent anywhere, it's just counting blinks. I'll be honest, I haven't set this one up for myself yet, but it looks genuinely useful for anyone who wants to know if their blinking has gone lazy (mine had).

5. Soften your screen: dark mode and warm light

A big, harsh, bright white screen is tiring for sore eyes. Two easy fixes I'd recommend:

• Dark mode everywhere. The Dark Reader extension turns almost any website dark, which is much gentler than glaring white pages. Turn your device's dark mode on too.
• Warm, dimmer light in the evenings. Turn on Night Light (Windows) or Night Shift (Mac) to warm the screen up, and knock your brightness down. It's easier on tired eyes and kinder to your sleep at night.

To be clear, and to stay honest with what I said in my screen-time article: this is about cutting glare and brightness so your eyes are more comfortable, not about blocking "dangerous blue light" (the evidence for that is weak). But comfortable is comfortable, and it makes a real difference on a long day. There's a good write-up here on tweaking your browser this way if you want to go further (bigger text, higher zoom, and so on).

6. Let your screen read to you

One of the kindest things you can do for dry eyes is simply not read with them when you don't have to. Your device can read the screen aloud for you, for free, and there are two ways to do it:

• Built into your device. On Windows, the Edge browser has a "Read aloud" button, and there's a system tool called Narrator. On a Mac, go to System Settings, Accessibility, Spoken Content, and turn on "Speak Selection" or "Speak Screen" (there's also VoiceOver). Once it's on, your computer will read pages, emails and documents out to you.
• A browser extension. If you want something simpler, the Read Aloud text-to-speech extension for Chrome reads any web page with one click.

And of course, every article on this site has a 🔊 Listen button for exactly this reason, so you can rest your eyes and let me read it to you.

The honest bottom line

None of these cure dry eye, and you don't need all of them. But stacking two or three, say voice dictation, a break reminder, and letting things be read aloud, genuinely reduces how hard a day at a screen is on your eyes. And nearly all of it is free. Start with whichever one sounds most useful for how you actually spend your day.