Eye pain has dozens of possible causes, ranging from something as minor as a long day at a screen to something as urgent as a sudden spike in eye pressure. The cause usually depends on where the pain is, how it started, and what other symptoms came with it. Most eye pain resolves on its own or with simple treatment, but a few patterns signal a genuine emergency.
Surface Pain vs. Deep Pain
The location of your pain is one of the most useful clues. Pain on the surface of the eye, often described as stinging, burning, or a gritty feeling, points to conditions affecting the front of the eye: dry eyes, a scratch on the cornea, pink eye, a stye, or a foreign object. These tend to feel worse when you blink or touch the area.
Pain that feels deeper, like an ache or pressure behind the eye, suggests something affecting the internal structures or surrounding tissues. Migraines, cluster headaches, sinus infections, glaucoma, and inflammation of the middle or back layers of the eye all produce this kind of pain. Deep pain that gets worse when you move your eyes in different directions can be a sign of optic neuritis, an inflammation of the nerve that connects the eye to the brain.
The Most Common Culprit: Screen Time
If your eyes hurt at the end of a workday, digital eye strain is the likeliest explanation. A study of working adults in the UK and Ireland found that roughly 63% met the threshold for digital eye strain based on a standardized symptom questionnaire. Symptoms include aching, dryness, blurred vision, and a feeling of heaviness around the eyes.
The fix is straightforward. Follow the 20-20-20 rule: every 20 minutes, look at something about 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This relaxes the focusing muscles inside your eyes. Adjusting your screen so it sits slightly below eye level, reducing glare, and increasing the text size on your display all help. Eye strain from screens doesn’t cause lasting damage, but it can make your day miserable if you ignore it.
Dry Eyes and Artificial Tears
Dry eyes cause a burning, scratchy sensation that can feel surprisingly intense. Wind, air conditioning, low humidity, certain medications, and aging all reduce the tear film that keeps your eyes comfortable. If you reach for artificial tears, the choice between preserved and preservative-free formulas matters more than most people realize.
Preservatives in eye drops can irritate the surface of the eye with repeated use. If you’re using drops more than four times a day, or if your dryness is moderate to severe, preservative-free single-dose vials are the better option. Redness-relief drops are a separate category entirely and work by temporarily shrinking blood vessels. When the effect wears off, redness can rebound and look worse than before. The American Academy of Ophthalmology recommends not using redness-relief drops for more than 72 hours in a row.
Scratches, Foreign Objects, and Injuries
A corneal abrasion, a scratch on the clear front surface of the eye, causes sharp pain, tearing, and sensitivity to light. Common causes include a fingernail, a tree branch, dust, or even a contact lens edge. Most minor scratches heal within a few days but need antibiotic drops or ointment to prevent infection.
If something gets in your eye, you can try flushing it out with clean water or saline. What you should not do is rub the eye, attempt to pull out anything embedded in the surface, or use cotton swabs or tweezers. If you wear contact lenses, leave them out until the eye has fully healed.
Pink Eye and Other Infections
Pink eye (conjunctivitis) causes redness, swelling, watering, and sometimes a crusty discharge that glues your eyelashes together overnight. It can be viral, bacterial, or allergic. Viral and bacterial forms are contagious, so washing your hands and avoiding shared towels or pillows matters.
A stye, a tender red bump on the eyelid, develops when an oil gland gets clogged and infected. A warm compress applied for 10 to 15 minutes several times a day usually helps it drain. A chalazion looks similar but tends to be painless and forms deeper in the lid. Both are common and rarely serious, though a chalazion that doesn’t shrink after a few weeks may need professional treatment.
Inflammation Inside the Eye
Two inflammatory conditions cause pain that’s easy to confuse with pink eye but is far more serious. Uveitis, inflammation of the middle layer of the eye, produces redness, light sensitivity, blurry vision, and dark floaters drifting across your field of view. Symptoms can come and go or gradually worsen over time. Scleritis, inflammation of the white outer wall of the eye, causes a deep, boring pain that can wake you up at night and may radiate to the forehead or jaw.
Both conditions require prompt treatment because they can damage vision permanently if left unchecked. If your eye is red and painful but also sensitive to light or producing visual changes like floaters, that combination points away from simple pink eye and toward something that needs an eye doctor’s evaluation.
Glaucoma and Eye Pressure
Acute angle-closure glaucoma is one of the true emergencies in eye care. It happens when the drainage system inside the eye gets physically blocked, causing pressure to spike rapidly. The symptoms are unmistakable: severe eye pain, a bad headache, nausea or vomiting, blurred vision, halos or colored rings around lights, and noticeable eye redness. This combination demands immediate emergency care because permanent vision loss can occur within hours.
The more common form of glaucoma (open-angle) develops gradually and usually causes no pain at all until significant vision has already been lost. That’s why routine eye exams matter even when your eyes feel fine.
Optic Neuritis and Nerve-Related Pain
Optic neuritis causes pain that worsens with eye movement and typically affects one eye at a time. Vision loss develops over hours to days, often starting as a blurry or dim patch in the center of your visual field. Colors may look washed out, particularly reds. This condition is closely linked to multiple sclerosis and is sometimes the first sign of it. The pain is usually felt around or behind the eye and may extend to the forehead.
Contact Lens Pain
Contact lenses that hurt signal a problem you shouldn’t push through. The most dangerous risk is bacterial keratitis, an infection of the cornea that can lead to vision loss or blindness if untreated. The CDC identifies several behaviors that raise the risk: sleeping in lenses, rinsing or storing lenses in water instead of solution, reusing old solution by “topping off” the case, not cleaning the case itself, and sharing decorative lenses.
If a lens feels uncomfortable, take it out. If the pain, redness, or light sensitivity continues after removal, the cornea may already be irritated or infected.
Symptoms That Need Immediate Attention
Most eye pain is not an emergency, but certain symptom combinations are. Get evaluated urgently if you experience any of the following:
- Sudden vision loss in one or both eyes, with or without pain
- Flashing lights and a sudden shower of floaters in one eye, which can indicate a retinal tear or detachment
- Severe pain with nausea, vomiting, and halos around lights, the hallmark of acute glaucoma
- Chemical splash to the eye, which should be flushed with water immediately and continuously for at least 15 minutes before heading to an emergency room
- A visible wound or object stuck in the eye after any kind of impact
A peripheral or central blind spot that appears suddenly, especially combined with flashing lights, can mean the retina is pulling away from the back of the eye. This is painless in many cases, which makes it easy to dismiss. It shouldn’t be.