A dull, persistent ache in your eye usually comes from one of a handful of causes, ranging from hours of screen time to sinus pressure to more serious conditions like glaucoma or inflammation inside the eye. The type of ache, where exactly you feel it, and what makes it worse all point toward different explanations.
Screen Use and Eye Strain
The most common reason for aching eyes is prolonged screen time. When you stare at a computer, phone, or tablet, your eyes are constantly refocusing to read the tiny pixels that make up the text on screen. You don’t notice it happening, but the muscles inside your eye are working nonstop to keep letters sharp against a low-contrast background. This produces a dull ache behind the eyes that builds over the course of the day.
You also blink far less while looking at screens. Normal blinking happens around 15 to 20 times per minute, but screen use drops that to roughly three to seven times per minute. You may not even close your eyelids fully when you do blink. The result is a dry, irritated eye surface layered on top of the muscle fatigue. The ache typically fades once you step away from the screen, though it can linger if you’ve been working for many hours straight. Taking breaks every 20 minutes to focus on something distant gives those internal eye muscles a chance to relax.
Sinus Pressure Behind the Eye
If your eye ache comes with a stuffy nose, facial pressure, or a recent cold, the pain may not be coming from your eye at all. Your sinuses sit directly behind and around your eye sockets. When they’re inflamed or infected, the swelling creates pressure that radiates into and behind the eye. The sphenoid and ethmoid sinuses, located deep behind the bridge of your nose and near the back of the eye socket, are especially likely to produce this kind of referred pain. It often feels like a deep pressure or heaviness rather than a sharp sting, and it tends to worsen when you bend forward.
Inflammation Inside the Eye
A condition called uveitis involves inflammation of the tissue layer inside the eye. The most common form, anterior uveitis, causes a deep ache along with noticeable sensitivity to light. Bright environments become genuinely painful because the inflamed tissue spasms when your pupil reacts to light changes. You might also notice redness, blurred vision, or floaters.
Uveitis can develop after an infection, alongside an autoimmune condition, or sometimes without a clear trigger. It requires treatment to prevent lasting damage to your vision.
Scleritis: Deep, Boring Pain
The sclera is the tough white outer wall of your eye. When it becomes inflamed, a condition called scleritis, the pain is severe, deep, and often described as boring into the eye. It can wake you up at night. Light sensitivity is common. This is distinct from the milder and more superficial condition episcleritis, which causes redness and irritation on the eye’s surface but typically no real pain and no light sensitivity. If the ache is deep enough to disrupt sleep, scleritis is a possibility worth getting checked.
Pain That Worsens With Eye Movement
If the ache flares up when you look side to side or up and down, optic neuritis is one explanation. This is inflammation of the optic nerve, the cable that carries visual signals from your eye to your brain. Most people with optic neuritis describe a dull ache behind the eye that gets noticeably worse with eye movement. Some also see flashing or flickering lights when they move their eyes. Vision in the affected eye may become blurry or washed out, particularly color perception. Optic neuritis is sometimes an early sign of multiple sclerosis, so it warrants a thorough workup.
Corneal Scratches and Surface Injuries
A scratch on the cornea, the clear front surface of the eye, produces a different kind of pain: sharp, gritty, and immediate. It feels like something is stuck in your eye even after whatever caused the scratch is gone. Tearing, redness, light sensitivity, and blurred vision come on fast. This type of pain is hard to confuse with a dull background ache because it demands your attention and worsens with every blink. Minor corneal abrasions heal within a day or two, but deeper scratches can lead to infection if left untreated.
Acute Angle-Closure Glaucoma
This is the emergency scenario. Acute angle-closure glaucoma happens when fluid drainage inside the eye suddenly blocks off, causing pressure to spike. Normal eye pressure sits between 10 and 20 mmHg. During an acute attack, it can rise far above that range within minutes. The pain is severe and often accompanied by a bad headache, nausea or vomiting, blurred vision, halos or colored rings around lights, and eye redness. This combination of symptoms needs emergency treatment to prevent permanent vision loss.
When Eye Ache Needs Urgent Attention
Most eye aches resolve with rest, a break from screens, or treatment of an underlying sinus problem. But certain patterns signal something more serious. Seek emergency care if the pain is severe and comes with a headache, fever, or increased light sensitivity. The same applies if your vision changes suddenly, you experience nausea or vomiting alongside the eye pain, you see halos around lights, or you have trouble moving the eye or keeping it open. Blood or pus coming from the eye, swelling around the eye, or pain caused by a chemical splash also warrant an emergency visit.
If you wear soft contact lenses and develop eye pain, or if a mild ache hasn’t improved after two to three days, those are reasons to get it evaluated even without the dramatic symptoms. Eye aches that wake you from sleep, come with vision changes in one eye, or consistently worsen with eye movement point toward conditions that benefit from early treatment.