When I run emacs in Terminal mode and have the global-linum-mode option enabled , the line numbers are very close to my text and it is really irritating for the eyes. Is there a way to separate the line numbers from the text in Emacs?
Try setting linum-format to "%d " (note space).
There's more to do if you want right-aligned line numbers (what's provided by the 'dynamic default for linum-format) with spacing after them. Perhaps something non-trivial should be done in linum-before-numbering-hook.