Ask HN: How do you prevent eyestrain with daily computer use?
Does anybody have any tricks to prevent eyestrain in day to day computer use?
* lighting position
* Screen brightness
* position to windows
and many more I am sure. Simply make text bigger. 125% DPI or 125% "zoom" depending on the OS/application help with eye strain massively, and it surprises me how few colleagues are willing to try it (e.g. "I can see perfectly, why would I increase text size?!"). Between that and lowering a monitor's brightness to below 50% (often around 35% depending on brand), are my biggest tips. Windows now has a blue light filter built right in (Settings -> System -> Display -> Night Light). > Simply make text bigger. This is astonishingly effective at reducing eye strain. Even if you can read small text on your screen, it requires a lot of work by the muscles in your eyes to maintain the focus long term. Larger text means less precise focusing is required to be able to read the text. This. At some point I noticed that at the end of the work day my eyes were excessively tired more often than not. This simple change of making reading easier by zooming in just a little made a huge difference. I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one who does this. I also enable the find the cursor feature because with multiple monitors I tend to squint to hunt for it otherwise. I did it the other way... Bought a cheap 4k@60Hz 50 inch TV ... cost me around AUD$400. I was doing multi screen before, but I like this better I have effectively 4x 1080p screens in a 2x2 array. The only downside is the tv forgets my backlight preferences on any source change or power cycle. Great point. I read HN at 160% zoom on FF. ...80%, personally. Even 100 looks comical on most sites, I can't imagine using 160%. But I think this is too dependent on monitor, system font, etc. to generalise. I use 125% on HN with a 23" 1920x1080 monitor. HN text is comically small. Not just reduce the monitor brightness, but also use "dark mode" whenever possible. I read a lot on the web, and found the darkreader extension incredibly useful for my eyes strain. Dark mode is effectively the same as lowering brightness. If you can lower the brightness to match dark mode's light intensity, it should feel about the same. There are some sources suggesting that all other things equal, black text on white is more legible too. Surely though, for a given total light intensity, dark mode allows for much higher contrast than the corresponding light mode? after going back and forth between "black on white" and "white on black", I ended up at "black on gray" Yes. And while you're at it, use double line spacing in your IDE too. You can feel the strain lessen. I'm on a 4k screen. You just convinced me to move from 125% to 150% scaling. I've invested in using eink monitors from Dasung. I use one in landscape and the other in portrait mode. I experience no eyestrain after making this switch, using a computer for 8+ hours a day. My daily driver runs NixOS, i3wm as my window manager, and I've changed the editor and themes of my most commonly used applications to work with the monitors. I recommend the investment. https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-e-ink-pape... I'm lucky not to have eye or hand trouble from heavy computer use, but now that I know a fast e-ink monitor like that Dasung exists, I really want to try it. It's a pleasure to use for reading documentation/websites and typing. If you decide to purchase an eink monitor from Dasung, I would suggest their latest 3rd generation device. The prior generations perform adequately, but they require Dasung's software to change the modes and brightness. The modes change the contrast/refresh rate of the monitor. The third generation monitors doesn't need the software to adjust the modes/brightness. Below is a review of their 3rd gen HD-FT mode.
https://youtu.be/5pevlmk5kQs How fast is the 'worlds fastest', can you actually use these for typing (with your eyes open)? Yes, completely usable. I've been using these monitors exclusively for all of my tasks for the past 6 months. I do like it... but 900+ is expensive... Thanks! That's very nice, a lot better than I expected. I got glasses that were focused at approximately the distance my monitor is from my face (~1 arm length). I'm near sighted and the monitor starts getting blurry at just the right distance. I have glasses for nearsightedness that are focused very far out (the common case). Wearing them for constant work at arms length really tired my eyes out. So, I'd frequently work without my glasses, but hunch forward a little to make seeing things easier. With glasses dedicated for computer work, I can read everything I need to, my body can stay in the position it should be, and my eyes don't get nearly as tired. As a side benefit, the glasses help me focus in other areas of my life. I frequently wear them while cooking, and it helps me do one thing at time, as other stuff is blurry. Seconding the recommendation for getting "task glasses". It is probably the single most impactful change one can make. I ordered a pair (via Zenni, just some regular polycarbonate lenses) that are at just the right optical power such that if I fully relax my eyes, objects 1 metre away are in focus. When my monitor is that far away, it's at optical infinity and very comfortable to look at for long stretches. It's a very noticeable difference: on the occasions that I forgot to put the task glasses on and wear my normal glasses by mistake, my eyes almost always end up feeling sore after a few hours. I'm tempted to get another pair at 50 cm for laptop and phone use. How do you calculate this? Is it based on your previous prescription somehow, or does it require another optometrist appointment? Just add diopters to the SPH (sphere) portion of your prescription, there is a formula 1/diopters to get your desired focal plane: +1 for 1 meter away, +1.25 for 0.8 meters, etc I started using reading glasses (non prescription) a while ago when I was getting a lot of migraines. My vision was fine but I had difficulty switching focal lengths. The glasses just made it a little easier and my eyes felt a lot better at the end of the day. Migraines reduced too. The other simple one is to just increase font size when you’re feeling strain. I’ll often change my font size when I’m in poorly lit conditions or if it’s the end of a long day. I don't really have any distance issues seeing. I'm technically slightly farsighted. What I do have is an astigmatism. Getting glasses (it was free with my work insurance) made a huge difference in my ability to stare at the screen all day. If you find yourself _ever_ squinting at the screen, go get glasses. Or if you feel your eyes get "dry". They're both likely symptoms of an astigmatism. I can use my computer and phone without glasses fine, but after ~4 hours I start to feel fatigue. And text is _slightly_ crisper with glasses on. I have astigmatism and nearsightedness And I did what burkemw3 did: Astigmatism-correcting glasses only. But it was very difficult. I went to an optician to buy them, and they told me, I would not need them, so they won't sell them to me. When I am nearsighted, all my glasses should correct nearsightedness fully. And to make it worse, they were not able to measure my astigmatism. The first one I went to measured 1.5 D cylinder and gave me such glasses, but that was a little blurry, so I went to several others and measured them and then said you have 20/20 vision, so everything is perfect. I finally found one who measured my eyes from scratch without taking the value of the old glasses and then he found 2.75 D cylinder, leading to a 30% better vision than 20/20. However, some of the opticians had wavefront eye laser scanner. That is a really advanced method to measure directly how the eye affects lightwaves rather than trying different lenses. The devices measured that I actually need a 3.6D cylinder. But the opticians always discarded that measurement, because it was not possible that I had 20/20 vision if my glasses are two diopter too weak. Anyways, since they did not sell me computer glasses, I bought them online, and just put zero for spherical value of the prescription. Although there seems to be something wrong, since I am always seeing sharper on one eye than the other. I also tried buying a stronger cylinder online to check it out, but that was not possible since the online sites did not sell any cylinder stronger than three diopter. Use a small font that becomes hard to read if your eyes are tired or dry and you start to strain. I discovered this decades ago at university. For a time, I switched to a large font, thinking naively that it would help with eye strain. But the problem became worse; my eyes became crazy tired, and it became obvious to me why: I could read the text no matter how tired my eyes were. Heck, I could stare at the screen without even blinking for minutes at a time, and still read the text. So I persisted in marathon hacking sessions without taking appropriate breaks. I promptly went the opposite way and used the smallest font I could comfortably read with rested, relaxed eyes. Problem went away. This established a corrective feedback loop. Firstly, I had to blink in order to continue to read. That font size was not possible to read without blinking for a minute. Secondly, straining to read when tired didn't work; I just had to take a break. Hah. You remind me of almost every other intervention in medicine. I remember e.g. when heart failure was treated with beta-agonists (every doctor at lectures: "It makes sense! The heart is struggling, so we give it a boost!"). Then they did some studies and found that while the heart output increased, people were dying faster. So they decided to do the exact opposite and switch to beta-blockers (every doctor at lectures: "It makes sense! A dimmer candle burns for longer!"). Then they found out beta-blockers made things worse too. I have no idea what they do nowadays, but I'm sure doctors still have a rationalisation-by-analogy explanation for it, whatever that is. No rationalization or failed hypotheses here; I'm describing what I tried and what actually happened. Yes, absolutely! Sorry I didn't mean to imply there was rationalization at play in your case. I just made the mental link with doctors supporting one hypothesis thinking it all makes perfect sense, and then you find out actually the exact opposite is the actual solution, and it typically also makes perfect sense. * Buy a good screen. * If you work on a laptop all day, buy an external screen. (Laptop always have small and often a shitty screen) * Adjust the brightness and the contrast. Do a google search to find some colored images with instructions how to calibrate. * Quick rules of thumb, you can always reduce brightness to 50% right away. Modern displays are extremely bright and the out of factory settings are insane, sometimes 80% or 100%, it's like starring at a lamppost. * In terms of positioning. Your eyes should be at the level of the top of the screen. Large displays (24" and above) can go quite tall even with the feet at the lowest position, it might not be possible to do that, it's okay if your eyes are only at 3/4 of the top of the screen. "Buy a good screen" - so what defines a bad screen in the context of being good or bad for the eyes? LCD screens have neither the clarity problem nor the flicker problem that CRTs have. Colors, brightness and angle of vision. Without going into specifics, the shortest way to get a good screen is probably to buy an IPS display (it's barely more expensive). Pretty sure all IPS display are at least okay. The cheapest displays are TN because it's cheaper to manufacture, sadly that technology has very bad angle of vision, move a feet to the left and another feet and you'll see the image looking different, it also has a more limited rendering of colors. Not great. Typically you realize how bad a screen is when you try to calibrate it (looking at a few pictures is enough, no need for expensive equipment). With a really shitty screen, you will notice that the display literally cannot render half the colors. For example looking at a picture with 16 shades from pure white to pure black, the 4 first levels of white look the same. Typically that's the part where you have to adjust brightness/contrast until it's showing a difference. If you have a really shitty screen, there's no settings where half the colors will render. The example above being extremely skewed toward bright white will slowly destroy your eyes, being too bright and removing details/contrasts. I don't know how true of a problem this still is. Are most LCDs now not typically TFT/CCFL? Quality still varies, but I haven't had trouble with even cheap displays if you can use the included controls or software to adjust the gamma or dark/light response. I used to use the Norman Koren test patterns[0] before using a Mac with included wizard. It's likely much more common for people not to know or try to see how much difference settings can make. IPS, TN, now you have this pentile shit But neither color accuracy nor poor viewing angle are issues that cause strain on the eyes. Blinding brightness certainly can, but are there really screens these days which cannot be dimmed-down enough? I have a hard time believing it. Some monitors do have pwm backlights which flicker extremely fast, and can worsen eyestrain or cause headaches for some. I've seen it even on monitors that advertise being flicker free. The problem is if their PWM is too slow, to the point where we actually see the flicker directly, or just barely indirectly (e.g. by seeing a "slideshow effect" when you move a finger back and front against the lit-up display). Concensus among opticians and ophthalmologists is however still that the main cause for eye strain is focusing your eyes at a short distance for an extended period of time. I'd also throw out that a 4k screen is also a good thing, since your eyes don't have to deal with "tricks" to have crisp, clear text to read. Low refresh rate. I’ve seen it referenced multiple times to be a reason for eye strain. You're probably confusing this with absurdly low PWM rate on the LED backlight (a minority of screens suffer this). Why not both? Especially if what you're looking at is moving in any way on the screen. I always have to throw in the homeless angle, but when people expect me to be able to produce out of the back of a Honda Civic with a ghetto rigged 15A/120W circuit + 30W solar and no tint and priviously no license or insurance (anxiety, ducking cops)... I just smiled and said let me write a book with reasons you’re out of your mind—poverty reduces to physics. I’m doing my best and overcoming obstacles, but yea, there is a cognitive dissonance between universally accepting things like this and then expecting a homeless person to be producing as though they have office space. Good list tho. 1) Don't sit too close to your monitor(s). They should be as far away as they are big, so if it's a 23" monitor, at least 23" away from your eyes. 2) Place the top of the monitor at eye level 3) THE BIGGEST: The 20/20/20 rule. Every 20 minutes, look at an object 20 feet (6m) for 20 seconds. These three changed my computing life forever, and for the better, especially since I'm on a computer 10 hours a day most days. Laptop users- get an external screen or a laptop stand that allows the screen to follow those rules. > Place the top of the monitor at eye level After years of doing this, I've come to change my opinion about this. I put the monitors so I see the middle of the screen. It means that my eyes are moving in every direction, and I'm less likely to bend my neck downwards, resulting in neck strain. EDIT: This does result in the monitor being very high up off the desk, but a good monitor arm will handle it without a problem. If you work in GUIs a lot, your menus and stuff are at the top of the screen, and you can keep the top of the monitor eye level. If you're a programmer and you use a fullscreen terminal, with the line you type on the bottom, your monitor needs to be higher. What I really want is a terminal that puts the prompt at the top, aka in reverse order to what most terminals are doing today. Put a mirror on top of your monitor so you can easily focus 20 feet away, and to see what's going on behind you All of the above. Also, if you wear glasses, check your prescription. A while ago, I switched to what in the UK are called Occupational lenses. The bottom of the frame is for close-up (less than 30cm) and the upper half is objects that are about an arms length away - my screen position. This helped me sit further back from my monitor but still have good visibility. Before changing, the position where I could see the screen the best wasn't ergonomically good and if I sat with good posture I couldn't see fine detail so well. It only took a few days to get used to the vari-focus. If you go from, say, a 2K 23" monitor to a 4K 46" monitor, you want to be at the same distance to see the same pixel density, and just have more monitor real-estate subtending a larger slice of your vision. You don't sit farther back if you install a second monitor; why would you do that if you obtain more size in a single unit? Echoing this: periodically focusing on a distant object seems to help my eyestrain substantially. For #2, get a monitor arm that lets you readjust the height of the monitor, especially if you regularly alternate between sitting and standing. The mono price one is good value for money here. > 3) THE BIGGEST: The 20/20/20 rule. Every 20 minutes, look at an object 20 feet (6m) for 20 seconds. What is this suggestion based on? Doing research of my own on the subject. Just google "20/20/20/ rule". I just did, and found the following article. An eye care professional tracked it down and attributed to... another eye care professional. https://www.optometrytimes.com/view/deconstructing-20-20-20-... You can also use reading glasses if you're perpetually too close. > Don't sit too close to your monitor(s). They should be as far away as they are big, so if it's a 23" monitor, at least 23" away from your eyes. So if I have two monitors side by side I can have them a lot closer than if I had one ultrawide monitor? For an ultrawide monitor, pretend it's not ultra-wide. Based on how tall it is, what would it's non-ultra wide size be? 24" Then use that. I've been running Flux https://justgetflux.com/ for over a decade now. Windows has something similar built in, but it's not as good as Flux in my experience. Flux has the ability to slower change the hue of your screen over time and gives you great control over it at every level. It also lets you set a notif for when you want to get up so when it alerts me that I'm 8.5 hours away from needing to wake up I know I need to start winding down Take a break.
Every half hour/hour, look away from your computer.
Look at something at a distance. Outside a window.
For a few minutes. 5/10 minutes. If you can, reduce screen time. No more than 3-4 hours a day.
If you can't, take a computer free day every 2-3 days. This has helped me more than any setting, or app. > If you can, reduce screen time. No more than 3-4 hours a day. If you can't, take a computer free day every 2-3 days. I think this is unfeasible for a gigantic portion of this site readership. Dare I say... undesirable even Get a gaming monitor. One with plenty of Hz (>100) and low GTG (<=2ms). And also don't do compromise at all in this aspect. I remember at Siemens in 2005 I exasperated both my group leader and the IT support staff because in the span of a week I changed like 10 monitors. They said I was the pickiest they ever saw - I told them that's my eyes we talk about and I don't get another pair for the rest of my life. I use slightly weaker glasses. 0.5 diopter less in each eye for my perspective. Even with bad screen habitats and no breaks this gives ~12 comfortable hours on the screens. Reading glasses for the 20/20s! I have a fit band that vibrates every one hour if I have been sitting for as long. I make it a point to get up and walk around. Take my eyes off the screen. Since the pandemic forced me to work from home, I take this hourly opportunity to get in 30-50 pushups every hour. Also helps with water intake. And takes my mind off the urge to take a tea or coffee break. But now that I think of it, I could've done the same in office. Having flux installed also helps. You need to reduce the time you are looking at the screen continuously. Realising that has helped me lot. Also washing your eyes with water, 3-4 times a day helps. Makes eyes relax. Hope this helps, cheers. > Like eye drops? Or just splash your face? Water!
This might sound a little weird, but I use a nose spray (any atomizer will do) filled with water and spray on my closed eyes when I feel like it.
I started doing this this year and it helped me tremendously. No more eye strain! Before that I tried EVERYTHING! * Dark Mode * Night mode (Flux etc.) * Changing Brightness * Changing ambient light * a few different eyedrops * Looking away more often * Sitting farther away from my monitor * Different monitor positions * Different monitors * Sitting less in front of a monitor * Bigger Text Nothing helped me. I asked my doctor and he couldn't help me at all.
Sprinkling some water onto my eyes? It just works. (I guess my eyes are just overheating or something? But honestly I have no idea.) It's probably related to lower blinking rates. There are software utilities to remind you to blink at least every couple minutes. I got an Oculus Rift2 to play Beat Saber for mini-fitness breaks and end up with a sweaty face so frequently wash/rinse during my workday. Eyes do seem less tired these days though I didn't think about it just until now. I use dark mode everywhere it's available - even on my cell phone. And speaking of, I found out yesterday that Github now has it. Best news all day! I use Logic Audio on my Mac desktop a lot, but it thankfully is in "dark mode" by default. I assume they made that choice knowing that people would be staring at the screen for hours on end. I also set my screen brightness to a comfortable level that isn't nearly full blast, and enabled the feature that lowers blue light when the sun goes down. Another thing I do: My laptop runs Windows, so I also have Linux running in a terminal on screen pretty much at all times. I let the terminal take over half the screen, which is pretty much where Windows wants to place it. However, with my browser (chrome), I stretched it to fill 3/4 or 2/3 (or so) of the screen so that it partly overlaps the terminal, and then set the defaults for a slightly larger font. This allows me to see web-based resources when I'm tooling around on the Linux cli. You have to be careful not to accidentally move the browser window too much that it goes full-screen, but you develop super-human placement accuracy after you've done that a few times. Likewise, when I am watching anything that is full-screen, like YouTube for example, I set my laptop on the foot stool so that my eyes can have a different focal length for a while. That's about it. I hope other people post some ideas, because I spend way too much time on the screen and so I'm always looking for improvements as well. Many good advice in this thread already. Personally I'm doing ok with good warm lighting in the room, low brightness/contrast (~60/30 during the day, ~50/25 in the evening), and I activate "night light" mode of Windows once it gets dark; window on the side, take breaks from time to time and use cold water to refresh your face. I wear glasses and as other say, I zoom in the text a lot. Big text makes things quick to read and hence less eyestrain. Whether to use dark mode or light mode in text editors/websites depends on the lighting condition around you. I mostly used dark mode now (except GitHub), but I make sure the contrast of the theme is not too big, not too small. But in my prev job we had white room with white everything and lots of light, and I was much more comfy with light themed terminal (although not white; soft bgcolor like HN has). On top of that I will add that for some reason for me, mobile usage contributes way more to eyestrain/headache/fatigue than computer use (order of magnitude diff). I can work all day long on a laptop without much issue. But checking mobile, especially as first thing in the morning or in late evening (even in blue light reduction mode), makes me much more tired nearly immediately for some reason. On a Mac, f.lux is not sufficiently strong, what has helped me a lot is to add a strong red color filter (System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Color Filters > Filter Type: Color Tint, set to red, intensity to full). I do the same on my iPhone, it's quite comfortable during the night. I also use the QuickShade app which makes the screen darker without reducing backligt brightness. Stick LED strips to the back of your monitor to provide background illumination at the periphery of your screen I bought a monitor with a "Low Blue Light" button (it's a "BENQ" brand). I didn't buy it because of that feature and had never even heard of it before. My first reaction was thinking it was kind of ugly so initially I didn't leave it on but after a month or so I noticed my eyes were getting strained so I tried it. It is ugly, but it makes a big difference. Now, when I turn off the Low Blue Light mode I can instantly feel the strain on my eyes. The picture is gorgeous but it's too bright and intense for work. Since I use several monitors I manually adjusted the others to reduce the blue. The biggest downside is selecting colors for design work. The Low Blue Light screws that big time, but after comparing how different colors look on different monitors I decided not to worry about that too much because I have no control over that at all. Blue light has no effect on eye strain[1]. The sky has about 100x the blue light emissions than your screen. It might be a great placebo effect, or maybe it just decreases brightness of the screen. [1] https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/blue-light-di... Had you really considered what I wrote you wouldn't have missed this important bit: "when I turn off the Low Blue Light mode I can instantly feel the strain on my eyes. The picture is gorgeous but it's too bright and intense for work." So, the feature also dims the brightness, and I did this with my other monitors too so they matched the BENQ monitor I said has this feature. But it's more fun to be dismissive, right? Why not just lower the brightness? Why mention blue light at all? It seems like you're just backtracking your comment. I think this is something people commonly conflate. These two things are true: 1. screens cause eye strain, 2. screens make it harder to sleep because of blue light. People then mistakenly interpret this as "screens cause eye strain because of blue light". It's a bit frustrating how many blue light filters advertise themselves as reducing eye strain, exploiting this misconception. True; blue light concerns are not related to eye strain: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha... As others have said, increase the size of your text / OS DPI scaling value. If you're reading a web page or coding, use the CTRL+mouse wheel shortcut to quickly zoom in and out to suit your viewing preference at any given time. I also frequently adjust the font size of the many notepad.exe instances I usually have floating about. The important thing is making the computer work for your needs, rather than trying adapt to the computer. Alternatively, I've had good results by reducing the screen resolution, as counter-intuitive as that may seem. I always used to deride my Father for doing this, but now, in my mid-30's, I see his point. Apart from that, try moving the screen away from your eyes a bit more, and try having your f.lux equivalent enabled throughout the day. What works quite well for me is to just take breaks. (I have +7 diopters with astigmatism and all the packages) On MacOS there is an app called "Time Out" that dims the screen every 20 minutes for 20 seconds. It forces you to just relax for 20 seconds (you can set it up as you like). In the meanwhile you can either look at something that is far away (several meters or a good reason to learn metric), or just close your eyes and lean back. There might be other Apps for other OSes but if you're into Arduino you can just smack a LED on the board and let it light up every 20 Minutes for ~20 seconds to have a reminder. Additionally, I take a break every 4 hrs for at lest 20 minutes and go for a walk in the park, cook something, cuddle the cat or whatever. Effectively this sounds like a somewhat stricter version of the pomodoro system, which prescribes a 5-minute "physical" break for every 25 minutes of uninterrupted focus. There are already a lot of good tips here. However I see that many people advocate dark mode everywhere. I think this is a bad idea. I think it puts a lot less strain on your eyes when your screen has less contrast to your room. What that means is that I use a light theme for my editor during daylight and when my room gets dark and I realize that my screen "becomes bright" I switch to a dark theme. Also I can recommend night mode. Gnome and others have this out of the box. What it does is fade your screen to more reddish colors when it gets dark. Also don't use too small fonts.. this sometimes seems to be like a contest for coders: "Look i have font size 7. I need to scroll less". And also don't use too low contrast color schemes. General advice: -Get a decent monitor (not necessary, but I prefer the wide curved ones like this[0]) and increase the font size. I never went back to my 12" laptop screen after I discovered larger monitors with big font. Specific to day time use: -Try and avoid glare. You can place your screen in front of a large source of light and turn up the screens brightness. Specific to night time use: -Use applications like Redshift or f.lux to reduce blue light as much as you can. -Reduce the brightness of your screen. -Try and get ambiant light, such as a difuse lamp or something, behind your screen to illuminate the area surrounding your work space. These usually work for me. Best of luck! I use a 43-inch 4K TV as a monitor located about 30 inches from my eyes. I've been using such for at least a decade, and would never return to a tiny porthole facing work of interest (such as a laptop, which is comically unsuited to serious, prolonged use). I do use prescription glasses ground for that working distance and strongly recommend that (prescription lenses). I recently (four weeks ago) had to replace the monitor/TV and spent more than a short while choosing comfortable typeface, font size, and RGB/BGR pixel ordering. As some others have mentioned, if one's eyes are strained, corrections are warranted. I do not deliberately practice frequent distance gazing, but I suspect I do so unconsciously. It depends a bit on what type of eye strain you’re experiencing. Dry eye typically comes from not blinking enough. It can also be worsened by blepharaitis (inflammation of the eyelids). If you feel like you’re straining to focus (and you haven’t already), you should see an optometrist and get computer glasses. I have a pair that I wear occasionally, and I find them especially helpful with low-res (e.g. medium to large 1080p) displays. On that note consider getting a 4K or better display, especially if it’s larger than 20” or so. Finally there’s the so-called 20-20-20 rule, which is to focus on something at least 20 feet (6m) away for at least 20 seconds at least once every 20 minutes. Has anyone tried to improve eyesight using the techniques in Getting Stronger: https://gettingstronger.org/2014/08/myopia-a-modern-yet-reve... ? They seem plausible -- certainly that populations that don't look far away seem to need to correct their vision more, which implies behaving differently could lessen or reverse the effect. But I don't know of them being tested. I'm curious to get n higher than 1 before devoting resources to it. Buy a monitor that offers flicker free backlight brightness control. Read up on PWM flicker in displays and their effects. It’s one of the biggest factors yet ignored by most folks. This is different from the refresh rate of your monitor. This and the other tips mentioned in this thread. Screen time itself shouldn't cause eyestrain. Reading is the most likely culprit. Pay attention to when you're actually exerting your eyes. For example, when trying to read a very small font you should feel your eyes working harder. See if reading a larger font feels easier. But sometimes it could be something more subtle like reading technique. Perhaps you're fixating on words or some details for too long. I hardly ever get eyestrain. But when very focused on a task for long hours, I find I may inadvertently exert my eyes more. Never happens with casual reading. > Screen time itself shouldn't cause eyestrain. Reading is the most likely culprit. I think this is true, because for me when I'm having a bad eye day I can play games for hours but struggle to read through a paragraph. I had laser eye surgery and almost regret it, my eyes get dry easily now (I seem to get recurring blepharitis which I lessen with a heat pack) and one eye in particular almost always feels like it has grit in it. But I can play games or watch videos and it's engaging enough that I forget all that, while reading is a completely different story. Dark mode and larger fonts definitely help, as does a downward eye angle. My work laptop screen does not help, I don't know what it is but I just feel worse at the end of a day that I use it. I think the text is probably too small but I don't realise because in proportion to the smaller screen size it looks large. > I think the text is probably too small but I don't realise because in proportion to the smaller screen size it looks large. My laptop is 1366x768 and it feels "wrong" to be zooming-in when screen real estate is already so limited. But once you get over the initial weirdness, you'll just keep doing it. Right now, on my desktop, I have HN at 250% zoom. I can make out 100%, 150% is perfectly readable, but 250% just feels great. Also many sites, including HN, have unlimited or very long paragraph widths so zooming fixes that too. > 1366x768 Yeah I think my work issued 14" is too. It certainly doesn't help that something like MS Teams wastes so much space even with 'full screen' active, and the same for various ribbon UIs. But I think you're right I should just give up and zoom. It's also good to follow the 20/20/20 rule. Each 20 minutes, take a 20 second break and look at something at least 20 feet away (20m works too, for metric users). Having your eye focus at a certain distance for a long time has an effect on your ocular muscles. Yes. But ideally this should happen instinctively. Say, if you're thinking, it's pretty natural to defocus or look at wherever. Whenever you're not actually reading or looking at something on the screen your eyes should wander off even if it's just for a few seconds. Wear terminal eyeglasses and keep the screen at least 1.5 meters away. This type of eyeglasses are not for helping with poor eyesight. They're specifically for reducing strain on the eyes when focusing at short distances for longer periods of time, which is the core of the problem. Before I got a prescription for such - which has completely solved the problems I suffered for a long time - I had to resort to tricks like taking frequent breaks just to focus my eyes on things at longer distances, which is only a band-aid rather than an actual solution to the problem. 1.5m? ~5' away? Cripes. It'd have to be a 55" screen for me to use it at that distance. I think it has more to do with diet and such than anything else. Healthy people can look at monitors every hour every day without experiencing any eye strain. For example spiking your blood sugar causes inflammations around your body, and when that happens in your eyes it hurts and they get blurry so it feels like you are strained. To avoid that eat better and exercise regularly. If you already do those things and are in good shape you can start searching for other fixes. That is all true. Sugar is very bad, but i consider every kind of animal product even worse. I am a vegan for years. The best plants to eat for best vision are those that have the compound carotenium. Many plants compose it including carrots, but in my personal experience the most carotenium of all the plants is in the bark of the pine tree. A food source so abundant, it is almost infinitely abundant. I eat the bark every day for years now, 10 or 20 hours a day straight. Once a day i eat some other plants. The best plant for keeping your eyesight healthy, and maybe even reverse any damage. Parody pearl. Native American Indians ate the bark of the pine tree for tens of thousands of years. Their skin changed colour as a consequence of so much carotenium. I haven't seen it mentioned, but there's also dedicated computer eye-wear. My eyesight is 20/20, but I did start suffering from some eye fatigue and dryness recently. What worked for me was a pair of cheap computer glasses off amazon that "block blue light". They're clear and don't affect color vision, so I don't know what (if anything) they in fact block, but the improvement is noticeable. I'm not going to name specific brands, but Take breaks and focus your eyes on something further away - for example by looking at something outside. The app Stretchly (free, open source) can display periodic reminders to take breaks from the screen. [0] I can't recommend it enough. It worked well for my RSI too. Alternative apps are Workrave or Workpace. You have some degree of presbyopia and need weak reading glasses. As you age the auto-focus capability of your eyes (called accommodation) degrades. Look for the depressing graph in this article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269899... This is incredibly annoying. I do have weak reading glasses and notice that changing focus between near and far is anything but instant. I have noticed another thing though. Sometimes the text/images are sharp but doubled-imaged a small fraction of a character apart. Part of this is likely due to extra muscle effort to maintain focus. Another part is that the degree of this effect is variable. I have drastically cut down my caffeine intake as it was getting out of hand during WFH. Since reduction in consumption and sometimes choosing tea or decaf, I've noticed much less of the double-imaging and don't reach for the low-magnification (1.0) reading glasses as often. Btw, does anyone use very weak reading glasses? I was thinking about getting something lower than 1.0 (say 0.75). Drugstores only seem to stock 1.25+ and I can find 1.0 at dollar stores, online I could probably order 0.75 to try. Edit: a completely different theory is that taking Beat Saber fitness breaks made my weak eye less lazy since depth perception is a good part of the game. I made two changes. 1) My regular prescription glasses now have a blue blocking coating. It gives them a slight yellow tint that I don’t notice, and it noticeably reduces eye strain (but does not eliminate). 2) Bias lighting behind my monitor that lights up the wall behind it. Staring at a bright screen in front of a black wall is no bueno, bias lighting at least alleviates the contrast between the two. Every so often, listen to your body. Do you feel tired? Feel your eyes if they are dry, or uncomfortable. Some ppl can go longer on a screen, you just need to find your range and make sure you don’t over extend those all the time. Rest them by doing a completely different activity for a few minutes. Walk away regularly and do something else Sorry if this has been mentioned in a previous comment, there are many!: what I find really useful is f.lux for lighting and colour. Especially makes a difference later in the day. I noticed I couldn’t fall asleep after a long d’au staring at the screen and this really helped... Can’t believe nobody mentioned Safe Eyes [0] yet. It’ll periodically suggest eye exercises. Game changer!
[0] https://github.com/slgobinath/SafeEyes Other people are already commenting what to do while you work, I will tell you what to do when your eyes are already tired. Go to finish-style sauna. Whenever I am tired after a day with a computer and go to sauna, it completely resets me. For me, the biggest factor seems to be whether or not I've had enough sleep. If I haven't, my eyes get sore, my brow feels tense and text has a "shimmer" to it. A nap is often enough to fix it. i use dark mode everywhere plugin on firefox. it messes up some sites, but its rare and the tradeoff is good. I also use f.lux on one of the highest settings. it is jarring at first, but you get used to it and save your eyes I have a window behind my computer. Every once in a while I glance outside and refocus my eyes. It import not to have the sun shine in this window at the times you do this. That causes eyestrain too. Use f.lux, redshift or some other alternative. You can thank me latter. I use these or equivalents (e.g. 'Night Shift' on macOS) on every device I can permanently (not just at night). It has been a big help and my eyes have acclimatized to the color shift even for graphics work. Also zero problems going straight from a device to sleep at all. I run "redshift -O 3500 -b 0.7" as many times necessary. To reset: redshift -x Nothing makes my eyes feel as good as getting outdoor time does, really. Just make sure to mix in walks during the day. Cut screen time to the shortest possible. Stop every hour look at random distances, stretch your neck and shoulders. we wreck our eyes to that level where computers have no chance to do any harm anymore. JK. Often a nap helps. Heard good things about GMG performance[0] ordered one today, might worth a look 0: gmg-performance.com use this application
https://iristech.co/iris-mini/ OLED, ColorVeil, nightmode Dark mode for everything Bias lighting. I am going to suggest Eizo (and similar high end) monitors. High quality and uniform monitors do wonders for prolong use. You might also want to use greyscale-only on alternate days if your work can accommodate it. Last but most important, train yourself to blink 2x more often.