Staring at a screen all day doesn’t come without its costs. While I really don’t want to stare at a screen all day, it’s a bit hard not to when you work in tech and blog on the side. It takes its toll on your body, both your back and your eyes.
I had serious issues with tension headaches, migraines, and even just an inability to focus before I learned how to reduce my eyestrain. Ideally, you should just let your eyes rest, but depending on your workload or goals, this isn’t always an option. Sometimes, you just need to keep working whether you want to or not.
There are several solutions I’ve found have helped me keep long hours without getting tension headaches. I’m not a doctor and all of the usual disclaimer, but this is what I found worked. Reduce blue light using either glasses or programmatically, and take regular breaks. While taking breaks sounds like common sense, there are some tricks to get the most bang for your buck.
Blue Light and Your Eyes
Blue light can have a serious effect on your eyes. It boosts your awareness, manipulates your circadian rhythm, and impacts the development of the eye itself for children based on modern scientific understanding. The problem is that it is a bit stimulating. Blue light can impact your sleep and more.
Your monitor is awash with blue light. Most monitors weigh in around 6500K for their color temperature. You can go higher or lower on most monitors, but 6500K is where most default (outside of Japan).
If you’ve worked in graphics or some other visually creative field, you may have discovered some monitors respond better to color temperature than others. Cheaper monitors tend to get more subjectively accurate as the temperature gets higher. It’s not so much they get good, but they get better. If I work on editing with 8500K versus 6500K on my favorite cheap monitor, one is presentable, the other is a bit of a gamble.
9300K is where I want to put all of my displays if I can help it. The higher the color temperature, the more blues there are and the richer they are. While this means you can work more efficiently in sprints, you’re going to wear out faster.
Blue Light Glasses
Blue light glasses are one of the easiest ways to remedy eye strain. If you already wear glasses, there are clip-ons, if you don’t wear glasses, there are cheap tinted pairs. You can spend more and get a prescription pair, but they aren’t exactly the most aesthetic unless you don’t mind carrying something else around.
Blue glasses weren’t my first move, but they were the most efficient at the cost of a couple cups of coffee. If you wear clip-ons, you can flip them up for serious work which relies on accurate colors. If you wear glasses (prescription or not), you can take them off as necessary. It’s easier to remember when to opt-out than to try and opt-in every time.
They may not be the most socially acceptable glasses, but they work. I’ve gotten flak for wearing mine at work, but I don’t really care as many technicians ended up following suit. In the end, more and more of my coworkers have asked which ones I’ve bought and why. They don’t look the best, but they definitely have helped.
They reduce eyestrain efficiently. It’s not an opt-in, but an opt-out system for most glasses wearers. If you aren’t used to glasses, they can be an ask. Since they don’t taint your vision like prescription glasses, it’s an easy adjustment. They change the colors, but they don’t shape the landscape like standard glasses.
Color Adjustment
Modern builds of Windows 10 come with a night time setting to make a screen’s color cool when it gets late. There are options for Mac (Night Shift), and Linux and other Xorg based systems (e.g. Redshift). Each has its own manner of setup and configuration, but all of them aim to do the same thing.
You can reduce the color temperature on your display at an OS and driver level for most things with these programs. More and more technology is smart enough to adjust the actual hardware as you change the settings from the OS. There are obviously exceptions, but most of the time changing a single setting is enough.
You can always consider changing settings on the monitor or screen itself, but this tends to be much harder to flip to and from on most devices. The OS or driver level changes tend to be more than enough to really square you away for eyestrain. I have monitors and screens which need a manual tweak, but usually a minor compromise is enough to get things resolved at an OS level.
The application and the timing necessary for everything to change is going to change on an individual basis. You also have to consider how easy it is to disable if you need to work in more visually accurate capacities. It doesn’t matter for my blog, but it does matter for the blog images. Even if you aren’t working on photos or other graphical media, you may still require accurate coloration at times. If you know accurate colors don’t matter (most coding, spreadsheets, most writing, etc.), what works easiest is best, but how you disable it is impactful to success too.
20/20/20
The 20/20/20 exercise is the most effective way to prevent eyestrain without wasting time. You spend 20 seconds, every 20 minutes looking at something 20 feet (~6m) or more away. This means you look out the window or go outside and look a little ways away. It really doesn’t matter what you look at outside, especially if you wear sunglasses or UV glasses that filter blue light.
This exercise only works if you follow through with it regularly. You can skip a couple sessions, but past that, only continuous rest works for recovery. If you ride your car’s maintenance schedule, you don’t hit major work until you’ve been all over (barring the unexpected). Spend a whole minute an hour on your eyes and you prevent a massive issue.
This singular exercise of just focusing somewhere with a little distance for a fraction of a minute reduces my tension headaches a good bit. If you work to live, this means better living, and if you live to work, this means more efficiency. You really aren’t losing out anywhere in the grand scheme of things.
While it’s called 20/20/20, it doesn’t mean you need to limit yourself to these parameters as long as you do more and not less. 10/10/10 just wastes time, but spending more time every 20 minutes looking at further and further things can help more. I like to spend more than 20 seconds shifting between items which are 20 feet (~6m) or more away. There isn’t really an upper limit as long as you can focus.
Conclusion
Working with computers all day takes its toll, but a little prevention goes a long way. Each of these methods provides their own value, but the longer you have to work on a computer overall, the better they work together. I wear tinted glasses, adjust colors on my screen, and take breaks to prevent the development of tension headaches. These minor steps each have their own benefit, but together they almost completely prevent headaches.
Taking short breaks is the most helpful change I made, but it breaks down eventually without the other pieces. Blue filtering makes it take longer for fatigue to build up in the first place. Adjustments to your screen can help, but not all screens respond well or look good when tweaked. A cheap pair of clip-ons or framed lenses can make all the difference. Combining the solutions takes the guesswork out while also giving your eyes a break.
While rest is the easiest way to reduce eye strain, it isn’t always a valid option. Consider making minor changes to your workflow in order to facilitate less strain on your eyes so you can work more efficiently at what you have to or what you actually want to. Most of the solutions are free, and the one that isn’t is cheap enough. Consider making the jump if you’re dealing with eyestrain and eye fatigue when you work with computers.
Image by Lukas Bieri from Pixabay
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