5 Tips For Reducing Eye Strain

Step 1: Lower the bright­ness on your monitor.

Is it just me or are everyone’s mon­i­tors set just a bit too bright?  As a test, look at the white back­ground of this web page. If it looks like a light source, it’s too bright!  Go ahead, fid­dle with your mon­i­tor set­tings right now.  It’s not too dif­fi­cult to do.   For every new com­puter I sit on, whether it’s a friends or in a school com­puter lab, I always end up hav­ing to decrease the bright­ness cause I could feel it burn­ing a hole in my eyes after 10 minutes.

Step 2: Install F.lux (It’s free!)

F.lux is one of the best, free tiny pieces of soft­ware you could install on your com­puter.  F.lux will not exactly lower the bright­ness of your mon­i­tor but it will match up the hues (“color tem­per­a­ture”) to match the time of day (or night) it is and the type of light­ing you have in your room.  In the begin­ning you may think it makes the col­ors look strange, but you will adjust to it in a few min­utes and the screen will be eas­ier on your eyes than ever before.

Tell f.lux what kind of light­ing you have, and where you live. Then for­get about it.  F.lux will do the rest, automatically.

Step 3: Make the inside of your room the same bright­ness as your monitor.

If you sit inside a dark room with the mon­i­tor glar­ing in your face, you’re just putting unnec­es­sary strain on your eyes.  The trick is to make it such that the mon­i­tor isn’t any brighter than the rest of the room, so it isn’t stick­ing out like crazy.

Just like how this would make a ter­ri­ble night light, look­ing at your cell phone or mon­i­tor in a dark room is not very different.

Step 4: Reduce Glare!

Is there a win­dow or bright wall behind you caus­ing all this crazy glare on your mon­i­tor?  Glare dri­ves me berserk!  See if you could cover that win­dow, or repo­si­tion your desk to reduce the glare.  Also if there’s any bright light com­ing from behind your mon­i­tor or from the side, con­sider repo­si­tion­ing your desk for that as well.  Drapes come in handy in these cases.

Ideal mon­i­tor posi­tion­ing is 90 degrees from nat­ural light sources.

Step 5: Apply these same con­cepts to your cell phone!

Once the sun goes down, lower the bright­ness on your cell phone so that it’s eas­ier on your eyes and it also dra­mat­i­cally extends bat­tery life! Also, don’t get into bed, with all your lights off, try­ing to use the cell phone before you go to sleep, burn­ing a hole in your eyes just before you go to sleep.

To ensure a good nights rest you should com­pletely refrain from using all elec­tron­ics at least 15 min­utes before going to bed.  The bright pro­jec­tion screen of a mon­i­tor or cell phone tricks your body to think it’s still day time.  Sleep is not an instant switch you sim­ply turn on and off: Treat your­self like a dim­mer. :)

Hope that helps!