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5 Ways to reduce eye strain while using your PC
Using a screen for extended durations is practically necessary for work and recreation. It usually takes a toll on your health and, most importantly, leads to eye strain and the associated discomfort of irritation, headaches, and dry eyes. While Windows 11 already has specific features to help reduce strain, you can take a few simple steps irrespective of the device you spend time staring at.
Prolonged screen time is often impossible to avoid, but these five tips could help you combat tiredness and eye strain while using a laptop or a desktop. They are useful at home, in office spaces, and in most other settings where you would use a PC.
Balance ambient lighting
It's all in the space you're using
The lighting in the space you use for work or recreation is essential to determining how strained you'll feel after a few hours. There's a reason why movie theaters don't switch to pitch darkness, and you can't enjoy Batman while lazing in a sunny park. The importance of controlled ambient light is compounded if you're doing color-sensitive work like editing photos or color-grading video footage.
A few rules of thumb are to avoid working in total darkness or using a screen with lights pointed directly at your monitor. The latter causes glare, and monitor light bars are a great alternative to conventional desk lamps for this reason alone. Moreover, light sources within your field of vision can be distracting, too, like the setting sun visible through a window or an incorrectly angled showcase spotlight. At home and work, you can adjust these lights or your seating position accordingly.
When buying new lighting, prefer diffused LED strips or window curtains/blinds that diffuse daylight instead of blocking it out entirely. Overall, you don't want a sharp contrast between your display and how well-lit the room is. If you haven't tried it yet, setting up bias lighting behind your display can also help reduce strain, even if it is monotone and dimmable.
Calibrate display brightness to ambient lighting
Accuracy is all-important
With the surroundings taken care of, the next step entails color-calibrating your display for the available light. I'm not expecting you to add a colorimeter to your everyday carry if you prefer screen time at cafés, and automatic brightness adjustment in most laptops works well. However, if you're on a desktop or just prefer using an external display, you can leverage the user-configurable modes on it to ensure the colors and brightness are best suited for available light.
I have my desktop monitor calibrated for bright daylight, bright artificial lighting in the room, and dim lighting. You can do it by eye, too, and get near-perfect results without using specialized equipment. A university in the Netherlands has outlined a series of tests you can follow in succession to calibrate your display at home. The tests work for LCDs, and while we suggest sticking with user-configurable modes as a failsafe, you can overwrite manufacturer calibration presets if they are awful.
You just need to calibrate the display once for a given amount of ambient light, and just remember to switch to the correct mode thereafter if your space gets brighter or darker as the day passes. Thereafter, dive into Windows or other OS-level settings to ensure on-screen text is contrasted enough to read at all times.
Glare and reflection are a bane
You don't have to put up with them
Even after setting up your room and display correctly, light that bounces off your display may render sections unusable because the reflection is just too distracting. This isn't usually a problem with LCDs since they typically ship with a frosted finish, but convertible laptops and OLED display users are all too familiar with distracting reflections, even of yourself. On a laptop, getting rid of these can be as simple as slightly opening or closing the hinged display.
Reflections and glare show up in the darkest regions of your screen, where the emissive display's brightness doesn't overpower the reflected light. You can counter this in one of two ways — increasing the display's brightness or scattering the incident light.
If you've already tried adjusting the lights in the space and changing where you sit, you could consider installing a matte-finish screen protector or a privacy filter on your screen. The former may cause a perceptible drop in image sharpness, while the latter may require display recalibration for color accuracy. In either case, the incident light should be scattered sufficiently to make the display visible.
Take breaks often with the 20-20-20 rule
And look into the distance
No matter how urgent your digital work might be, putting eye health first can help keep strain and associated ills at bay. You just need to take a short pause every 20 minutes and look at something 20 feet away (or in the distance) for at least 20 seconds. This will ensure your eyes aren't tired from constantly focusing on the screen near you.
Alternatively, if your working style benefits from longer focus sessions or watching a gripping true crime episode, remember to take a longer break every hour and avoid looking at the screen entirely during this time. The aforementioned 20-20-20 rule and the importance of frequent breaks have gained widespread recognition as an important element in maintaining good eye health.
Eye muscles also benefit when you gently roll your eyes clockwise a few times and then counterclockwise. You can also trace an imaginary figure eight on the wall with just your eyes, ensuring your head doesn't move. The exercises prevent stiffness and fatigue in the eyes, relaxing them periodically. Touch typists can take these routine breaks without ever letting their hands stop too!
Consult a professional periodically
Make it a routine
If you have tried all the above-mentioned remedial measures and still find that your eyes go dry, start watering, or generally feel strained after short stints, it might be time to involve a professional optometrist. Undiagnosed or mistreated eye conditions such as nearsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism may find their discomfort increase greatly when using a screen. If you're using bifocal lenses, there's a chance your PC display is somewhere in between the reading focal length and the one for longer distances.
You can get your eyes tested and use prescription glasses. While the efficacy of blue-light coatings on lenses is often hotly debated, you can try progressive bifocal lenses if the standard ones don't cut it.
Make the most of what's available
Most importantly, you don't necessarily need to invest money to make PC screens easier on your eyes. Most of my suggestions just need a weekend to implement at once. While it may not be easy to figure out the most comfortable conditions for working on your PC, gradual optimization can help keep the ills of eye strain at bay.
