Six Ways to Tackle Digital Eye Strain
How to give your eyes a break without abandoning technology
Official statistics show that over half of people suffer from digital eye strain. This is the type of assessment that scientists describe as “conservative.”
The only way half of people suffer from eye strain is if we count in the fact that half of the world population doesn’t have access to the internet.
From those who do use technology on a daily basis, how many do you think suffer from eye strain?
Simple. All of them.
Our devices demand a lot from our eyes. Squinting at tiny symbols. Processing multiple sources of light. Processing the light itself: blue, cold, and cutting. Making sense of movements and flickers that do not appear anywhere in nature.
And this is the point. Our eyes have evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years to process very different shapes, colors, and movement. Our computer screens are foreign to them. So they work very hard to do their job.
In other words, they strain.
Here’s how you can make their job easier.
Warm things up
Let’s start with the biggest question: what’s natural? The whole reason your eyes strain and give you headaches is because they are dealing with “unnatural” stimuli. Meaning, with stimuli that are not found in nature.
Like blue light. Research shows that blue light causes damage to cells in lab animals. It disrupts sleep, overloads the eyes, and contributes to the causation of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.
And where do we encounter blue light? In the little rectangles we stare at all day: our screens.
Thankfully, this is easy to fix. Go into your settings and touch up the color temperature.
The entire point here is to choose something that is easy on your eyes. As much as we all share the same biology, we also all have individual needs and preferences. Play with the temperature and find something that feels good, smooth, and — above all — natural. Try to keep it between 2.000K and 6.500K on the Kelvin scale. Anything beyond that will most definitely stain your eyes.
Blend all the lights
When your eyes start to strain, a very natural instinct is to increase the brightness of your screen. This makes it easier to read what’s on it.
But it also makes your eyes work harder.
Our eyes have evolved to process the world with a single light source: the Sun. When you add another light source into the mix, they work twice as hard.
Have you ever had a lamp on in a room during the day? It’s irritating and distracting.
Your screen is another source of light. A very intense one. Not only that, but you stare right into it, for hours and hours, every day.
Even if strong brightness helps you see better what’s on the screen, it does more damage than good. There are other ways to make your screen easier on the eyes. But when it comes to brightness, you need to go in the opposite direction.
Tone it way down.
Your screen should not be brighter than the room you’re in. It should feel like you’re reading a book, a newspaper. Not like you’re staring into a fire.
A great way to make sure your brightness is at a healthy level, is to hold a piece of white paper against your screen. Your screen and the paper need to have the same level of luminosity.
Here’s where contrast comes in
Now that you’ve brought the contrast between your screen and your surroundings to an absolute minimum, you’re free to go all out with the contrast within your screen.
This is what your eyes are actually craving when you up the brightness. An easy way to process what’s on the screen. Picture a book with very clearly printed black text. And picture a book where the text is faded. What you really want with the second book is clearer text, not a brighter page.
Once you’ve adjusted the color temperature and brightness to natural levels, then feel free to up the contrast as high as you want it.
Speaking of text…
We’ve been using the comparison with books and newspapers a lot so far, but here’s where we need to drop it.
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Fonts.
Traditionally, book and paper fonts are heavy. Think of Times New Roman, the font that has delivered news and stories to millions of people for decades. This font, along with all other Serif fonts, carries a certain authority.
Not online, though. Online, these fonts strain your eyes. All the loops and tails that go with the Serif fonts make your eyes work that much harder.
The solution here is to keep things simple. No loops and ribbons. No Serif, or to use the technical term: Sans Serif. Sans Serif fonts are your friends. Simple, round, immediately readable. Your eyes don’t need to pause and make sense of the text.
Our favorite is the JetBrains font family but you can also go for the classics.
- Arial
- Tahoma
- Verdana
- Calibri
Choosing a good Sans Serif font is the first step.
The second step is making it big. Similar to the contrast, once you’ve fixed brightness and color temperature, you’re free to increase other settings as much as you want.
Experts recommend “a text size that is 3 times larger than the smallest normal viewing font size.”
Try setting the font size at 130% and see how you feel.
Let’s talk about flickers
If your screen flickers, then you are guaranteed to suffer from eye strain.
Screen flickering happens when the screen refreshes new images at a lower rate and can’t keep up with the content it’s projecting.
What makes this a particularly insidious problem is that the ficker doesn’t even need to be perceptible to you in order to strain your eye. In other words, you might not even know that you have a problem.
But this is also very easy to fix. Adjust the settings of your refresh rate to the highest possible.
The refresh rate dictates how many times per second your screen draws a new image. The higher the refresh rate, the smoother your screen is on the eyes.
Think about your theme
Once you’ve made all these changes to your settings, it’s time to think about the general “vibe” of your screen. It makes a big difference.
Digital eye strain happens because our eyes work hard. We’ve repeated that many times already and it wasn’t exactly breaking news to begin with. We all know that modern-dan humans strain their eyes by working on computers.
And yet, we add more and more stimuli. We know we’re overloaded but we continue riding the carousel of add-ons, bright colors, alerts.
Get off the carousel. Reduce the stimuli. Create a sense of simplicity, of peace and calm.
This can be done with choosing a soothing theme and background image. Something that, instead of ringing alarm bells within your eyes, creates enough space and silence for them to do their hard work.
We recommend neutral colors in the black-grey range. This will create a natural contrast with the pages you read and will complement the warmer color temperature of the screen.
Remember, the goal is simplicity.
The takeaway
Eye strain is directly tied to headaches, migraines, and an overall very miserable experience of daily life.
Many people try to tackle this by trying to blink more often, using eye drops, forcing themselves to look away from the screen at regular intervals.
But here, we run into the same problem. How natural is this? How natural is it to force yourself to blink or drop liquid into your eyes?
Unless you turn away from all technology for good, then you are among the majority of people: you are going to be looking into a screen for the bigger part of your day. Every day.
You’re not the thing that needs to be tweaked. Your screen is. Right now, it’s your enemy. But you can make it your friend.
