You’ve come to the end of a really long day and you would like to do some writing, but you just can’t face that monitor. Time to play around with those monitor settings.
Eye strain is something that plagues many of us in this day and age. We spend so much time on our computers or electronic devices that our eyes just aren’t coping. Many will read their eBooks off of a tablet or smartphone, and that laptop seems to be attached to our limbs. Or we’ll watch the latest movie on that LCD TV mounted on the wall. Between our day jobs and the computer requirements there, and our home lives, no wonder so many of us suffer from eye strain headaches every day.
However, there are some tricks that we can play to keep the eye strain away.
There’s the obvious of forcing yourself to get away from the computer screen for a few minutes every hour. However, how many will quickly swap the computer screen for that game on our smartphones? Yeah, we’re not doing ourselves any favors. But the tricks I’m talking about so simple, more people should do them.
Where possible, change color schemes.
The harsh white background in most text-based programs is too much for most people to spend day in, day out staring at. If possible, look at changing that color to something softer on the eyes. Or look into Night Modes on your device (if it has one). These often change the white background to black, and the black text to white.
This isn’t always possible. My blogging engine employs a white background, and that’s that. Within Word, if you change the background of your normal template, all your documents will get that color too—even the ones you send to others. In some email editors, the background color of your composer is migrated into your emails. (Sending purple/gray emails to clients is so not a good look.)
However, many external monitors have the ability to play with “colors”, such that you can have a vivid scene, or a soft detail, or that movie setting. Gaming modes on screens often shift the contract of the color schemes, such that the detail in the dark areas is more pronounced, but this can be extremely bright on the eyes in the lighter settings. Playing around with those color schemes that are directly on your monitor will only influence what you see, and changes nothing in what you send to others.
Brightness and contrast have their influence over eye strain too.
Play around with the brightness and contrast settings of your monitor too. Many writers work at night, when the ambient light is not as bright as the afternoon sun. Yet, they insist on using maximum brightness. Is that really necessary? If you lower your monitor’s brightness, not only will you help your monitor last longer, but you’ll help your eyes last longer.
On my monitor, I have multiple settings already stored into its memory, so I can easily switch between them based on the ambient lighting. In the middle of the day, when the sun is streaming in my office window, my monitor is on full brightness. I need to be able to see what I’m working on. However, as soon as that sun goes down and the overhead lights go on, my monitor is put into Night Mode, which is the minimum brightness possible before my monitor goes black.
My laptop doesn’t have Night Mode or multiple memory settings. It doesn’t even have the ability to play with the color scheme for the display (not without changing the actual Windows color scheme). However, I still keep my laptop on a dim setting, and I can easily change the brightness, because there are quick keys on the keyboard. No point in forcing myself to live with eye strain if I can avoid it.
My smartphone and tablet live on dim settings too. They only go brighter when I’m in the bright sun and I can’t see what’s on the screen. The moment the sun is not an issue, down the brightness goes again.
Playing around with brightness settings is a practice that I have been doing for years, since I was a teen. I will still suffer from eye strain occasionally, but my night vision is better than average, and I’m fairly confident that my insistence of working on a dim monitor when in low ambient light has something to do with it.
If you regularly suffer from eye strain, give these ideas a go. The longer you can stave off the eye strain headache, the longer you can keep writing and editing.
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© Copyright, Judy L Mohr 2018