Now, for most of us, working from home is a whole new ball game when it comes to the set up that we’ve got and also the environment that we’re working in and this is particularly true when we think about the fact that we’re far more likely to get eye strain and visual discomfort working from home than we are in the office.
In this blog post, I’m going to give you six tips to help you see more comfortably and experience less eye strain when you’re working from home and you’ve got some serious work to get done.
Let’s get going with today’s blog post all about helping you see more comfortably when you’re working from home.
Optimize your background lighting.
Now, one of the things about using computer displays and devices is that they really have this bright screen and often you can forget about the background and the fact that the background can be so much dimmer in contrast to this bright display that you’re looking for. It’s important to get the balance right so that the background lighting is almost comparable to the brightness of the screen, which means you will have to kind of really be in an environment where the lighting is either great natural light or you have to make sure you’ve got a good background, bright light as well.
One critical thing that happens when we look at an object that’s close up, such as our computer screen, is that our pupils constrict and that’s to say that our pupils get smaller in size. This is an important observation to understand because there are many things that our pupils will respond to, for example, when we look at things further away, our pupils want to dilate so they get bigger. When we look at an object close up, they want to do the opposite, they get smaller, and also our pupils respond to lighting levels.
So when we’re looking at a bright display, for example, that encourages our pupil to also respond by getting smaller and when we’re in an environment that’s dim and dark, the opposite happens. It encourages our pupils to expand and get bigger. So if you’re in an environment where you’ve got your monitor close up to you and you’re looking at this bright display close up to you, those factors will encourage your pupils to get smaller, but if you’re in an environment that’s dark or there’s a big contrast between your display that you’re looking at and the surrounding environment, that’s going to cause a conflict, because once telling your pupils to get small and the ones telling your pupils to get big, and this can cause a conflict which can lead to discomfort of your eyes and can lead to eye strain.
Eye strain, by the way, is a king pulling tension sensation that people often notice around their eyes. So when you experience that, that’s going to make it difficult for you to work for prolonged periods comfortably.
Now, going further on from that and to also set the scene for some of the other tips that I’m gonna give you. I just want to point out that three key things happen whenever we look at an object close up. So these three key things happen to our eyes and they form a phenomenon very well known in optics, is called the Near Triad.
The Near Triad is the three key things that happen, so the first one we’ve talked about, and that’s the fact that your pupils constrict. Secondly, the other thing that happens is that your eyes converge, so the muscles that move your eyes, they line your eyes, so that they can kind of point inwards to address the object they look at up close up to you. Thirdly, the thing that happens that makes up the Near Triad is that your eyes auto-focus.
The muscles that do the focusing of your eyes, they kicking as well, so you’ve effectively got these three changes that were complementary together and they kind of work to help you see more comfortably close up, so that is your pupils constricting, your eyes turning in and then your auto-focus and kicking in the process that we call accommodation to allow you to be able to see and see comfortably working close up.
Optimize your screen position.
Now, your screen position is something that should be individual to you, different people have different focus points. If your eyes are focusing at 50 centimeters and you’re then forced to work at 30 centimeters, that may not be appropriate for your eyes because you’re focusing ability may not be adequate and you may also be just more comfortable in that position, whereas somebody else may be perfectly fine working in that position because either they are younger, so they are manual focusing, etc. Is a lot more capable or they just may not have the same kind of prescription as you in their glasses. So there’s a range of different things that means that your position has to be unique and individual to you, so you have to make sure that you optimize the position where your screen is gonna be optimized for what your eyes are capable of being able to deal with.
How I would advise that you do this is to get an object, a reading object, and this can just be your laptop with a font that you are most likely going to use, then, hold the computer screen or the laptop or your device screen at the point where you can see comfortably, then extend your arms right out to the front, starts to go blurry or starts to get difficult, then you can stop at that point because you know that that’s the extreme of your range, then move the laptop or the device closer towards you in the opposite direction and come as close as you absolutely can to the device. The display starts to become noticeably uncomfortable or starts to become blurry. Then, again, this is your optimum point close and close to you, so in between those two points or the closest to you and the point furthest away, that’s your range of clear vision.
Now the most important and the most optimum place to be able to have your reading device or your computer screen, your display is by the middle of those two blur points. So, that middle point is really where your screen should be, because at the middle point is where you’ve got the most comfortable capability to focus and hold your focus for longer periods, and then working at this point will allow you to be able to have more visual comfort for longer periods.
If you remember back to where we talked about the Near Triad, so the other two parts of the Near Triad, that is your eyes converging in and you’re also focusing those two factors are affected by you working at the position that is most comfortable for you. So if you’re holding, for example, your laptop screen too close near the extreme of the range or too close to that to near kind of blur point, then it’s going to be harder to work for long periods, working at that position and in the same respect, if you’re holding it too far back from the middle of the range, there’s also going to get difficult after a certain period of use. So you want to be kind of in that middle of the range, which is the kind of sweet, sweet spot and the optimal point to maintain your focus comfortably for the longest period.
Consider your display screen brightness.
Now, for many of us, things look nice and crisp and we’ve got a bright screen and we feel like, we’re kind of seeing a nice contrast because the screen is so bright, but if you’re going to be working for a prolonged period, you have to consider whether the level of brightness that you’ve got your screen permanently set at is necessary. I think most people can benefit from having the screen brightness reduced to right about the 50 percent mark or at least to the point where you can comfortably see without having such an intense screen brightness, glaring back at you.
One of the reasons why having a bright screen might be uncomfortable for you is the fact that, again, relating to the impact on your pupils when you’ve got a bright light shining at your pupils, your pupils get small. And again, thinking back to the Near Triad we talked about, this is important because if your pupil gets very very small, this may also influence the other two factors in the near Triad. So that’s your auto-focusing and how your eyes converge, it may kind of put pressure on those two other aspects of the near Triad to want to kind of kick in and artificially adjust more than they would ordinarily because they’ve been influenced by the other member of the near Triad.
So these three aspects, how your eyes turn in and how your focusing works, and how your pupils react, one can influence the other, if you’ve got your pupils, as I said, been constricted, then this can make things uncomfortable for you because it’s affecting, these other aspects that are talked about as well. So we can influence that by keeping the brightness down to what is necessary. This thing most people find will make your eyes, instantly feel more comfortable and make it more bearable for you to work for longer periods.
Block the blue light emitting from your display screen.
Now, one way or another, many of us will have heard something about blue light and the impact that it might have on our eyes, in one scenario or the other. Certainly, as far as a device is concerned, we know that a lot of monitors and display screens emit a lot of blue light, whether or not it is good for the health of the eyes, that’s a discussion that perhaps you go through in another blog post.
But one of the things that we do know is that many people find that just by blocking out the blue light, it instantly seems to make your vision more comfortable while using the monitor and the display screen. So I’d highly recommend giving this a try if it’s something you’ve never done before, and you can do this in a couple of ways.
First of all, you can go out and purchase some blue-blocking glasses. There’s plenty of them available on Amazon, I think these products do help in this particular situation and for other reasons as well, that’s perhaps beyond the scope of this discussion. But, you know, you can get something from Amazon and you can also get prescription blue-blocking products made by an optometrist or other online retailers as well.
Now, simple and free way of doing this, though, is by using the blue light blocking software that’s already included with every Windows PC out there and you can do this by, just perhaps navigating over to your notification center and you’ll see a kind of a night mode there. If you click on that and you’ll find that the display will go yellow, and that tells you that the blue light has been kind of removed and that yellow appearance arises because, when blue light is filtered out, the light that passes through or transmitted is more yellow. So that’s something that you can do instantly and free if your Windows user believes that Macs may have something like that as well.
If you’re an iPhone user, I think Android users as well, you can search on your phone and look for night shift mode, when you enable the night shift mode on your phone, it’s got a timer as well. So you can enable it to come on automatically at certain times of the day, or you can just put it on manually. But you can also find that the whole display takes a yellow tinge to it and this is the blue-blocking kind of filter that’s enabled on your phone already.
Give your eye muscles a break.
As we talked about, there’s effectively three muscle groups that are involved when you want to hold your focus for long periods looking at an object close up and those muscle groups up, the muscles that are to do with how your eyes turning, how your eyes kind of converge, that’s what we call Extra-ocular muscles. So that’s the muscles that help you look left, right, up, down, everything in between. Then, the other group of muscles is the muscles that control your pupils, the Pupillary muscles. The third group is what we call the Ciliary muscles and these are the muscles that do your auto-focusing for you.
So it’s important to recognize that these muscles can get tired just like any other muscle in the body and if you’ve been holding your focus for any period, that is important to have a good break to allow these muscles to rest, to recuperate, and then continue to be effective for you. A common rule of thumb to consider in this kind of situation is the 20, 20, 20 rule, it’s one that you might have heard of before. It simply reminds you to take a break every 20 minutes, when you take that break to look about 20 feet away and you can do that for 20 seconds, and that kind of really allows you to have a little bit of a rest because you’re doing it at relatively short intervals, I think for longer working periods while it’s probably worth, you know, halfway through your day having a little bit more of a break to kind of do some eyes exercises that kind of help to distress your eyes a little bit.
I’ve got a few of these exercises that I’m gonna a kind of leave a link to, if you want to check that up on my website, you can just check that out and also access a free PDF that will help you to implement some of these exercises as well.
Here is the link; Eye exercises for tired eyes & FREE PDF https://meyetips.com/4-exercises-to-r…
Hydrate your eyes
Knowing that one of the common contributing factors to computer vision syndrome is the impact of dry eyes on the user. Now with dry eyes, this can arise because you are prone to dry eyes anyway but, you know, this is not always necessarily the case. People who ordinarily wouldn’t experience dry eyes can have, to some degree a level of drying out while they’re using computer screens and display screens as well for prolonged periods.
Now, the reason for this is because a well-known fact that when we all stare at an object close up in our blink rate and a blink efficiency reduces it almost, if you like, like a protective mechanism that our visual system, which automatically blinks for us, understands that we’re doing an important task and reduces how often we blink to allow us to be able to concentrate. The only problem is that for most people, this reduced blink rate often means that they’re blinking incompletely, so the blinks that they take intend to be half blinks rather than full blinks. There’s always an area that never fully gets wet on the surface of the eye as a result, this area starts to experience drying out.
The drying out then leads to the symptoms of soreness of the eyes can lead to a kind of pinky is developing and also can just, heighten the sensation of discomfort when you’re working for a stretch period. So it’s important to prompt yourself to blink more in the first instance because it’s our blinking is an automated thing, it’s not something that we think about.
As much as people might say you need to blink more, it’s not necessarily something that you’re going to easily remember to do, so, you could perhaps stick some sticky notes or sticky notes on your laptop or your display screen just to remind yourself to blink, when you blink as well, then it’s important to take full complete blink so your eyes getting hydrated and moisturize and then do that regularly, typically most people when we look at display screens, even when you do things like a task, like driving our blink rate may reduce us by as much as 50 percent, if not more. This kind of change in this kind of reduction in blinking efficiency can be quite dramatic, so it’s important to be conscious of you’re somebody who feels a lot of soreness in your eyes, be conscious of your blinking, making sure that you blink completely and blink regularly as well.
Also, the other point I would make is, while you’re perhaps doing this task, have a glass of water beside you and set yourself the task of complete drink in that bottle of water, and just make sure that you’re physically well hydrated as well and this goes a long way to generally making sure your whole body is hydrated, which will also help you feel comfortable, but also can lend to the hydration of your eye as well.
So these measures are simple, but they can have quite a significant impact, over time. It’s important to kind of factor them all in and not to kind of overlook any one of these things and particularly something as seemingly simple as blinking more often.
Those are the 6 tips that I’ve got for you, hope they were helpful. My question for you today is which of those tips do you think is going to be the most beneficial to you? Leave me a message in the comment section.
Thank you and I look forward to catching you in the next one.
Take care.
