My eyes take time to adjust to the increased magnification, triggering a brief headache. Then, after I take them off after a long screen session, they adjust back to my normal sight, triggering another headache.

However, staring at the screen intensely without them also triggers a headache.

My solution: make everything bigger on the screen. Terminal, browser, text size. Makes me feel like a grandpa, but it works. I've even reduced my resolution to scale everything.

My eye sight is 20/20 and I have no problem reading small text in books, but something about the screen just makes me feel so much more relaxed and comfortable when everything is bigger.

I also recommend an onscreen magnifier that appears and disappears on hotkeys. I use MacOS' built-in one, set up to show when ctrl-alt are held. I have only moderate myopia, but the magnifier makes it much more comfortable to look at small-ish things on the screen. There's an image that you wish was bigger? No need to open it separately or bend forward—just mash the keys, bam, it's half the screen now.

On the non-hidpi screen the magnifier pretty much took me to the days of 800x600 screens, causing frequent reflections on how the times change. But on hidpi, it's more like I get a 1280x800 screen in the magnifier. Works like magic for images with small details, e.g. aerial photos: almost like peeking through a telescope.

Yes I do this too, for exactly the same reasons. Also makes me feel like a grandpa, but who cares. Also it makes me realize how frequently apps fail to account for large system-level font sizes.

It's possible that the brief headache is due to confusion between vergence and focus. I.e., your brain is going "my eyes are converging a point 30cm away, so why am I focusing as though it's infinitely far off?!"

If this is the case, adding base-out prism to the lenses could (in theory) solve problem.

https://www.eophtha.com/posts/fun-with-prisms-in-ophthalmolo...

I did this not for eye strain but so I would stop craning my neck forward, and it works fantastic.

I just put 2x scaling on all the screens (all 4k+, so do what works for your screens),

I’d say from there I slightly scale down most websites using the browser to 90% or 80%.

Have you compared similar font sizes on different monitors? I’ve realized monitor quality makes a big difference when reading text for hours on end. Some produce very sharp text, others not so much.

All retina monitors have had impeccable text sharpness since 2012. However, for desktop monitor sizes anything less than 5k isn't acceptable.

Do you wear glasses often, given that you have 20/20 vision?

No, my eye doctor actually just prescribed me a set only for looking at screens because it increased the sharpness (apparently one of my eyes has stronger visual acuity than the other, and this imbalance is exacerbated when staring at screens but also I was told this is pretty common). I spent a lot of time trying to "hack" a solution for my eye strain and constant headaches, so I tried a bunch of things, including readers.

To state the obvious, just in case, the old “if it hurts you to do X, do it less” applies to eye strain as well.

If sitting 8h in front of a computer hurts your eyes, taking regular and irregular pauses, changing focus, printing long documents etc. will of course dramatically help and probably be the best effective way to reduce it.

The study (linked at the end of the article) is published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology; no English translation needed.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33587901/

Oh! My mistake. I thought the article was about some newly-published German study and that the English links were just references to other, related studies. This is the other study they linked ("Does iPhone night shift mitigate negative effects of smartphone use on sleep outcomes in emerging adults?"): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleh.2021.03.005

It's possible I'm missing something, as neither seems to be about retinal toxicity (i.e., "danger"), just eye strain and sleep duration/quality. The article you linked is about eye strain w/ "blue blocking" lenses, and the other is about the "night shift" feature of iOS.

(For reference, the blue-blocking lenses in the article you linked were ones that

>filtered blue light by front surface coating between 10% and 30% in the range of 400-500 nm. These lenses almost completely blocked transmission below 400 nm and had approximately 95% transmission between 500 and 700 nm.

so they are of the "Blokz" type that probably don't do much for computer/phone use. While displays do produce light in the 400nm-500nm range, the lenses described only attenuate it by 10%-30%.)

>On a note related to eye strain, but unrelated to blue light: the best solution I've found for eye strain is to wear reading glasses (or if you are near-sighted, glasses with an additional diopter or two) even if you don't need them. With the correct SPH value, the screen will be at optical infinity and your eyes will be fully relaxed.

This is interesting. I'm reminded of the oft repeated recommendation to "look away from your screen at something far away" every 15 mins. I wonder if you could just switch glasses to a prescription that make your eyes believe they are focusing on something at a distance. How would you figure out the right prescription for this use case?

I find that wearing reading glasses helps me stay focused in an office environment. My computer is in focus, but anything farther away is a bit blurry and therefore less distracting.

Myopia progression isn’t related to eye strain or muscle use. Over focusing on the peripheral parts of the retina tells the eye to grow longer because it thinks it’s over focusing, especially in youth. You should wear corrective lenses as little as possible especially if you do work that keeps your peripheral vision in focus like reading or using a screen.

What do you mean by "over focusing on the peripheral parts of the retina"? And if this is true, could one reverse myopia progression by doing the opposite?

The eye grows automatically in response to what is in focus. If too much is constantly in focus the eye grows longer to blur it. This is especially important in peripheral vision which is why lenses are finally coming out with blurred edges to slow myopia progression. Ophthalmologists who don’t know this and don’t tell people to use lenses as little as possible and dont think screens cause myopia are negligent (and hopefully will start getting sued until they learn) especially when prescribing lenses to children when this matters most. The eye generally stops being able to respond to the over focus stimulations in adulthood. And children with unnecessarily worsened myopia from negligent doctors are at higher risk for permanent blinding illnesses earlier in life and more frequently. If your eye doctor doesn’t know about low dose Atropine for children, then leave them (or explore legal options if your child’s myopia has gotten significantly worse). There is no known way to reverse the elongation of the eye and therefore reverse myopia, for now it’s permanent. Any claims to reverse myopia without surgery are pure quackery, like the Bates method.

In that last sense are you referring to young people?