An Experiment in Eye Strain

Oy! My eyes have been a bit sore lately. So has my back, head and moustache. I've been sleeping badly too.

I think it comes down to a bad work setup. I spend pretty much all my time at a keyboard, so when things are wrong with my setup, I suffer. I've known about a few obvious problems, the chief one is that I'm on a laptop without an external monitor and I do not have a good desk or a good chair, so I'm slouching and hunched over all the time.

But, I think I've realised that I have another issue that is not well explored in the good work environment lore. I have a screen that's bright, but the matte finish causes all the brightness to go diffuse and glaring. There's quite a large amount of light hitting my eyes all day and the scattering effects from the matte finish could be messing with my visual cortex. I figure that if the visual signals are a bit messed up, the brain has to work that much harder to understand the signals its receiving.

Thus, my experiment is to run mt screen at minimum brightness. Less light assaulting my eyes and relatively more light is going cleanly from the screen to my eyes. After an hour of cranking down the brightness, I'm already feeling better. Now, I just need to see if this is a short term effect or really a benefit. Afterall, it could just be that I need to relax and get out a bit this weekend.

I'll follow this up in a week or so to report the results.