This may not have been CVS, but I felt it was related to looking at screens all day so I wanted to share.
I frequently hear coworkers complaining about headaches and recommend they decrease their screen brightness. They always provide their own reasoning for the headache cause that makes it unavoidable. I shrug because I can't make them try my suggestion. But it would be interesting to have someone else try and get some feedback if the solution works for others (identifying my problem as a work hazard rather than a personnel condition).
http://i.imgur.com/5Cwiuif.jpg
Mine isn't quite that dim, but it's not nearly as bright as the view out the window behind it.
The best thing I can recommend is reducing your monitor's brightness to the same level as your periphery, including turning on a lamp to illuminate your surroundings (called bias lighting). Try something as simple as this: https://cdn.instructables.com/FUD/A1WU/GX3M1GEN/FUDA1WUGX3M1...
Also, if you aren't already, move your monitor further from your eyes. OSHA recommends almost 2 feet of distance; I personally prefer close to 3 feet. https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/computerworkstations/compon...
Edit: This is the technique used to modulate "brightness" by varying the duty cycle: http://www.waitingforfriday.com/index.php/Controlling_LED_br...
I use Flux on Mac and Windows and Redshift on Linux to adjust the colour temperature of my screens.
And a huge dose of brightness adjustment. All the way down first thing in the morning, especially at work where I have skylights above me.
This combination has completely eliminated all eye related discomfort for me.
Here is the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/migraine/comments/53m46d/as_promise... And the list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1etWKGqzZFHd293O5ooKy...
With the never ending trend of websites and applications being white background black text aside from high contrast modes and/or plug-ins to change color schemes turning down your brightness works well.
My home computer is on night mode with brightness and contrast at the bottom. With the light off or could stand to be even darker!
Also I use flux and try not to use the computer much at weekends.
Another thing I noticed helps is some other light source in the room, possibly a desktop lamp to light the wall behind the screen. It bothers me if the screen is the only light source in the room.
Both have paid versions, but Bluelight Filter's constant nagging & promotion of their other apps made the choice easy for me.
A lot of the recent "awareness" of CVS is based off people who want to sell you blue light blocking glasses.
This infographic is one of my favorite examples: http://vspblog.com/blue-light-infographic/
There's lots of numbers and statistics there, but none of it is actually scientific. The closest you get is that "VSP Optometrists report a 50% increase in digital eye strain and the effects of blue light exposure."
But I can promise you as someone on the receiving end of VSP's marketing to eye care professionals, that they're marketing the bejeezus out of their blue light blocking technology to their eye care professionals.
So, if you're an optometrist and you have a financial incentive to sell blue-light blocking coatings, and you're getting tons of marketing about the epidemic of digital eye strain in your inbox and mailbox and the publications you read, of course you're going to notice an increase of its incidents in your patients.
If you're experiencing discomfort from using your computer for hours every day, you should absolutely do things to alleviate that discomfort. But the thing that all this marketing and FUD leaves out, is that there's no evidence that blue light exposure (from digital devices) or CVS or digital eye strain or whatever they'll be calling it in a week causes any long-term damage to your eyes.
From the American Academy of Ophthalmology[1]: "Staring at your computer screen, smartphone or other digital devices for long periods won’t cause permanent eye damage, but your eyes may feel dry and tired."
[1]: http://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/computer-usage
I always believed this myself but I wonder what kind of research has been done to back it up. Intuitively, staring at a computer screen for 8+ hours a day for year after year would not seem to be a good thing.
Indeed this article seems to claim different:
"As you sit in front of the screen, your eyes dry out, and you stop blinking. Over time this leads to damage of the eye muscle that is used to focus on far away objects and damage to the tear ducts."
The condition he wants me to avoid is called nearpoint stress, but sounds very similar to me (a layperson). It culminates in your eyes lenses becoming "stuck," unable to fully relax to focus properly on things at a distance. I guess the reason is that your cilliary muscles (that alter the shape of the lens) become overworked to the point of a spasm.
One symptom of that is looking up from your computer and objects being blurry for a few seconds, but then coming into focus.
My +0.75 pair I found walmart.
That said, I often find the same thing as you, that nobody sells them. It's very hit-and-miss, so I just check the racks frequently and see what turns up.
Wearing them is really nice and when I do it all the time it prevents me from having any trouble focusing on objects at a distance, except for some specific things.
Looking through a scope on a rifle still causes the blurriness, perhaps because of its extreme closeness.
I was prescribed .75x glasses with an anti-reflective coating (which I think is fairly standard), and the above problem is no longer.
flux: https://justgetflux.com/
and now that I've been running linux, redshift: http://jonls.dk/redshift/
I find it hard to use a computer without these now
I'm sure if I ever do somehow see the light and accept Flux into my heart some day, with my luck right afterward there's bound to be some hip new product that claims that looking at an over-abundance of parallel and perpendicular lines keeps you awake longer or is otherwise minisculely unhealthy, so the product applies small distortions to the locations of everything on your screen, and people designing while they have it on will inflict similarly-jumbled messes upon their own users...
I hope Apple releases Night Shift for macOS soon and then I can stop manually switching color profiles around, but for now it's not a big deal.
My story goes back over 4 years ago, one day like the flick of a switch I could barely keep my eyes open. Now I live with it but it is extremely uncomfortable and distracting and I no longer hack on anything outside of work. My issue isn't so much dry eyes but strained and fatigued eyes. Imagine the most tired and strained eyes you've ever experienced. Multiply that by 10 and that is how my eyes feel starting from the moment I wake up. Luckily I still have 20/20.
Basically, let this be a warning not to take for granted your eye health.
I also recommend changing one thing about your routine every week and keeping an eye pain diary. That will help you identify things that help. It takes some work, but as you said eye health is super important.
Something like the alarms that wake you up at the right point in your sleep cycle.
It would probably need to have a cut-off eventually, but I'd hate to be interrupted in the middle of tracing some complex logic if there's a perfect stopping point 10 minutes later.
The world can wait. Fuck it. Just slack off and waste some time. That's what I do.
When my eyes feel bad, it's time to destroy an hour of the day, go for a walk and anyone who can't get on board with that can take a hike.
It's a very customizable tool - I've used it for months.
Or managers (when in the office). :)
Joking aside, I view this as a necessary balance required in life. Even if my primary activity needs a lot of solo concentration, I must embrace the distactions as having value for reasons mentioned in the article. We are not ultra-specialized machines, even if we specialize in very narrow fields, we still live a life that comes with variety, diversity and in an environment filled with beneficial chaos.
The more I think about it, the more of these issues that get solved naturally when working remote/at home.
Not quite what you're asking but it tracks how long you've been working (or using keyboard/mouse) and simply displays that without interrupting you at any point. If it's an hour or more for me, when I happen to glance at it, I get up and take a walk or stretch.
At school, I was taught that we have a short attention span of something like 10-15 minutes, so you could always do that. Every time the alarm goes off, go for a walk around the office.
Not quite what you were asking for, I know.
"Reading in a sitting posture at myopia onset predicted the greatest myopic progression to adulthood and reading face up on one's back the lowest. Reading with eyes on turned more downwards was slightly connected with greater myopic progression."
I had some major vision problems a couple of years ago, to the point I didn't touch a computer for about 4 months. iPad and iPhone screens weren't bothering me so I got to keep working.
My suggestion to people having severe problems is to strip apart every variable and test. A few things I have suspicions about which I have rarely seen addressed:
- switching between low & high DPI screens
- lights/screens which are not on the same frequency
- viewing angle (referring back to the myopia study.) Prior to a standing desk I would always lean back in my chair - going back to when I was like 11 years old.
From my opinion, if you took best practices and worst practices, and then like did all the worst ones you would be fucked pretty quickly. You could take someone in great health and give them chronic pain in weeks or a few month. Doctor's advice shouldn't be ignored, especially when something fatal may be occurring, but in many cases they may have no helpful advice.
Ergonomic / RSI / Carpel tunnel issues apply here as well. I've mentioned before I had severe RSI with chronic, 24/7 pain for years, and exhaustive attempts to fix it eventually cured it. Unfortunately as I get older I've also had to acknowledge that our bodies get less and less capable of fixing themselves. At the least we can try really hard to do things which aren't aggravating the decline.
One day, I woke up and both hands felt a bit odd, painful and tingling all the time. The next day, I woke up and both hands were burning. I had no strength, and no fine control at all. When I did tense them, it felt like I was holding my hands under a running hot tap. I couldn't hold a fork to get food to my mouth, I couldn't even hold a key to get it into the lock to open the door.
I was studying at the time, and obviously couldn't continue that. No doctor was able to help me, I was put on anti-inflamatories that were completely ineffective. I started drinking to deal with the pain, and within a couple of months I was drinking 3.2 gallons (12 liters) of beer a day, just to dull the pain.
Once the pain died away, I was still left with some serious problems. Fortunately alcohol dependence was not one of them (I just stopped drinking). Any repetitive motion that lasted more than a few minutes would cause me a day or more of pain. I found I was unable to reliably hold things, and I could just lose my grip on whatever was in my hands. Many glasses and cups were smashed because I just couldn't hold them.
So here's when I figured out what was wrong: many of my problems were related to a significant loss of strength. Because I had been unable to do anything for more than three months, I had lost much of the strength in my hands and forearms. Stamina, too. This meant that when I did anything repetitive, I was straining the muscles beyond their ability to cope.
I sold my computers, and grabbed a pair of free weights I had lying around. The "free" part is important, because machines reduce the load on ancillary muscles. I started doing some very basic arm strength exercises (curls and reverse curls). However, training yourself is something I would recommend against - find a reputable physiotherapist and have them set you out a basic rehab program, and get a muscle balance assessment, too. You could find that you have other issues that are causing your problems - I still have serious muscle tension issues that I am working on, with the assistance of a physio.
I studied personal training some years after, and I've found that it's so very easy to screw it up when you do it all yourself. I met one guy who thought he was just a paragon of bodybuilding - he was bench pressing well over 200 pounds, but his lat pulldowns were limited to just 30 or 40 pounds. His shoulders were rounded so far forward that you couldn't see any definition in his pecs.
The main reason I recommend a physio rather than a Personal Trainer (PT) is that, as I said, you may have some biomechanical issues that need sorting out, and no matter how much a PT may claim they can do this kind of thing, they are not medical professionals. A PT would be helpful in making sure you you are biomechanically sound in implementing the physio's program, but there's no substitute for real medical help.
I hope this helps you, good luck.
Is there any evidence that this treatment actually works?
I think you need to be careful not to overdo compresses, and associated massage, as the glands are also delicate and you can damage them, but for me it results in much more comfortable eyes and better vision when I do it semi regularly.
The downside to the compress (other than the one you mentioned) is the simple fact that I can't always just nuke my little eye-pad thing and lean back for 10 minutes several times per day at work. Even when I'm able to do it a few times per day as my eye doctors have suggested, any relief is relatively short-lived and doesn't treat anything long-term.
It sucks because my eyes almost always feel irritated or dry and no manner of lubricating drops, antibiotic drops, or hot compresses have helped. I've tried a few less tested but ultimately harmless things like fish oil supplements (since they're cheap and effects seem to range from unnoticeable to possible systemic benefits in the long term).
My takeaway has been that there's really no "cure" for blepharitis or chronic inflammation and meibomian gland dysfunction. All you can really do is minimize the things that exacerbate it and deal with it.
The 20 seconds, 20 feet part is closely matched to eye exercises for people with certain types of nearsightedness or eyestrain. One example for nearsightedness is "close, middle, far" practice, where you cycle your focus across three visually-adjacent objects at different depths, which forces quick refocusing without saccades.
This has been pretty consistently shown to help strengthen muscles and improve refocusing speed. I haven't seen CVS-specific results, but for now I'll trust that treatment for older syndromes is a good start.
The initial thinking was that I could do this to help reduce swelling (tired, puffy eyes). No idea if that works, but it sure is refreshing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagus_nerve#Vagus_nerve_stimul...
(I'm a layperson, hopefully all of my terms were correct.)
Also, quinine which is found in tonic water might help... with twitching and relaxing the eye muscles.
Since that time, I have always used small fonts and haven't had any problems. Plus, when CRT's started to disappear around the turn of the century, that was a fantastic change. Solid-state screens are much easier on the eyes.
Android and iOS also can do this. On iOS it's again an accessibility option, press the home button three times after it is activated and you will be able to read HN much longer (also, a black+blue HN is nice).
I am using this option so much that I finally switched from Ubuntu to OS X on the desktop after an Ubuntu upgrade at that time eliminated negative screen colours (and hibernation, but this is a different story), and it was impossible to bring it back.
I also like Flux darkroom, but after some time it gives you the feeling of being in a horror movie.
I don't generally hear others complain. Maybe it's rare.
After a particularly intense few weeks of work of computer-based work, I started getting double vision every time I tried to read or type at a computer screen. Initially it was rather disturbing.
Recovery was 3 days away from screen time and time outdoors (focusing eyes on far away things). I've definitely reformed my habits to spend time looking out the window more.
Also, flux is a requirement for any screen I use.
I have a 2012 MBP Retina, in retina mode (scaled at half the native resolution).; I can look at it for hours and hours without any problem. I also have a larger 4K screen from Iiyama, also "in retina mode"; after about an hour staring at it, my eyes are so dry that they are forced to cry, and headaches are much more frequent when I stick to that.
Somebody should do for monitors what Hermann Miller did for chairs.
Some HN discussion about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11546490
Here is the "You Hate Your Readers' Eyes" quiz. Is your body typeface...
* Sans-serif?
* Thin?
* Gray, the lighter the better?
Good work! You hate your readers' eyes!
What helped me a lot was a pair of Gunnar glasses (cristaline version) plus taking short brakes every 25min (Podoro Technique helps with this). The Gunnar glasses alone took me to cut down my use of eye-drops to 1 or 2 times a day.
So I honestly recommend the glasses, but wait for the style you like to be on sale (I bought mines 30% off) and if you are not sure about the meassures of your head, go with the Sheadog ones, I have a big head, and those fit me perfectly and are very light weight.
I suppose I should ask my optometrist about this.
I asked the optometrist what would cause my eyes to go bad and she just said "How many hours a day do you look at a computer screen?"
That way your eye has to re-focus as you look up and down on the screen.
The glasses also have a tinted glass that's supposed to help.
Mine are from the company starting with Gu... when searching for "computer screen glasses".
while : do
for run in {1..5}
do
sleep 1
tput bel
echo "Eye Beep"
done
sleep 1200
Another thing that has helped a lot: get a better monitor.
This effect could last the rest of the day/evening for me.
I'm positive the screens are the issue. My toddler nieces stand a foot away from tvs and every time i see it i beg their parents to not let them subject their developing eyes to that.
8 hours a day at work, and I then come home and game for 3 or 4 more, sometimes as much as 9 or10 additional hours, and have not yet felt anything as described here.
I may do these exercises naturally, as part of my existing habits, because I'm fairly easily distracted.
PS: Huge glasses that cover the eyes also protect against moisture loss.
It remains an open question which CVS is more harmful to software developers.
It's a condition; one that results from a specific type of activity (extended close work, which is not what our eyes are intended to do).
I do agree though that there's a danger with this kind of thing to think of it as some kind of single agent and oversimplify. I think we need to be careful to keep in mind the underlying nature of the meaning of these terms.
EDIT: Thanks for all the downvotes guys, it's good to know that humor has no place here.
Basically any re-used joke like this Oprah thing isn't going to play well here.
Also, as someone else mentioned, it needs to add to the conversation.