Is Your Computer Giving You Migraines, Stress Headaches, or Eye Problems?

Protect Your Eyes from Your Computer

You use your eyes perhaps, more than any other part of your body. You depend on them for nearly everything you do. But are you treating them with the care they deserve? If you use a computer several hours a day, there’s a good chance you aren’t.

Eyestrain can cause eye fatigue, red eyes, pain in or around the eyes, blurred vision, stress headaches, cluster headaches, migraines, and occasionally even double vision. Eye fatigue, in turn, can cause degraded vision, and can last as long as you regularly strain your eyes.

Avoid Focus Confusion

The first step in reducing eyestrain from your computer is understanding why reading from a monitor is worse than reading from paper.

Printed text has a very "hard" edge between the black ink of the text and white paper on which it’s printed. Text on monitors has a less defined edge, and this causes "focus confusion". Have you ever seen someone wearing a shirt with funny writing that you couldn’t quite focus on? Your eyes focus in and out, closer and further, trying to find the distance at which the text should be perceived. Your eyes are literally confused, and this causes eye strain. My head hurts just thinking about it.

Modern computers actually take steps to make this effect worse. Gone are the days of ugly, sharp, blocky fonts—nearly all computers, PC and Macs alike, use special methods to smooth the edges of fonts when displayed on your monitor, such as Microsoft’s patented ClearType technology. Although it looks more pleasing to the eye, it can cause you some serious pain by contributing to eyestrain.

Font smoothing methods try to fool your eye by making clear jagged curves (with sharp edges) look like clear, smooth curves (with blurred grays, hard-to-focus-on edges). They certainly do fool your eyes—only too well.

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Disabling font smoothing is the single most effective step you can take to thwart computer-induced eyestrain. Your text will look uglier, but your eyes will thank you. You can find steps to disabling font smoothing for Windows XP and Windows 7 at the end of this article.

The advent of larger monitors may have brought you another cause of eyestrain: higher resolution. You may unintentionally have set your resolution too high, leaving your fonts smaller than they would have been on a much older, smaller monitor. If you don’t want to lose the extra desktop real estate that accompanies higher resolutions, you’ll need to increase the default system font to a point where the text is large enough to keep your eyes comfortable.

Reduce Glare
Adjust your monitor brightness and/ or lighting so your monitor is brighter than the other light in the room. If you wear glasses, consider getting an anti-glare coating on your next set of lenses (usually an extra $50-65).

Correct Distance
Keep sufficient distance between your eyeballs and your monitor. You can find the optimum distance simply by extending your arm: your palm should barely rest on your monitor without leaning forward or backward.

Keep Continuous Focus
You don’t want your eyes to change focus for every line of text you read, so make sure your monitor isn’t tilted. It should be straight-on to your face.

If you use dual monitors, make sure they’re at the same distance and angle to your face (if they’re large, they shouldn’t be in the same plane). If they’re different sizes, adjust the resolution and default character display size so that the same text, when displayed on both monitors, is the same size.

Refresh Rate

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If you have a glass monitor (as opposed to LCD or plasma) make sure your refresh rate is set to the highest rate your monitor supports. You may need to refer to your monitor’s owner’s manual—and I suggest Googling for it since you probably threw it away years ago (i.e. Google: Zenith 3220 + manual).

Rest Your Eyes: Dry Eyes Cause Damage
Take breaks. Prolonged focus on your monitor can cause not only eyestrain, but can also cause dry eyes, which in turn can cause your eyelids to scrape layers of cells off your cornea when you blink. Your cornea should have 5 layers of cells. According to my Optometrist, I was down to 3 layers on the lower half of my eye lenses. At his advice, I keep a bottle of standard eye drops at my desk, in addition to taking eye breaks.

I hope you’ve found these steps helpful. If you have further concerns about eyestrain, or experience physical pain in your eyes, you should seek the advice of an Optometrist or Ophthalmologist. Eyestrain and dry eyes can cause serious problems without noticeable physical pain in your eyes. If you have noticeable pain in your eyes, you may have more serious vision issues. The expression, prevention is the best medicine, works especially well for your eyes.

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Disabling font smoothing on Windows XP:
Open Control Panel.
If you have a "Manage ClearType fonts" icon, use it to disable ClearType fonts.
If not, open the Display Properties icon
Select the Appearance tab
Select the Effects button.
Disable the checkbox beside "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts".
<OK>
<OK>

Disabling font smoothing on Windows 7:
Open Control Panel
Select Fonts.
Select ‘Adjust ClearType test’
Disable ClearType and any other font smoothing technique here
<OK>
<OK>

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Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
Microsoft WindowsXP is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
Microsoft Windows7 is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
ClearType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
Googleis a registered trademark of Google Inc.
Zenithis a registered trademark of Zenith Electronics LLC.