This is a Guest Post by Michael Carper Editor of ABC Neckties. If you would like to Guest Post for Baby Boomers US, check out our Guest Post for Us page.
The strain is a result of over-focusing by the eyes. Reading pixels on a computer screen requires your eyes to focus. When they has to focus for too long a period, they become strained. Eyes can become tired, red, dry, or sensitive to light; CVS can even cause head and neck aches. Fortunately, there aren’t serious, long-term effects of CVS; it’s merely uncomfortable in the short term.
The first way to combat CVS is through settings on your computer. You can make online text easier to read by enlarging it, usually through pressing Command or Control, and then +.
Another way to reduce the effort needed to focus is by setting both your room light and your display brightness to a moderate amount. Bright lights in a room, especially those that glare on the computer screen, make it more difficult to read the screen. An especially bright screen creates too much contrast, especially if the room is slightly darker. The best solution is to dim your computer screen and avoid bright room lights. Laptops typically allow you to change the brightness through certain keyboard keys, including Macs. Separate displays typically have physical menu buttons.
Additionally, proper posture can reduce the strain on your eyes. Sitting about two to three feet from the monitor is a good distance to balance the ability of your eyes to focus and their ability to read. It’s also important that your eyesight be level with your monitor; you don’t want to strain your neck looking up or down.
If you wear reading glasses, bifocals, or contacts, there are certain steps you can take to avoid strain with those. Glasses, in general, are preferable to contacts for the sake of avoiding strain, since they avoid the inevitable redness and dryness that comes with wearing contacts for long periods. For me personally, taking my contacts out and replacing them with glasses is the best way to reduce eye strain, especially since I, and many others, end up wearing them for more than the recommended 8 hours a day.
If you wear reading glasses, you still may have to increase text size in order to read comfortably at a proper distance. If you wear bifocals, you may have to either lower your monitor or raise your chair, in order to keep your vision through the lower lenses level with the screen.
If CVS persists and you find your eyes hurting, the most effective solution is to take a break. Looking at something different than a screen is good, looking at something farther away, and thus giving your eyes a near-sight focusing break, is better. Often CVS can be aggravated by inadequate blinking, so try blinking two dozen times to get your eyes moist again. Eye drops can assist the re-moistening of your eyes as well.
About the Author: Michael is a student at Wabash College and writer for the Reading Glasses Shopper blog. As someone who spends too much time on the computer, he battles Computer Vision Syndrome daily.
Every week I come across an article or two that I find very helpful to me as a Baby Boomer and think may be of some interest to you, the community, as well.
