How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

A lot of the guidelines that are used to light a scene for a camera are also quite useful for lighting a room for yourself, just with less light needed as the human eye has a much higher dynamic range than a camera sensor:

* Use diffuse light. This usually means multiple light sources bouncing and diffusing light off surfaces (ceilings, walls, etc) or diffusers.

* Minimize shadows. Shadows lead to contrast which can lead to eye strain. Use multiple, maybe directional, light sources to illuminate shadows.

* Minimize highlights. Windows without blinds let in lots of light which leads to contrast and can lead to eye strain. Curtains and blinds are great ways to diffuse light.

* Uniform color temperature. Try to make sure all your lights have the same color temperature. Small variations are okay but large color temperature variations lead to color contrast which also tends to be hard on eye strain.

* Select your color temperature based on needs and feeling. A lot of people prefer warmer color temperature lights and cool temperature lights are known to be more stressful for folks with anxiety-related conditions, but if your work requires accurate color representation, or you find yourself mentally trying to compensate for color temperature, then change the temperature to what you find most productive yet relaxing.

* Wall color. Remember that "white" light that reflects off colored surfaces will take on a hue similar to the reflected surfaces. Walls of different colors can cause challenges for uniform color temperature, and warm colored walls can take cold lights and turn them warm.

A side effect, of course, is that your room will become a lot more photogenic. It's no coincidence since photogenic rooms are often just easiest on the eye to look at.

"Golden Hour" is considered a great time for photogenic events, photographs, and videos. "Golden Hour" lighting tends to be diffuse, not too strong, and warm toned. Humans tend to really like this style of lighting and if you do too, you might want to recreate some of these properties in your office.

A big thing not often spoken about with eye strain is dry eye caused by the lack of blinking due to focusing on screens too close to our face. This is an evolutionary phenomenon--close dangers cause extreme focus without blinking. Extreme focus on close items reduces our blinks.

Our eye lids have glands in them that release oils on your eye with each blink. These oils help prevent the watery part of your tears from evaporating. When it evaporates your eyes dry out causing discomfort and potentially pain.

If you don't blink enough, the oil doesnt get on your eyes and eventually, in extreme cases, the glands can even die. A lack of oil in tears can cause extreme eye fatigue and even pain.

This is why dry eyes is on the rise. Remember to blink!

I actually built a little web app to count my blinks. See https://dryeyestuff.com/. Not perfect, just a prototype. 100% free.

The natural light and diffuse light are good tips.

Next is to get a big screen eg. 85" 4K and put it 1.5m away. That should be your main display. I don't have that all the time, but then I get some variety, 85" @ 1.5m a lot of the time, laptop some of the time, driving/walking etc. for longer range.

1.5m is the midpoint of focus for the muscles in your eyes.

I built augmented reality displays and this was the focal plane we selected for to minimize eye strain and the felt sense of vergence/accommodation conflict.

We could then throw graphics as close as ~30cm, or at infinity using vergence adjustments, even though the accommodation was at a fixed 1.5m. Graphics felt best at that distance, but they also felt ok in the range 0.5-10m, which suited nearly all productivity scenarios.

This is another +1 for WFH. Many office environments have terrible lighting, and there's very little you can do about it.

I started leaving most warm nightshift on MacOS and iOS on 24/7. Made a huge difference. Now when I see a normal not warm screen it hurts.

One slightly different approach I haven't seen mentioned here - I use grow lights in my office.

They're way brighter, so simulate sunlight better, are full spectrum, and as a bonus my plants are super happy. I use 5 of these with a diffuser: https://www.amazon.com/SANSI-Daylight-Spectrum-Sunlight-Gree...

Having worked from home for many years, I was surprised that I had never come across the acronym “WFH” before. It took me a moment to decipher its meaning, especially since the article introduced another acronym, “PWM” (pulse-width modulation), right at the start.

Many people overlook how spaces are lit from an aesthetic perspective as well as a from the functional perspective this article is written from. Lamps and other eye-level lighting sources do more than just help eye strain as the article suggests; they also work wonders from an interior design perspective, and make spaces feel way more livable. I always find homes overly reliant on overhead lighting struggle to shake the more sterile feel of offices, where overhead dominates.

For me the revolution was to get a rather expensive monitor [1] with a great reader mode that lessen the flicker considerably. When I game with it and I turn off reader mode my eyes really feel the difference even though I spend way less time gaming than working.

I wonder if OLEDs will be even better since they shouldn't flicker during productivity (from what I read at least).

[1] was one of the LG ultrawide 34" but it was a few years ago and can't find it anymore.

Sooooo, I always saw offices with neon bulbs, so, very very cold light (well, actually "hotter" in Kelvin degrees...) and very bright. So I copied this in my home office, which is a 12 square meter (130 square foot) room with 6x 7000K bulbs, each emitting about 800 lumen. Am I doing totally wrong, according to TFA? Should I replace them with warm bulbs? I'usong GU10 bulbs.

Is no lighting considered too little? I like to sit in the dark with nothing but a computer monitor for light. I have noticed this greatly reduces eye-strain and distractions, but perhaps that is just me.

Environmental modification is one of my favorite emotional coping strategies. It.. feels like you're actually doing something! Cleaning up/tidying, "sacred space creation," light and color therapy all work way more effectively than you can believe.