How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

In the history of LED lighting, it took quite a bit of work (hybrid phosphor technology, etc) to get them to emit warm color temperatures. The exact color temp can be a personal preference, but I think a lot of people aren't privy to the difference the color temperature of "white" light can make!

I want to go on a guerrilla campaign around my neighborhood and replace porch light bulbs with warm equivalents.

I'm in a basement and had fairly good success with certain "led shop lights" to make the space feel more like it has natural light (though I could improve things further).

I do find however, that using diffuse lighting and minimizing shadows is what makes lighting feel artificial.

Natural sunlight has very parallel rays that create very evenly lit surfaces with very sharp shadows. Whereas most artificial light has radial rays around the light source that diminish in intensity with the cube of the distance and thus create fading gradients on surfaces and weak shadows especially if you have many of them.

I find I miss the feel of parallel rays of natural light so I try to find lights that have for example, parabolic reflectors to make the rays more parallel and position a few of them farther away from me pointed towards my visual field to try to replicate natural sunlight coming through a window.

One challenge however, is that it's surprisingly difficult to get good parallel rays from artificial light sources because of conservation of etendue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etendue ). I wish there were more options on the market.

I am quite sensitive to glare. I have tried many setups in my windowless office with low ceiling height and have found linear up-down pendant lights the best option. Up-light is more important as it bounces soft light from ceiling. When I want to work in dimmer environment in the evenings, I switch off the down-light.

I also try to buy lightning fixtures that are designed anti-glare although they are more expensive. You can also make pendant lights yourself with led strips and aluminium profiles.

Your eyesight and glasses also matter a lot. My glasses are quite worn with lots of scratches. They definitely make issues worse.

Is there a way to diffuse light from overhead recessed lighting? For me the ‘soft’ LED bulbs I have aren’t enough. I wish there was some kind of diffusion cover I could put on the outside of the recessed housing that softens the light further but also doesn’t look like I hacked something together.

But I also wonder - why has there been such wide adoption of overhead recessed lighting? To me they’re a big part of why lighting in modern homes looks harsh.

Diffused bright light from a white wall behind you is not any better. Learned this the hard way when I started WFH in Anno Covidi 1.

I agree up until golden hour. It's a very specific style of lighting and isn't any better or worse. It's not the best time to take a picture, it doesn't have the best light. It's a specific kind of light.

>* 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.

This is huge. I personally can not stand warm color temperatures in my office or bedroom, I know all the colors are off and it aggravates me to no end. On the other hand, I can't stand cool color temperatures in the dining room because it doesn't lend well to eating comfortably. And in either case, I can't stand warm color temperatures on any monitors/screens or televisions because of the same reason as when I'm in my office or bedroom.

Use color temperatures that suit your preferences, going against them just because someone says it's better for you (eg: red shift at night, aka blue light fearmongering) is patented bullshit.

I used to have this dry eye problem a lot, but turning down the brightness of the display really helped with that. The eyes can adapt to very low settings, almost at the bottom of the range on macs at night for example.

I find it is also important that whatever is behind the screen is lit indirectly equally to the brightness of the display. A bright screen in front of a dark wall is a perfect recipe for dry eyes for me.

Optometrist recommended I take daily fish oil and give it a month to see result. Sure enough, roughly a month later, I stopped having dry eyes. My eyes feel good even now during winter, when both outside and inside air is quite dry.

btw, if you have 2 different monitors on different lengths from your eye you change focus more frequently and your eyes feel better.

A laptop + big monitor is less irritating for the eyes as long as they aren't put exactly on the same line.

I, too, experienced dry eyes and found it challenging to consciously blink regularly. A few years ago, someone gifted me one of these "3-D puzzles" (similar to this: https://www.amazon.ca/Bookend-Miniature-Bookshelf-Birthday-B...). I kept it on my desk and it helped me somewhat regulate my constant focus on the screen by prompting me to glance at it occasionally. That's just something that worked for me.

Pretty nifty, except that it also detects "winks" as "blinks".

This is a great idea, and it seems surprisingly accurate.

I know it's a prototype, but in case you're interested in feature requests: if I have multiple webcams, it seems to just choose the first one without a way to select another.

Wouldn't an app that randomly turns the screen black for a split second every few minutes be able to induce blinking as a response?

Cool web app but doesn't work unless I take my glasses off, sadly.

I remember standing up on office chairs to twist the florescent tube bulbs above my desk just enough to turn them off. That light was just awful.

It helped a lot until maintenance would come in at night and "fix" the light and I'd have to do it all over.

The over-bright lighting, monitor glare, and eye strain are a favorite conversation topic at my workplace since RTO.

My eyes are sensitive to glare, so in my last job I took to wearing the visor I wore outside also inside. Got some weird looks but it was a lot easier on my eyes.

Oh god they just replaced our horrible fluorescent tubes with dazzling white LED. From bad to worse.

Had a coworker that could notice the flickering from the bulbs (fluorescent?). I can't see it, but for those who can it's apparently really jarring.

Amen. I wear a ballcap at the office.

Ours are absolutely atrocious.

I forgot just how bad it got until they did a big office move a couple of months ago. Previous to that I'd been way out on the edge with large windows behind me (with some shading film on them). My move now put me in the centre of the floor with barely a window in visible range, stuck under these godawful, far too bright lights.

The first day in that space reminded me just how much I'd hated that aspect of things before the pandemic.

85" @ 1.5m is insanely big for me, do you not get sore having to dart your eyes about to read the corners?

I made a glasses with the focus optimized for 1.5m. A lot easier on my eyes for working than my progressive lenses.

I would disagree with 1.5m, but I do recommend checking how close you are to your monitor.

Let's assume you have a reasonably sized office monitor (27" or so). Extend your arm with your hand as a fist, forward. If your screen is closer to you than your knuckles, it's too close.

Now, for the height: all monitor stands are too low. If you keep your head straight and look at the monitor, you should be looking at the upper third. VESA mounting arms or monitor stands solve this problem.

Glad to hear someone else doing this. I feel bad not using the grow light to... you know... grow plants. But the light it provides in my office is lovely.

You can have both though, overhead white lighting for the day and lower temperature lamps for the evening. It's not a binary choice.

> 2) If your monitor's backlight flickers at a low enough frequency[0] that it's a problem -- get a new monitor[1]. If you spend enough time using your monitor that the eyestrain is real, upgrading your monitor is a no-brainer.

My work laptop flickers and the only solution was to throttle the CPU. Seems like it draws too much power and the AC cable that came with it can't handle it at medium loads.

You're an exception.

For most people, sitting in the dark with only their monitor giving off light massively increases eye-strain.

This used to work for me as well, but one day my eyes just gave out. I now need a setup similar to the article. I use two diffuse light sources at corners in the room, with BenQ light bar in front, and (almost most importantly) a warm lamp backlighting the monitor. I might replace the backlight with an RGB bias light of some sort, but it has to be there or everything gets painful fast.

Same here. Sounds like people are describing their yoga studios in this thread. Not for me.

For me it really depends on the situation. When I'm gaming or watching a movie, I prefer effectively no light. In fact, I built an enclosed space in my garage that is light tight. Then I have an overhead LED strip with variable intensity control. I find that programming and video calls both work best if I have a reasonable level (about 50% of what a typical office overhead would provide). I absolutely love complete darkness but after a while I start to feel like a cave troll.

Do what works for you. If it’s comfortable and you don’t notice lingering issues it’s probably fine.