Eyes Care

If you want to protect your eyes and prevent long term damage, the first place you should look at is your home office. Whether it’s just a desk in the kitchen or a separate room, you should start by making sure your workspace is properly lit. Any glare and harsh contrasts in your environment can contribute to your eye strain. You should also be aware of your monitor’s settings if the light in your workspace changes throughout the day. Tweaking your monitor’s brightness and contrast based on the ambient light helps reduce eye strain. If you want a detailed guide on how to do this, check out Charles Poynton’s extensive article on the matter. It might also help to lessen our dependency on the computer screen, if possible. Since I’m a freelance writer, I sometimes use speech recognition software so I can speak my first draft into a microphone rather than stare at the screen. For visually dependent tasks such as graphic design, tough, this kind of workaround isn’t really possible, although perhaps you could try sketching onto paper instead of working on screen for some of the time. Finally, we should all regularly take eye exams. By consulting an eye doctor, we can prevent major problems as well as track the health of our eyes over the years.