Tips on protecting your eyes from a Computer Screen

[Grateful11]

Protect Your Eyes from the Computer Screen
By Phyllis McIntosh

According to the National Institute on Occupational Safety and Health, nearly 80 percent
of people who work at a computer more than two hours a day suffer problems such as
headaches, blurred vision, or dry eye.

Jeffrey Anshel, O.D., a California optometrist and author of several books on visual
ergonomics, suggests ways to protect your eyes:

Adjust the monitor. When you gaze straight ahead, you should be looking just over the
top of the monitor. If the monitor is too high, you can’t focus as well and your eyes open
wider, causing tears to evaporate faster.

Remember to blink to keep your eyes lubricated. Studies show that we blink a third less
than normal when concentrating on the computer screen.

Take a break to unlock your focus on the screen. Anshel recommends the 20-20-20 rule.
“Every 20 minutes take a 20-second break and look 20 feet away.”

Reduce glare. Avoid competing light by keeping a window to your side rather than in
front of or behind you.

[what4]

Here are a few other tips. I used to teach eye exercises and am not currently doing so.

(1) Because computer displays are composed of fairly large dots, spend some time each day looking, in a relaxed manner, at the tiniest details of some examples of high quality print (such as magazine pages with many sizes of type). The eye's focus is amazingly sharp, and it uses very fine details to focus on. Provide those details. Computer screens don't.

(2) Exercise your focus: In addition to looking 20 feet away, focus your eyes through a ladder of distances, very near, near, mid, far-mid, far, very far, and back again. Quickly, easily, in a relaxed way.

(3) Breathe! Better yet: adjust your posture around this standard: Sit so that your breath can happen naturally and fully, without your having to think about it. Don't slump.

(4) "Paint" the environment with your eyes. In a down-time moment, casually sweep your eyes over every part of the visible environment around you, area by area, such that your central focus "paints" the whole scene into your mind. What does this do? It practices using the sharp central focus of the eye to take in detail from the environment and pass it to the peripheral processing. It's a way of, so to speak, tuning your sharpening filter.

Don't strain to see. Be easy. Let your eye-mind do its work without much conscious interference. It's eye-mind, of course, because the brain's processing of sight seems to begin in the retina itself.

And, finally, the mystical moment: Whatever you are aware of seeing has already passed through a filtering and processing system that has "you" written all over it. One of the inexhaustible challenges of life is to seek moments to separate what you expected to see from what you actually see. The result is always a surprise.

[Todd's keyboard]

what4,

Have you ever come across a series of exercises called "Pepper Stress games"?

I learned a few of these on the '70s at a workshop given by an optometrist. He introduced the activities as originating from a Dr. Pepper, an optometrist who was practicing in Lake Oswego, OR, at the time.

thanks, Todd's blurry keyboard