Extremely important thing to do for ANYONE who is a screen-staring addict.

Author: RationalMadman

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The notion that staring at a screen for long periods of time is bad for POSTURE is true if you don't pay attention to how you sit/lay/stand while using it and position your neck relative to the screen but the added notion that it harms your eyes and optical health is only true if you don't do the following:

There is something called 'blue light' that is used in all screens (TV to computer to phone) to make it appear 'fresh' and 'vivid' to you. This is very good in short bursts at making things very powerful and appear 'wow this screen is so good' but is extremely detrimental to your eyes after long periods of use and somewhat ironically makes your eyes quite 'unblue' and red after long periods of staring at it. This even can damage your ability to process light if you 'toughen yourself up' to it and destroy your retina by making yourself seemingly immune to the eye strain's felt pain and irritating via conditioning yourself to it by extensive exposure. This is NOT a conspiracy theory, many screen-based technology providers acorss multiple platforms have realised this is the single thing harming people like me who are staring at the screen all day but for whatever reason failed to advertise or make 'big' their in-built solution in all models of things made post-2014 towards October 2015. They added something that Google calls 'amber lighting' but most call 'night light' (and Google ended up using that term too). It artificially makes all colours that stray away from orange to be toned down in what is shown to you (they can't actually 'cut out' or 'reduce' the 'blue light' element to the screen). What this does in turn is make your eyes receive a less vivid but extremely soothing version of whatever you are seeing whereby the glare and harshness is completely blunted if you set the strength at the right level but don't go all the way 'red' or 'extreme amber' nor forget the role that BRIGHTNESS plays in the harm to your eyes. 

A key aspect to most tech with screens (if not all by this day and year) providing amber-increasing screen intonation is that it enables you to not have to reduce the brightness to such a severely dark level that your eyes are strained ANYWAY as you have to make the screen so dark that you struggle to 'focus' on it relative to the brightness of the lighting around you. This means you can now have your screen as bright (although i suggest 'one notch darker') than the lighting of your room/environment but have it ambered to such an extent that the focusing on the screen doesn't 'hurt' or redden your eyes for a long time.

Note: if you still experience eye-strain after actively using this, you need glasses and have abnormal eye-sight-range, don't be ashamed to see an optician, I guarantee you that if you have eye-strain after using amber lighting in the way I suggested, you 100% need glasses/contacts/laser-surgery so it won't be a wasted visit to the opticians.

Some platforms, such as Windows, 'force' you to set a time that you consider 'night' for the amber lighting to be activated during and it will turn back to blue-light-inclusive non-ambered screen for the rest of the time. A trick to get around this is to leave a fifteen-minute gap where your 'end time' is fifteen minutes earlier than the time of the 'start'. If you set it so they are the same time, it will never activate and you can't be more precise than 15-minute-slots as that's how Microsoft has decided to do it for now. When the fifteen-minute period begins (or when you are in a period of time where you know you'll be on during the fifteen minute period) set is for a fifteen minute period far away form the time you're using it. Do this constantly, there's no other solution. You want to be constantly doing it and never staring at non-ambered screen, this does what 'gaming glasses' do without costing a single extra cent or penny beyond what you paid for your system.

205 days later

Pinkfreud08
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Thanks 
Alec
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Thanks.
K_Michael
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Nothing new, but good to know that others know.

118 days later

RationalMadman
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also turn the default app size to around 125% or whatever your computer offers, it is my personal opinion that all default icons and proportions are basically 80% of the size that they should be for a proper relaxing experience. Again, there's no substitute for glasses, ask the optician for antiglare if they don't offer it (in this day and age they should always ask if you spend a lot of time in front of a screen). If you don't need glasses, all my solutions will work for you, guaranteed. Try playing around with text size a little but don't mess around with the text contrast, imo.

If using a phone, similar techniques work but on a phone I suggest truly increasing default font to largest and even making colours more pronounced (but not the most extreme vibrance, that will strain your eye differently).

If you want to have a dark mode on sites, 'darkreader' is the most trusted one. Do note they are always problematic as to alter your screen to dark, they need to record every single piece of text that they then turn white or whatever you customise it to, so I personally will never ever get this addon/extention type as it's not like adblock where they promise that they discard anything that isn't inside and 'ad frame' as soon as they 'read it', same with VPNs and such. Screen alterers are very dangerous business and it's why no browser in its right mind will allow a 'theme' to alter your general site display, it's simply too large a security threat. They know many naive users would go for a theme they find appealing and not realise what they're signing up for, that's why both Chrome and Firefox (and basically all browsers) have made it so that to alter the display of websites, you either need to do it on your actual control panel on your computer or agree to the terms and conditions of an additional addon that explicitly is for that and states what it reads and alters, in order to achieve that appearance.

This is the dark theme that is most trusted in terms of street cred:

Firefox (works on Android browser as well as computers, not sure about iPhone and never will care): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/darkreader/



it promises that it doesn't store, but it definitely reads every word on the page as it goes along and has to temporarily fully store it in some capacity to alter it and present it back to you.
- quoting myself from another thread on the matter.