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Comment on Ask HN: How to deal with eye strain and skin damage from computer monitors?

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For the eye strain, the general rule of thumb is the 20-20-20 method: every 20 minutes, look away from the monitor at something at least 20 feet away from you, and keep looking to that distance for about 20 seconds. Basically just give your eyes a break from having to focus up-close. The good thing about eye strain is that, while it can be annoying or painful, it's temporary; the old wive's tale about eye strain leading to vision impairment isn't founded on any actual medical evidence. So the frequent short breaks should help a lot.

I haven't heard about monitors contributing to skin damage before, but if it's truly due to a reflection of the sunlight from your window, then no monitor settings will help -- you may be able to "drown out" visible light by flooding it with brighter light from the monitor, but that doesn't actually remove the reflected light, so any UV light reflecting from it will always be reflecting no matter what your pixels are doing. You have a few options to deal with that:

1. Move your monitor so it's at a different angle from the window, so it doesn't reflect the sun directly at you.

2. Get a different monitor with a less reflective screen (those plastic LCD screens, for instance, are less reflective than glass ones).

3. Tint your windows against UV. You can buy window tinting specifically designed for that; just make sure it blocks the full UV spectrum (UV A and UV B) if you want to remove all the effects.

Although I'm skeptical it's a reflection issue; I would wager that the problem is simply that you've moved so that you're now sitting directly in front of the window for longer periods of time than you used to. In which case, the window tint is probably your best bet.

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