It’s half three on a Tuesday. Aoife has been staring at spreadsheets since nine, with a chatbot open in the other window. Her eyes feel like someone sanded the inside of her lids. There’s a dull ache sitting right between her eyebrows, and she keeps leaning closer to the screen because the numbers have gone a bit soft round the edges.
Her first thought is that her prescription has gone. Her second is to order a pair of blue light blocking glasses and hope for the best.
Either might help a little. But most of what she’s feeling has a simpler cause: hours of close-up focus, a stiff neck, hardly blinking, and a desk set up in the worst possible spot. That’s all fixable, and none of it needs a whole new life.
If your day runs through AI tools like Aoife’s does, reading a chatbot’s answer, then the rewrite, then the summary of the rewrite, your screen time has probably quietly crept up as well. A few changes can win some of it back.
Start with the light, not the glasses
The biggest cause of that mid-afternoon fade is often contrast. A monitor blazing away in a dim corner, or a bright window directly behind the screen, makes your eyes graft harder all day just to cope.
Turn the desk so windows are off to the side, not in front of you or behind you. That gets rid of most of the glare bouncing off the screen. If the desk can’t move, a cheap blind that takes the edge off direct sun does more than you’d think. Then turn the screen brightness down until it roughly matches the room. It shouldn’t feel like you’re looking into a lamp.
Height and distance matter too. The American Academy of Ophthalmology suggests sitting about an arm’s length away, roughly 45 to 65 cm. Put the top of the monitor at or just below eye level so you’re looking slightly down. When your gaze tilts down a bit, your eyelids cover more of the eye, tears don’t evaporate as fast, and that gritty feeling takes much longer to arrive.
So, about those blue light glasses
This is where a lot of money gets spent on the wrong thing, so it’s worth being straight about it.
Screens do give off blue light, but far less than a sunny day. And the evidence that filtering it helps tired eyes is thin. A 2023 Cochrane review looked at 17 trials and found there may be no short-term benefit for screen-related eye strain, and that the effect on sleep was unclear. The American Academy of Ophthalmology doesn’t recommend blue light glasses for computer use.
That doesn’t make them useless. Some people simply find a filtered or lightly tinted lens more comfortable, and if Aoife likes how hers feel, fair enough. What they won’t do is fix strain that’s really coming from her posture, her focus or her dry eyes.
What does have a stronger case is wearing the right prescription for the distance. Reading glasses are set for book distance, and distance glasses for across the room. A screen sits awkwardly in between. If you’re constantly leaning in, get your eyes tested. You might need lenses set for screen distance, which let you sit back properly. An anti-reflective coating is also worth having, because it cuts the reflections from windows and overhead lights that make text look muddy.
None of this needs to be expensive. Feel Good Contacts, for example, sells prescription and non-prescription screen glasses from €12, with 30 days of free returns and a 12-month frame warranty. That makes it low-risk to try a pair and see whether they actually suit you.
And if your eyes are sore, red or blurry most days, skip the shopping and book a proper eye exam. That’s worth far more than any coating.
Look away. Properly.
When you focus on anything close, a small muscle inside your eye tightens to keep it sharp. Hold that for hours and it tires, which is why Aoife struggles to focus on a colleague across the office by four o’clock.
The fix is almost embarrassingly simple: the 20-20-20 rule. Every 20 minutes, look at something at least 20 feet (about 6 metres) away for 20 seconds. Out the window is perfect. The trees across the road, the roofline, a passing bus will all do.
Blink on purpose while you’re at it. We blink far less when we’re concentrating on a screen, and plenty of those blinks are only half-blinks that never fully close. Every so often, shut your eyes properly for a second or two. You’ll feel a bit daft, but it spreads a fresh layer of tears over the surface.
Get AI to do some of the reading for you
Here’s the slightly ironic bit. The AI tools adding to Aoife’s screen time can also take some of it away.
She can try talking instead of typing for a while. Most assistants have a voice mode, and dictation is built into every phone and laptop now. Drafting an email or brainstorming out loud means she can look out the window instead of at the screen. She can listen instead of reading: lots of apps and assistants will read a long document aloud, which is handy when she only needs the gist. And she can simply ask for less. A prompt that ends with “give me five bullet points” is kinder to her eyes than one that gets back a 900-word essay.
It’s the same direction voice-first tech is heading anyway, with AI glasses and voice commands putting information in front of people without a screen at all.
One word of caution. Some “wellness” apps use your webcam to watch your posture or count your blinks. They can be genuinely useful, but check what they record and where that footage goes before switching one on.
Fiddle with the settings
Software gives you a few free wins. Plenty of people squint at tiny default fonts on sharp, high-resolution monitors for years without ever changing them.
Push display scaling up to 125% or even 150%. You should be able to read comfortably sitting back in your chair. If you have to lean in to read a cell in a spreadsheet, the text is just too small.
Many people also find warmer screen colours easier in the evening, and most laptops and phones will shift colour temperature automatically as the day goes on. Whether that does much for sleep is still argued about. Putting the screen down well before bed probably does more. But it costs nothing to switch on, and plenty of people find it more pleasant.
What’s wrong | What to try | Why it helps |
| Monitor sits too high | Top of screen at or just below eye level | Eyelids cover more of the eye, so less dryness |
| Screen far brighter than the room | Match brightness to your surroundings | Less glare, less squinting |
| Leaning in to read | Scaling at 125–150% | You can sit back, and your neck relaxes |
| Glare on screen or lenses | Desk side-on to windows; anti-reflective coating | Sharper text |
| Focus gone by mid-afternoon | 20-20-20 rule plus proper blinks | Rests the focusing muscle and re-wets the eye |
Back to Tuesday afternoon
Aoife doesn’t need to change her whole working life. She needs her desk turned side-on to the window, her screen dropped a few centimetres, the text made a bit bigger, a habit of glancing out the window every twenty minutes, and an eye test she’s been putting off since last year. The glasses can be whatever she finds comfortable.
Long screen days will always ask a lot of your eyes. But aching, squinting, and leaning in by half three doesn’t have to be part of the job. Fix the basics, let AI handle a bit of the reading, and comfortable eyes become the normal state of things again, not something you only remember on holiday.
Related: Your Glasses Are About to Become the Most Contested Real Estate in Tech
