- Edited
Hi everyone! I just found this forum today after a mental breakthrough about what might be causing my eye strain issues, and I'm so happy to be here. That being said, I'm not nearly as tech savvy as many of you on this forum seem to be--just a woman desperately trying to fix this fairly recent problem of mine.
I'm wondering if I can quickly give a background and timeline of events, so that people here can give me some advice about what to do next? Basically I work from home basically answering emails all day for my day job, and I'm also a heavy reader and write books as a side hustle, so am on screens many, many hours a day. I'm 31 years old, and I have never had any sort of serious eye strain issues until earlier this year, which began to really manifest in the springtime. My personal laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad with a matte screen, and my day job laptop is a MacBook Pro from mid-2015 with a glossy retinal display. My phone is a OnePlus Nord N200 5G, which I purchased several weeks ago when my last one died. I seem to have hardly any issues (maybe none at all) with the Lenovo and my phone, and I also have no issues with my e-ink Kindle, but I believe the MBP is causing me terrible eye strain--symptoms are dry eyes, a feeling that verges on a headache, sometimes slightly blurred vision when looking at text, sometimes trouble with my eyes focusing, and sometimes dizziness.
When this first started I was doing a heavy editing push for my latest book, so spending tons of time working on screens. I had also recently gotten a new contact lens prescription. I went to my optometrist, who recommended vision therapy. The initial consultation for vision therapy gave me major quackery vibes, and it would have been quite expensive to do the sessions, so I opted not to follow through and got a second opinion from an ophthalmologist and optometrist. The ophthalmologist said not to waste time and money on vision therapy, and the optometrist (recommended by the ophthalmologist) adjusted my prescription down in my glasses and contacts, as she said my power was too high. That was a big adjustment, but I do see great with this new prescription; once my eyes adjusted I assumed that would be the end of my issues… Not so, unfortunately.
Work for my day job has been heavy these last few weeks, and my eye strain feelings are coming back. They're not as pronounced as they once were (no dizziness, THANK GOD), but still are definitely present. It seems to be that specifically when I have been working on my MBP for a while that I start to feel the near-headache feeling. The Lenovo is very comfortable to use. Like I said up top, these symptoms started in the springtime during a heavy screen period. I've only had this MBP since December of 2020, and many days work is light, so my working theory is that heavy screen time + a bad prescription + using the MBP over time has caused my symptoms to manifest. And now I have fixed the bad prescription, but I'm still using screens many hours a day (more so on the MBP in recent weeks), so that is not allowing my eyes to rest up properly.
So what do I do now? It seems that people who have issues with MBP screens point the finger at temporal dithering, which is impossible to disable? I think that I should probably ask my IT department for a Windows laptop and hope that works better for me. I'm also using eye drops and today started using a humidifier by my work area. Does anyone have any other ideas for things that I should try? Sorry for this excessively long post, but I am just so excited to have other people to talk to about this and hopefully find some answers.