9 months ago, I found a book called "The Way Out" by Alan Gordon. It's about self-treating all kinds of chronic pain via mental exercises/techniques (called Pain Reprocessing Therapy - PRT). Since then, I've been applying PRT exercises to my leg muscle pain, eye muscle pain and others.

(note that my eye pain is triggered by screens, my leg pain is triggered by walking, etc).

I have not had an "accumulating" treatment effect (I mean, I'm not getting gradually better as weeks pass), but I do have a potent short-term analgesic effect (i.e. within the same day after doing the exercises).

To quantify a bit:

  • Without PRT, I use my projector at 30% brightness max - I can't tolerate any more than that.
  • With PRT, I'm able to use it at 100% brightness.

The effect takes about 2-3 hours to kick in and lasts for maybe 5 hours. To get that effect, it takes me about 5 minutes to do the exercises in the morning.

I do expect an accumulating effect to appear in the future, but it may take many more months for me to reach that stage. In any case, I think PRT is a very valuable addition to our toolkit. And, since PRT is for treating what's called "neuroplastic pain" (a.k.a. "central sensitization"), this is a valuable addition to our vocabulary and list of possible "diagnoses".

All the best.

    Unfortunately it does not help for those us that get red eyes. And I think this is harmful for the community as such, as we should try to keep away from any psychological aspect of this. It is bad display tech, not pain that starts in the brain and goes away with mental gymnastics. It's like a broken bike causes a person to fall and injure, broken displaytech causes eyes to go red. For some it's the pain, for me, I have zero pain, absolutely no pain since 30 years.

      Maxx And I think this is harmful for the community as such, as we should try to keep away from any psychological aspect of this.

      I tend to respectfully disagree, simply because there are many here who could not go back to “known good” (or previously good) hardware after the bad hardware triggered their conditions. To suggest that the damage to the body is strictly physical does not seem reasonable to me, given the general ability of the body to adapt and heal. At least subjectively, I believe my own condition has a strong psychological component.

        if shoes rub your feet, you need to be patient and block the pain throught the blood

        if the sleeves of the jacket are too short, you need to walk in cold with open hands and train hands skin

        meditation also could help!

        sometimes emotion problems lead to red-eye sympthoms

        eye drops, medicine injection and the sense suppressors works great

        you can cut-off eye ball to get rest at all 🙂 At least, ears is good way to get environment data, also you can train leg fingers to get objects position immediantly

        3 months later

        An update on my progress:

        1. I've rendered 2 unusable devices (my builtin laptop screen, and my Samsung Galaxy A15 phone) comfortable via this therapy.

        2. They are basically comfortable from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed.

        3. I still do the PRT exercises almost every day, "to keep in shape" so to speak.

        I'll try to summarize (and REALLY oversimplify) the 224-page book for you screenstrained folk who cannot easily research it online.

        1. Most chronic pain is so-called "neuroplastic (NP) pain". This is the case, for example, for my eyes. I'M NOT SAYING EVERYONE ON LEDSTRAIN HAS NP PAIN. But a sizable portion might.

        2. The brain is a giant neural network that's great at learning useful things, but sometimes it learns things it shouldn't. Such as: "how to reproduce pain in response to neutral (safe) stimuli".

        3. The problem is not in the stimuli (e.g. temporal dithering, PWM). The problem is in the brain: It has created a conditioned response (think Pavlov's dog) that connects screens with pain. How this can happen is another story.

        4. Yes, everything you've ever learned about cause-and-effect is telling you the specific screen is the problem. But this can be false in the case of NP pain.

        5. This kind of association (associating a pain response with neutral stimuli) can be unlearned via mental exercises/techniques. The book teaches about 10 such exercises/techniques. They take time to work, because rewiring the brain doesn't happen overnight. For me I saw much improvement in the first month, then it was nonlinear until now, a year later, I feel rather good using screens.

        6. The most powerful and central of the 10 techniques is called Somatic Tracking. It involves:

        6.1. First of all, proving to yourself that your eye issues (pain or something else) is NP. It might not be NP - in that case Pain Reprocessing Therapy won't help you.

        6.2. Armed with this proof, do brief sessions ("Somatic Tracking") in which you consciously point your attention at your pain, but without (in that moment) trying to get rid of it. Just observe it with a sense of lightness and curiosity. If you look at the pain with a sense of danger and urgency, the therapy won't work.

        7. Even if you heal your NP pain (via this therapy), it's not necessarily gone for good - you can get relapses sometimes. The book describes how to avoid those (as much as possible) and how to handle them if they do happen.

        ==============

        Again, the above summary is an oversimplification. It's not complete enough for you to start doing PRT just from reading it. I just intend it to maybe catch your interest, so you may decide to get the book.

          logixoul If you first started having screenstrain upon getting some new tech, and you can still use old tech comforably, then it's probably NOT NP pain, and you can stop reading here.

          Hi, what do you mean by the sentence above? If I used iOS 17 without any problem and iOS 18 gives me eye strain and headache with Same screen, this means I don’t have NP?

          If I used to use windows 10 and Linux without any problem and today I can’t tolerate the pain I get from the latest updates with the Same screen, this is also means I don’t have NP?

              twomee

              Hmm, I think I was too hasty with that sentence. I'll edit it.

              I think your screenstrain might be NP. The brain can learn to be sensitive to one technology while staying insensitive to other technologies.

              Example:

              • Average person with iOS 17: 0% strain
              • Average person with iOS 18: 1% strain
              • Screenstrain sufferer with iOS 17: 0% strain
              • Screenstrain sufferer with iOS 18: 80% strain

              Explanation of this example: iOS 18 might include some new tech (e.g. some special form of TD) which makes it DISTINGUISHABLE from other tech by the eye. And this distinguishability (which is barely felt by an average person) can be enough for the brain to "learn" NP pain in response.

                  logixoul your example sound like the reality. Probably I sensitive to dithering which this is what causing me an eye strain. So are you telling me that I can adapt to that pain?

                  Another thing is, after I use a device that makes me eye strain, after a sleep I wake up very tired, like I walked a lot and the body is tired(which is illusion to the body). Is that what happened to your with your eye strain?

                      twomee So are you telling me that I can adapt to that pain?

                      Depends. If your pain is neuroplastic, then you can strongly reduce it, yes. The book explains how you can differentiate between neuroplastic pain (which originates in the brain) and "structural pain" (which originates in the eye or whichever body part you have pain in).

                      In my experience, sometimes pain has a neuroplastic component and a structural component. In such cases, you're likely to get partial relief from the pain via PRT.

                      twomee Another thing is, after I use a device that makes me eye strain, after a sleep I wake up very tired, like I walked a lot and the body is tired(which is illusion to the body). Is that what happened to your with your eye strain?

                      No, I only feel my screen strain as:

                      • Tense/painful eye muscles
                      • Burning sensation in eye(s)
                      • Sensation of foreign body in eye(s)

                      It's always one (or more) of these. In my case PRT has reduced all of those. I feel like they're basically 3 sides of the same coin.

                            logixoul Ordered.

                            Even if it is a scam, it's only $11.25. I've lost WAY more on scam cures before

                              logixoul well, that is a big if, will need to investigate it. I checked my eyes in 3 doctors and everything is ok. I have astigmatism but i have it from the childhood so I don’t think this is the reason.

                              I also checked my head and it seems everything is ok. The doctor said I don’t have migranes, it’s a tension type headache which the source is from muscles and mind. Maybe this is really a NP

                                8 months later

                                logixoul nice to read this.

                                I think I also has some kind of neuroplastic pain as I've lost many previously safe devices after extensive tests of new ones.

                                Do you have any updates? Do this therapy still working for you?

                                    Ivan_P I think I also has some kind of neuroplastic pain as I've lost many previously safe devices after extensive tests of new ones.

                                    Yes, that does sound like NP pain.

                                    The therapy still works for me. More specifically:

                                    I can use almost any device for hours (although I do use non-polarized sunglasses when using a device where I can't control the screen brightness - e.g. ATMs or some friend's laptop/phone).

                                    However, I often get partial pain relapses (about once per 1-2 weeks), which take 1-2-5 days to recover from. And the only way I'm able to recover from them at all is by continuing to apply PRT therapy to myself.

                                    My relapses usually happen when I haven't been sleeping well for several days - because then I'm too sleepy to apply PRT properly.

                                    Thankfully, most of my relapses are partial, i.e. even in the middle of a relapse I'm still able to use screens (enough to keep earning a living), it's just more painful and requires me to use my arsenal of pain-relief options (pills, rest breaks, splashing with water, etc) more often.

                                    When I'm not in the middle of a relapse, I can do 8-hour workdays without much discomfort.

                                      dev