Hi everyone,

I have a theory I’ve been thinking about as to why our symptoms are occurring, but not yet have a complete solution.

For background, I’ve been dealing with eye strain, headaches, feeling of unreality, eyes blurry for hours after computer use etc, for years. In fact, I never had anxiety (clinical) until I started using an iPad 2 back in the early 2010s.

Never thinking it (anxiety) was anything digital-related, I pursued avenues such as diet, caffeine reduction etc, which helped tremendously at first.

In the last few years it has returned, as has my digital/screen-related symptoms. I’ve never been one to consider that my anxiety was causing my screen symptoms, but instead the inverse. I’ve tested this (it’s never perfect of course, as there are always placebo and nocebo effects) with spending time away from screens for extended periods, and it certainly appears as there is a direct and strong correlation.

My journey to understanding started with this YouTube video. It’s called ‘Exploring the Spectrum’ by John Ott, who found that certain light frequencies has massive effects on plants and their fruiting, disease etc. He furthered the experiments to looking at animals (including humans) living under certain light frequencies, and found that different ones can produce different ailments in animals. In fact, he saw that blue light on rabbit retina cells caused ALL sorts of problems with the way they (the cells) behaved.

In fact, it’s not only the specific light frequency that may cause the ailment (e.g. blue), but get this, the ABSENCE of others. The sun’s light frequencies change throughout the day - more red in the morning and afternoon, more blue during the middle of the day etc. Conversely, a screen’s light spectrum (as well as LED lights, fluorescent lights etc) is very different. Blue light is energising and can be toxic when not paired with red light frequency, which is healing.

All of this is signalling to our body and brain. Think why all OS’s now have a version of Night Shift, because blue light stops the release of melatonin, and when we look at a normal screen at night, it signals to our brain that it’s midday and ruins our sleep. Night Shift can reduce blue light and create warmer tones.

It’s an old doco/video, but the information is invaluable for those that manage to watch it all - if you can get through the beginning (which is essential to watch), the rest is super interesting. It’s like a light bulb turning on in your head. I posted it a few years ago but no-one really took notice. And to be fair, it appeared that the only solution was not to use screens.

As an aside, and I’m not going to focus on this because it’s so divisive and I’m not sure it’s the big player here, but light frequencies are non-ionising radiation. Yet they still have a proven biological effect. Yet other EMF frequencies, along the SAME spectrum of electrofrequencies are ‘said’ not to have any biological effect because they are non-ionising…

Anyway, I digress. For years now, in search of why my headaches, anxiety, eye strain etc were getting worse, I researched more on this forum and had quite a few conversations with AI. AI isn’t perfect of course, but it’s good at inhaling a lot of information and summarising it.

2 things I realised. Light is information. And eyes are an extension of the brain, which allows us to intake light and decipher and absorb that information to give us ‘reality’.

I realised the more time I spent outside, even using the laptop or phone, the more relaxed my eyes were, once the initial light sensitivity to the sun decreased.

Through my AI chats, I started thinking that this was all an information overload disorder. I’m also a behaviourist (animal) by trade, and behavioural science is a specialty of mine. We can, over time, be desensitised to stimuli - provided that our brain realises that it’s not harmful. If we flood, even subconsciously, our brains with information it thinks is harmful, we can actually SENSITISE it to the stimuli. This might explain why there is often a trigger (COVID, driver update, new computer), that makes our brain less tolerant, and suddenly the brain is sensitised because it pairs other harmful stimuli with this stimuli.

I’ll expand on this in a moment. Back to the information overload. I have read several times of people here reporting that certain displays almost drive our eyes to want to focus more. Like we can’t actually help it, but they are drawn towards the pixels on the screen, causing eye strain.

According to AI, higher pixel density (think retina and HD screens) has more information packaged in it per pixel that is sent to our brain. Not only that, but certain technologies can pack MORE information into the already dense pixels - namely PWM, temporal dithering etc. And each new hardware and software driver update helps it to pack even more information that we aren’t consciously seeing, but our brain is. It’s almost as if the feeling of our eyes being driven to focus is by design, to get our attention. Our brains crave information.

So hence I think that we are dealing with information overload (and unnatural light spectrums). Not in a sense of doom scrolling, reading everything we can etc, but in the sense that our brain in constantly processing visual information, and each update or change is packing more information into the visual field, to which our brains respond to try and inhale that information. The screen is not just static, but instead is dynamic, and technologies such as PWM, dithering, and any other tech designed to pack more ‘information’ is causing us overload. It’s not one thing. It’s everything. It just depends on what that particular person was sensitised to, and then by the process of pairing, it may have generalised to other ‘harmful’ screen technologies.

We all have different thresholds, and different causes. This is the brain being sensitised to certain technologies or hardwares when it’s in a ‘harmed’ state (e.g. COVID, inflammation, caffeine overload etc). This could be why we all have different solutions - some people feel relief from rolling back a version of Windows (different pixel tech), others feel relief from using blue light blocking glasses (light spectrum). In the end, it’s the visual stimuli and the information it’s holding, as well as the unnatural light. As humans, we naturally are ok with analogue objects in natural light, but with the digital technologies trying to win the race to have the best and most vibrant screens, it’s hurting us. We are just the canaries in the coal mine.

I don’t expect all will agree, and I definitely don’t have a complete solution (except to avoid screens which is not an option here!) as I mentioned in the opening sentence, but it’s a theory I’ve been working on. If watching John Ott’s documentary helps even one person who might be able to connect different dots that could help all of us, then my post is worth it.

Thanks all.

Chris