How Can I Avoid Hurting My Eyes Looking At A Computer In A Dark Room

Is working at a computer in the dark bad for your eyes?

Doing this by itself is not 'harming' your eyes. Having said that, the reason that working in the dark causes problems is because a flickering light source causes the pupils to have to constrict and dilate many times quickly, over and over again. There are muscles involved in this process and, like any other muscle, overuse can be symptomatic - eyestrain, headaches, etc. This will also partly depend on the type of monitor you have, the refresh rate, the resolution, etc. So, even with some low ambient lighting in the room nearby, like a lamp, computer use can be less of an problem. Computer use alone, whether in adequate light or not, is also associated with dry eye syndrome because of a decrease in the blinking rate - also seen with such things as driving, reading a book, or watching tv - and also incomplete blinking - more common in the use of digital devices more so than a book. We are seeing more dry eye syndrome in younger people and this is probably a contributing factor.

Every time I look at a screen (phone, computer, etc.) my eyes water. I literally have tears now. Why is this so?

There are many causes, and they can be hard to diagnose, but the three common causes of eye pain from screens include the following:(1) Excessive BrightnessMany displays are unnecessarily bright, thanks to newer technology that makes screens bigger and brighter. Eventually that falls into envelope of eye discomfort. Try dimming the screen somewhat to a more comfortable level. As a rule of thumb, the screen should never be the brightest thing in front of you — dim it to roughly the same brightness as your surroundings (or very slightly above). For totally dark rooms, if you still have pain at the dimmest brightness setting, then turn on a little bit of lighting to balance things out.(2) Blue lightExcessive amount of blue light can cause headaches in some people. Use the “low blue light” mode or the “nighttime light” mode of your iPhone or Android. That turns the screen orange, and makes the screen easier to stare at. Some computer monitors have an ergonomic “low blue light” mode.(3) Flickering Screen(e.g. PWM = Pulse Width Modulation).Certain screens such as very bright OLED phones (including Samsung Galaxy and iPhone X), or older bright LCD monitors, need to do a high-frequency flicker of the backlight to dim the screen. Apple laptops and Apple monitors do not do this, so if your eyes never watered with an Apple LCD display, then purchase a “PWM free” laptop or monitor, or an LCD-based iPhone instead of an OLED-based iPhone. (It is hit and miss with OLED — some newer OLED screens do not flicker when dimmed)

I've used f.lux on my computer for 2 years. Now I can't look at a computer without f.lux and I have to use the computer with very low brightness. Will f.lux damage my eyes in the long term?

I think you’re looking at this from the wrong perspective. F.lux is trying to solve the problem of staring at extremely bright screens all the time. In it’s default configuration, it’s engaged in the evening hours, to further reduce eye-strain and other factors from staring into the equivalent of a flashlight all the time.I’ve used F.lux for years, on every machine I own and use on a regular basis. My eyes have gradually trained themselves to acclimate to a dimmer screen. I also theme my operating system UI’s with an overall dark theme, to reduce the amount of light output from my monitors. This has a lot of benefits.Less eye strain, even outside of my normal F.Lux utilization hours.I sleep noticeably better when I use dimmer screens throughout the day.I rarely run my laptop above 50% brightness, unless in very direct sunlight. Battery savings for the win. Bonus power savings are gained thanks to the decreased brightness on the monitors at the workstations I use in my home office/cubicle.No one wants to use my computers thanks to the dimmer screens in my default configuration.My overall eyesight has improved, symptoms of night blindness that I suffered from in my pre-F.lux years are all but gone.You’ve already highlighted one of the few disadvantages above, but I’ll dump the full list, since I like typing.Every time I have to work on my mother’s laptop, or any of the other machines around my office, I get an instant headache.I’m extremely sensitive to badly aimed headlights at night. If you happen to hit me with your high beams while headed the other way, I’ll hate you for eternity.Displays on at night drive me nuts until I’ve configured them. I bought a small television for my bed-time Youtube binging, and I still haven’t got the screen output dialed in quite right. The ambient brightness keeps me awake at night, even when I’m not looking directly at the display. (On the plus side, I turn it off earlier and get to sleep sooner instead of binging LTT/Level1Techs Linux content until 3am.)We weren’t meant to stare at super-bright things all the time, but so many of us do. F.lux and other tools of it’s ilk do something to decrease the harmful side effects of this habit, and that makes them an invaluable tool.

On a computer, which color scheme is easier on your eyes: light text / dark background or dark text / light background?

Back In The Day, computer screens were black with light (green or white) text.  This made sense.  Then, word processors came along and someone (probably Microsoft) realized (or thought---but probably correctly) that the business people they were selling to wanted something more literally What You See Is What You Get, leading to the black text on white "paper" background paradigm.Turns out this was more like staring at a lamp than a sheet of paper, but it stuck. I've always hated it, and especially hated that on the web, unlike in terminals and editors, you really can't switch back without destroying the aesthetics of almost all websites.What you really want, to prevent eye strain and fatigue, is overall low intensity, medium/high contrast.  Low intensity means your eyes won't get burnt out from staring at a lamp, and medium/high contrast means that your eyes don't have to strain to see the difference between the text and the background.Another issue is focus.  If the screen is too dark (and you are in a dark room), your pupils will dilate, and this makes the image blurrier, causing strain.  This means you don't want too low intensity, especially if you sit in a dark room.Therefore, you want a background with about the intensity of a dark grey, with something about the intensity of a light grey.  However, to get the high contrast I discussed above, you need to use color.One of the best color schemes for this is actually yellow text on a dark blue background.  However, this often looks pretty garish, so I don't use it.  Zenburn (available for vi(m), emacs, all sorts of terminals, and probably your favorite editor too) is a popular theme with fairly low intensity, but I find the contrast isn't quite high enough, so I usually go with something a little darker for the background and a little lighter for the foreground.Personally, I use a slightly modified Sunburst on emacs: http://pdeng.wordpress.com/2008/... and the default terminal scheme for the latest Ubuntu's "Ambiance" theme (with some silly zsh customizations and proper DIR_COLORS and LS_COLORS).

Is it bad for the eyes to look at the phone in the dark even when the brightness mode is set to the lowest?

No, there's no evidence for that. Or on bright setting. Or any other settings. You can't “hurt” or damage your eyes by looking at cell phones, computer screens, TVs, or gaming devices (hand helds), or pretty much anything else, with exceptions of the sun, some powerful lasers, or welding arcs.So, you may fatigue your eyes, or if you are doing this in the evening could reset your circadian rhythms, or screw up your thinking patterns (evidence for this goes back and forth), but you won't damage your eyes.