For a year I had my home office setup with LED strip lights all the way around the room. They were mounted on a narrow shelf encircling three walls. Color temp was about 6000K.
I loved it, for a while. It felt like a fresh bright day. However, after some months of 12 hours a day of working in this environment, I started having pain in my eyes, almost as if they were being squeezed.
This discomfort persisted for a month after I left my office (took a DN work-cation in the Caribbean). As I began looking into this, I started reading about issues with blue light. I found suggestions that too much blue light was harmful. And likely me spending 12+ hours looking at bright monitor screens was also harmful.
After returning from my trip, I removed most of my lights and turned my monitor brightness way down. Since then, I haven't had the same bad feelings.
I would think that light is light, and only brightness and color temperature would be the variables. But perhaps there's something more, because in general it seems that eyes are fine with outside daylight but less fine with indoor lights. I would like to know what is best for my comfort and health, but I'm not sure anyone really knows; studies and articles often disagree...
Some lamps output a better spectrum than others. While the distribution of wavelengths output by something glowing with black-body radiation (like the sun or an incandescent lamp) is very smooth and reminds of a normal distribution, CFLs are famous for having terrible light (it's mostly spikes of specific frequencies in blue, green and red, and the relative height of those can be tuned to get a desired color temperature). White LEDs are much better than that: they are actually blue LED with a phosphor coating that absorbs the light and reemits white light. The light from the phosphor has a good, smooth spectrum, but depending on LED quality a good portion of the blue light can shine through, giving it much more output in the blue wavelengths (even at low color temperatures, for the purposes of color temperature you can just shifting the rest more into the red, or by cheating and adding some red LEDs into the mix).
LEDs that minimize that issue are widely available due to demand from photographers, video makers, etc, but they cost a good bit more.
"blue light is harmful" is a highly debated topic. Iirc there is no consensus yet and some studies indicate that it's not a health risk.
Apart from that, having a screen that is too bright can certainly cause problems. Especially if the contrast is very stark to the surrounding environment.
I personally use a light theme when it's very bright outside/inside and a dark theme when it's dark + my monitor brightness at home is set to ~70% which is plenty.
And a simple test for it would be to buy a $3 set of blue-light blocking glasses and see if that solves the problem for you rather than throwing out a bunch of far more expensive lights.
I loved it, for a while. It felt like a fresh bright day. However, after some months of 12 hours a day of working in this environment, I started having pain in my eyes, almost as if they were being squeezed.
This discomfort persisted for a month after I left my office (took a DN work-cation in the Caribbean). As I began looking into this, I started reading about issues with blue light. I found suggestions that too much blue light was harmful. And likely me spending 12+ hours looking at bright monitor screens was also harmful.
After returning from my trip, I removed most of my lights and turned my monitor brightness way down. Since then, I haven't had the same bad feelings.
I would think that light is light, and only brightness and color temperature would be the variables. But perhaps there's something more, because in general it seems that eyes are fine with outside daylight but less fine with indoor lights. I would like to know what is best for my comfort and health, but I'm not sure anyone really knows; studies and articles often disagree...