Today, I'm going to show you the best desk setup to reduce eye strain! So whether
you are setting up your desk to do home office work, school work, or for gaming,
these tips should help you keep better focus, stay comfortable and perform better.
This video is going to have two sections, the first is showing the ideal ergonomics
of the desk setup and then I'll share some tips about the screen settings as well as
office hacks to reduce eye strain, that most people just don't know about. Now first thing
you want to do is set up your laptop or computer screen to the proper distance,
height and tilt for your eyes. Now for this desk setup I am using the ASUS VivoBook Pro
16x with the AMD RYZEN 9 6900 HX processor which was sent out to me by ASUS but rest be assured,
all of these tips should work great with any screen whether a laptop or desktop. But huge
thanks to ASUS and AMD for sponsoring this video. Now the ideal distance to set up your
computer screen should be about an arm's length away so that you don't have to reach forward to
hit any buttons or shut it off. I like to say that you should be able to give a high five
to your computer screen or at least touch it with your fingertips. For the height of your
computer screen you're going to want to adjust the laptop or desktop screen screen so the top
is just about eye level or slightly below that by about 10 degrees. This is going to be the
ideal position for your eyes because when you're looking at a near computer screen you actually
cross your eyes a little bit and that's going to be more comfortable in a slightly downward
position. If you are using a desktop monitor and it doesn't adjust for height, then you can simply
try putting some textbooks underneath it to try and give it a little bit of extra height. If you
are using a laptop as your main computer, I do think it's best to get a laptop stand as well
as a dedicated external mouse and keyboard just so that you can keep better posture with your
arms and hands otherwise reaching forward like this and typing is going to hurt your neck and
shoulder muscles and yeah it's not comfortable. In addition to all this, you want to tilt the screen
a little bit right? Nobody reads a newspaper holding it straight up and down like this,
no, you have it tilted just a little bit so that the text is facing up toward you. But it is also
important to try to avoid any glare from light sources that could be from behind you because that
can otherwise be distracting and make it harder to see the screen clearly. Now just doing this,
having a proper setup should help a lot of people with both their posture and their eye strain but
now to help further reduce eye strain and fatigue here's a few tips to help! Number one is to adjust
the brightness and contrast settings. A recent study did show that people experienced less eye
strain when using a digital device with a lower brightness setting. I personally like to set
mine around 50 percent or so but you'll have to play around with it to find what you find
is most comfortable. Also keep in mind that if you're using a conventional LCD display the color
and picture quality usually does decrease with those as you decrease the brightness. One great
feature of the Vivobooks OLED technology that I'm using here is that it maintains 100 color accuracy
at all brightness levels. It even has Pantone validation, which means that I can reduce the
brightness levels and I don't sacrifice any crisp clear images. Which is something super important
to me as a content creator because I do a lot of video editing and artwork on my computer. The OLED
screen also produces truly dark black colors which helps to boost contrast giving you much clearer
images and no matter what screen you're using if you do have a slightly higher contrast this
will make reading small black letters on a white background a little bit easier. Reducing how much
you need to focus and helping improve eye strain. Tip number two is that you may experience less
eye strain in a well-lit room with good lighting that's either coming from around or behind your
computer. That's because having good lighting helps constrict your pupils and having small
pupils in fact increases what's called your depth of field, more or less your range of clear vision
or focus and this will help reduce the amount of time your eye muscles will have to adjust and
refocus going from word to word in a sentence or from an image to an image on the screen. So
while I know some people like to game or work in a darkly lit room, this in fact could be
contributing to eye strain and defocus. Tip number three is to change the font size. If you're having
a hard time reading small print you can increase the font size or decrease it by holding the
control or the command button and then hitting the plus or minus keys on the keyboard. Alternatively,
you can also hold down the same thing the command and control button and scroll the mouse wheel,
this usually does the same thing. Now when it comes to computers, blue light is a question
that everybody asks me about and across the research the one consistent finding I've seen
is that blue light, can and does influence our sleep cycles. So I personally do recommend people
try and reduce blue light exposure in the evening hours before bedtime. Now with that being said,
one of the cool advantages of the Vivobooks OLED screen is that they found a way to reduce the blue
light exposure by up to 70 percent. To show how cool this is, here I have a band pass filter,
which will only allow blue light of 436 nanometers to pass through it and when I hold it in front
of a more conventional LED screen here you can still see the light passing through it but when
the filter is put in front of the new a OLED screen, it looks almost completely dark which
means it's not emitting as much blue light at that specific wavelength. And they're able to do this
again without compromising color accuracy which means no more yellow or orange screens. Which I
personally think is super cool. So now what about eyeglasses? If you're experiencing eye strain and
you haven't gone in to have your eyes checked and maybe get a prescription pair of glasses updated,
then that might be a great place to start for a lot of people just having accurate eyeglasses
can help with a lot of eye fatigue. If you are somebody who spends a lot of time in front of a
computer screen then perhaps getting a dedicated pair of computer glasses may help. These are just
regular glasses prescriptions that also have some added magnification and or prisms built into the
lenses to help your eyes focus on where it needs to on the screen and further reduce eye strain. I
think computer glasses are especially important for anybody over the age of 40 who spends an
excessive amount a time on a computer screen like for work or something like that. Verifocal
or progressive glasses can help in short-term computer use but for long term just you're going
to end up trying to find that sweet spot and that hurts your neck and it's just not as useful as a
dedicated pair of computer lenses. And my final and bonus tip is in fact move and take frequent
breaks. After about 10 minutes everybody does begin to slouch and your eyes tend to get tired.
I mean nobody goes to the gym, lifts a weight halfway and then holds it there for an hour! So
why do you think that's acceptable for your eyes to do that? Let me know in the comments if you've
ever heard of the 20 20 20 rule. Meaning to take a 20 second break looking 20 feet away every 20
minutes. That's something that a lot of doctors have recommended but it'll tell you more recent
research and experts are now saying that that's not frequent enough. Instead they're recommending
every 10 to 15 minutes! So pause what you're doing, stretch your legs, get a drink of water
and take frequent breaks. Your eyes will thank you for it! Hey thanks for watching this video. I hope
you found it helpful! Also a huge thanks to ASUS and AMD again for sponsoring this video and if you
want to learn more about the VivoBook Pro 16x OLED screen that I used in this video then I'll put a
link in the description below so you can check that out. To learn more about what the published
science says about blue light or reducing eye strain check out some of our video series over
here otherwise I hope you have a fantastic day. Keep an eye on it, we'll see you in the next one.