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Wellness Wednesday for September 21, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Was having pretty insane eye strain issues that bled into a sort of chronic fatigue situated in my head that made me want to do nothing but lie down after my WFH programming job was done for the day. All post-work hobbies and even weekend hobbies were kind of a drag because I had this head thing going on. Tried all kinds of things like keeping the night filter on my work computer at all times, which maybe helped a little. Was worried I might have to get into another line of work.

Then I serendipitously discovered that of all the screens I own, precisely one of them uses pulse width modulation for dimming, and that's my iPhone 13 Mini. Years ago I had some problems with a PWM device and ended up getting rid of it. Was very surprised to see it on an iPhone. Last week I resolved to not ever look at my phone except for necessities like texting (and I don't hold long text conversations). So basically barely ever looking at my phone.

After a week the issue is almost completely resolved. It's ridiculous how well that worked.

So far I have no plans to get a new phone either because I kind of like being forced to look at my phone less. Win/win.

Reddit has some info on this here in case anybody else is dealing with something similar: https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/

In my experience, eye strain issues are massively helped by short breaks scattered through out the day. Is it possible that you were filling the natural breaks in work by looking at your phone? If so, maybe it’s not about PWM, it’s about the fact that not having a phone means you’re not staring at screens 100% of the day.

Somewhat possible, definitely true for when I go out but when I'm at home (which is most of the time) I am extremely good at just pulling out the laptop when I get the impulse, even started taking the laptop into the bathroom with me with a tiny table to set it on.

Would agree there is definitely less overall screen time than before.