Bright lights give me a headache, especially in midday when it's bright outside. I'll often resort to wearing sunglasses indoors when it gets out of hand.
Perhaps it's a certain kind of light, but I don't get the same kind of headache outside in bright lights. (Although I do find bright days painful.)
I have a neurological disorder called visual snow syndrome that's the root cause, nobody really understands where it comes from but the current theory is a dysfunction of metabolism in part of the visual cortex. It causes all sorts of weird visual stuff like the eponymous 'tv snow' and other distortions as well as intractable headaches, apparently it has similarities with certain kinds of migraine. As for the photophobia it's quite a difficult sensation to describe but for me its acute form is an unusual sensation that's in the same category as pain without being pain itself - it's like the sensation of looking directly at the sun but with ordinary light sources that don't bother other people. The chronic form is less intense, it basically just makes concentrating in a bright environment exhausting after a while and it trashes my focus, making me headachy and irritable. As a result I never have strong lights on even at night, and I also don't drive in the dark because the glare from the headlights can mess up my vision for minutes at a time which is obviously not safe.
Fluorescent tubes are among the worst offenders for messing with my concentration, though anything with a pronounced 50 Hz flicker or too high a colour temperature isn't great for me. The kind of cheap lights offices traditionally use are particularly bad which is part of why I'm full time WFH now!
> The wavelength of light may also affect the photophobia percept. Main et al. (103) found that shorter wavelength (blue) light was more uncomfortable for subjects with migraine than for those with tension-type headache or controls. These investigators also reported that longer wavelength (red) light was also less comfortable for subjects with migraine (103).
Look about your work environment. It is possible that your light environment is just not good. I used to have photo sensitivity and frequent headaches at a previous work.
Then, I realized that the cause was bad light conditions. It was not that I was in the dark, but for example sun light was coming from a window at 90 degrees with my screen.
And despite being sufficient light in total all around, it was like that the direction of my screen where I was looking was the darkest.
Not sure about the science here, but I have found the opposite to be true for me. I love natural light and crave it while I work. However, I have found that if the room is just a little too bright I will end up with severe eye strain and headaches after a day of work. Ambient light is the unfortunate cause.
I'll add to your comment that light sensitivity in general is a known issue with many people (eg autistics). They actually feel pain from seeing lights that are too bright including lots of sunlight or artificial light. So, one or more of these people might have this condition.
I’m not the parent commenter, but I’ve heard ‘photophobia’ used to refer to the sort of extreme light sensitivity experienced by migraine sufferers: not a ‘fear of light’ per se, but rather the perception of bright light as an unpleasant or even painful stimulus.
My environment isn't "badly lit". I just don't want bright, flickering light blasted into my eyes at my expense.
I even block natural light using sunglasses when I go outside!
Once upon a time I stared at the Sun for a solid 20 seconds without blinking. I couldn't read text for a month, the letters disappeared from under my center vision. Why in God's name would I want to routinely stare at a bright screen?
This is not scientific in any way. when I'm exposed to sunlight for a long period of time without sunglasses, at night my eyes hurt.
I tend to think that pain is a way the body has to let you know something is not right.
No problems with eyesight. No glasses or anything. I see the light as basically replacing the brightness I would be getting if I wasn’t sitting inside my office instead of outdoors.
And sleep: I don’t have any trouble sleeping, no. But as I mentioned, using a such a bright light in the evening will fuck with your day/night rhythm. If I’m not diligent to turn off those lights at sunset, I’ll easily be working up until two or three in the morning. If that happens, the problem isn’t that I wouldn’t be able to sleep (I will) or that I would sleep badly (I won’t). It’s just that it shifts my rhythm out of sync with everybody else.
Used to have extreme migraines. Any exposure to Fluorescent light would leave me mentally disabled within 10 minutes. So I could enter any grocery stores. Or go into work. Blue light filter glasses did little to nothing.
I got some FL-41 glasses that covered top and sides. I would be fine for about 2 hours under those lights. Eventually light leakage would get to me. But it made a drastic difference.
The receptors that cause light to be painful are sensitive to the blue part of the spectrum. Fluorescent tubes tend to load up on that part of the spectrum because it is cheap to do so and high color temperature used to be a luxury feature, not because there is any technical reason to.
Yellow "bug light" CFLs do not cause headaches for me, and are easy to read by. Unfortunately the color rendition is ... poor. It seems that there is no middle ground with CFL engineers.
Anecdotal evidence to the contrary - i have a sunshine-bright light fixture at home (600W worth of metal halide arc lamps), and while it does make the dull winter days less dark and gray, it also tend to make me tire quicker.
It's the same sort of feeling you get when you haven't slept in a while after having slept too much - your brain still feel fine, but your eyes are already tired (and yes, i checked the lamps for a lack of UV).
I wonder if this has to do with the insanely bright LED lights used on emergency vehicles now. I can't imagine being in a car at night and having photosensitivity for migraines or even worse epilepsy. it's so bright on some I can't focus on driving.
What id really like to know is if this was studied before LED strobes and to compare it specifically for that.
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...
Perhaps it's a certain kind of light, but I don't get the same kind of headache outside in bright lights. (Although I do find bright days painful.)
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