Ethan Park
Contributor at Screen Sight Care
About
Freelance web developer in Austin. Three monitors on a standing desk in the spare bedroom that has been my permanent office for four years. I track my screen time out of habit -- nine hours average on a working day, closer to eleven the week before a big deploy.
The 3pm headaches started around year three of fully remote work. Predictable enough that I started treating the last hour of the day as lower-intensity work so I would not make expensive typos while squinting. My optometrist diagnosed digital eye strain at a routine exam and gave me the standard list: blue light glasses, twenty-minute breaks, monitor angle and distance. I ran through the list. Some things improved. The afternoon fatigue pattern did not go away.
So I started looking into supplements and found the space hard to evaluate. Too many products making claims I could not verify. Review sites that seemed to reference each other in a loop. I did what I do with technical problems that lack good documentation -- I ran the experiment myself and logged everything. Fourteen months. Seven supplements, tested one at a time with three-week breaks between each to avoid carrying over effects. Weekly fatigue scores on a consistent scale, monthly cost calculations, plain-language notes on anything that changed.
Three of those supplements showed patterns I could notice. Two did nothing. Two I genuinely could not tell. I have written about all of them.
Not a doctor. Not an optometrist. Nothing in my background qualifies me professionally for health advice. If your eyes are a serious concern, see an actual eye doctor -- I am just someone who applied developer methodology to a personal problem and kept notes.
Recent posts by Ethan Park
- Why I Ignored My Optometrist's Skepticism and Kept Testing Eye Supplements
- My Screen Time Tracking Journey: Keeping My Eyes Honest After Years of Austin Freelancing
- Finding the Signal in the Noise: My Journey Through Seven Eye Supplements as a Remote Developer
- Beyond Blue Light Glasses: My Experience Testing iGenics and VisiFlora for Screen Fatigue
- How VisiFlora Changed My Focus During 10-Hour Debugging Marathons
- iGenics Honest Review: A Programmer's 14-Month Supplement Testing Data
- Stop the 3 PM Blur: My Honest TheyaVue Review
Disclosure
This site uses affiliate links. If you buy something through these links, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend eye supplements I have personally tested and tracked. Commission has no effect on what I report.