Glare, the window, and where light should come from
There is a thirty-second test that tells you almost everything about the light in your room: turn the screen off and look at it. Whatever you can see reflected in the dark glass is what your eyes are competing with all day. A window, a lamp, a bright wall, your own face.
Glare matters to this site because of what people do about it without noticing. You don’t consciously fight a reflection — you move your head out of its way, and then you keep your head there. A tilted, turned or lowered head held for hours is a furniture problem wearing a lighting disguise.
The direction light should come from
One rule, and it’s the whole subject: light should arrive from the side, not from in front of you and not from behind you.
From behind you (a window or lamp at your back) puts the light source into the screen as a reflection. This is the worst arrangement and by far the commonest, because when people set up a desk they instinctively face into the room and put their back to the window.
From in front of you (facing a window) means you’re looking at a bright background with a dimmer screen in front of it. Your eyes adapt to the bright thing, the screen looks dark, and you either crank the brightness up or lean in.
From the side avoids both. The screen shows no reflection and the background behind the screen isn’t dramatically brighter than the screen itself.
Most desks are placed for the room’s geometry — against the free wall, in the alcove — and the light direction is whatever it happens to be. Turning the desk ninety degrees is free and is more effective than anything you can buy.
GLARE — the check
Turn the monitor off. Sit where you work. Look at the dark screen.
· Nothing much visible in it → clear
· A window, a lamp, a light fitting → direct glare; move
one of the three
· A bright patch with no obvious source → a lit wall or ceiling
· Your own reflection, clearly → the room behind you
is brighter than the
screen
Now turn it on. Look past the screen at the wall behind it.
· Wall much brighter than the screen → you're squinting
· Wall much darker than the screen → screen too brightThen the behavioural check, which is the useful one: watch where your head goes. If you find yourself habitually tilted to one side, or ducked down, or sitting off-centre from your own monitor, there’s usually a reflection you’ve been dodging for months.
The three things you can move
Glare is a relationship between a light, a screen and your eyes. Only three objects, so only three fixes.
Move the screen. Rotating a monitor slightly, or moving the desk, changes the reflection angle. This is the free one and it’s the one to try first. Note that on a shallow desk you may not have the room to angle a monitor much, which is one more reason depth constrains more than people think.
Move the light. Close a blind, or half-close it — the useful setting for a side window is usually slats angled to throw light at the ceiling. Move a lamp so its bulb isn’t in your line of sight or in the screen’s. Turn off the ceiling light directly above and behind you, which is usually the source of the mystery bright patch.
Change the brightness relationship. If you can’t move either object, you can reduce the contrast between them. Bring the wall behind the screen up in brightness with a lamp pointed at it, or bring the screen’s own brightness closer to the room’s. Which direction depends on which way the mismatch runs.
An honest note about screen coatings: matte screens diffuse reflections into a haze rather than showing a sharp image of the window, which is usually easier to work with; glossy ones look better and reflect like a mirror. This is worth knowing when you have a choice, and it’s not worth replacing a monitor over. A repositioned glossy screen beats a badly positioned matte one.
Brightness, and the thing people get backwards
The reflex when a screen is hard to read is to turn the brightness up. Sometimes correct, often not.
The screen should be roughly as bright as the surfaces around it. If it’s much brighter than the room — the classic case being a bright screen in a dark room at night — your eyes are constantly readapting between the screen and everything else. If it’s much dimmer than the room, you squint.
So the adjustment is a relationship, not a level, and it changes through the day: a brightness that’s right at eleven in the morning is too bright at eight in the evening. Two ways to handle that:
- Turn the screen down in the evening, manually or with whatever automatic setting your system offers.
- Bring the room up instead, with a lamp that lights the wall behind the screen. This is the same idea as the strip of light people put behind a television, and a cheap lamp aimed at a pale wall does it perfectly well. Note that this is a different job from lighting the desk surface, and a desk lamp has one job — pointing it at your keyboard instead will make the mismatch worse.
Dark colour schemes are a preference, not an ergonomic measure. They reduce the amount of light the screen throws, which helps in a dim room and can make things worse in a bright one, where dark screens turn into better mirrors. Use whichever you prefer and set the brightness relationship separately.
Text size is not a lighting fix, but it’s the thing to try
A lot of what people attribute to glare is legibility. The two feel similar from the inside — both produce leaning and squinting — and they have completely different fixes.
Separate them like this: enlarge the interface substantially for ten minutes. If the leaning stops, you had a text-size problem and were solving it by moving your torso. If it doesn’t, the light is the issue.
This matters because leaning toward a screen is expensive — it takes your back off the chair and puts your head forward, so a small readability annoyance becomes a whole-body position held for hours. Where discomfort points has more on reading the compensation rather than the complaint.
Two screens make it harder
Adding a second monitor multiplies the glare problem, because the two screens face slightly different directions and a light that misses one will catch the other. It also tends to mean one screen is angled toward a window that the primary one avoids.
The practical approach is to fix the primary screen’s reflection first and accept a compromise on the secondary, since you look at it less and usually for glanceable rather than sustained reading. Deciding which one is primary is the prerequisite.
What lighting can’t do
Sorting the light out removes a reason to hold your head at an angle. It doesn’t treat anything, and it won’t make four unbroken hours at a screen comfortable — that’s duration, and getting up is a different subject.
Tired eyes at the end of a screen day are common and are not, by themselves, evidence of anything wrong. But persistent headaches, changes in vision, or eye pain are reasons to see a qualified professional — an optician or a clinician — rather than reasons to buy a different lamp. Uncorrected vision is a genuinely common cause of leaning toward a screen, and no amount of furniture adjustment substitutes for an eye test.
Turn the screen off and look at it. It costs nothing and it’s usually obvious.