My phone was giving me migraines, so I made these 5 changes

Around 2022, I was diagnosed with chronic migraines. Unlike normal headaches, migraines come with a variety of neurological symptoms on top of the pain, such as nausea, light and sound sensitivity, and difficulty concentrating.

As I took the time to figure out what my migraine triggers were, a few culprits stood out, including the time spent on my smartphone. The bright screen would often trigger migraines or worsen my existing symptoms — so I had to make a few changes to reduce the impact it had.

Most of these changes also help reduce eye strain, so you can try them out even if you don’t have migraines or headaches from screen use. Since changing these settings and features, I notice my eyes don’t twitch after using my screen for long periods of time. But the biggest effect was on my migraine symptoms, with me experiencing fewer migraines triggered by screen use and ensuring I could still use my phone during mild migraines.

While there may be reasons why you might want to avoid dark mode, the feature is essential for me. I used to only use dark mode at night time when I was preparing for bed, but I’ve now made sure that dark mode is the default mode on all of my devices.

In many ways, dark mode has become an accessibility feature for me. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to use my device without risking triggering a migraine or making an existing migraine worse.

On my Oppo Reno 10 Pro+, I also have the option to set a dark mode style: Enhanced, Medium, or Gentle. Since Enhanced includes the most darkness, with a black background, I opted for this style.

Switching over to dark mode on my phone also means that most of my apps are also in this mode. For the few that didn’t switch over automatically, I manually toggled dark mode within the app settings.

Eye Comfort, also known as Eye Protection or Night Light (depending on the exact OS you’re using), is a blue light filter available on Android smartphones. I used to use a blue light filter app on my phone, but since Android introduced the ability to customize the filter setting, I can use the feature directly through my smartphone software.

I also made sure to toggle Eye Comfort to the default setting, rather than limiting it to certain hours. Meanwhile, I always adjust the temperature to as warm as possible to improve my comfort when experiencing light sensitivity.

Since my eyes adjust to this filter, it is not as distracting as it might seem. However, the drawback is that it can affect the color accuracy of images you’re viewing. But I prefer this caveat over the alternative of having my phone cause headaches and eye strain.

I’ve been meaning to make the switch away from Chrome for a while now since I want to be less reliant on Google apps. But the lack of the ability to use my dark mode extension on Chrome’s Android app was the final push I needed to stop using the app as my default mobile browser.

Instead, I’ve switched to Brave, which allows me to force dark mode on web pages that use a light theme by default. While many websites support dark mode, there are still a few that only have a light theme. I noticed this the most when reading news or looking up recipes.

The feature to force dark mode is available in Brave’s Appearance settings, where you can choose to enable night mode.” So far, I haven’t encountered any issues with getting sites to deliver a black background and white text, which has made the change to a different browser worthwhile.

While Adaptive Brightness on Android is useful, I found that my light sensitivity often meant that the brightness my phone automatically set was simply too bright. This is especially a problem at night, when I set my screen to 0% brightness when I’m in bed.

The main drawback of this is a slight loss of convenience. When I go outside, my phone screen doesn’t automatically adjust, and I have to use muscle memory to turn the brightness back up. But the main benefit is that my phone doesn’t automatically turn the brightness back up once I’ve turned it down.

Sometimes I would be using my phone when I started to feel the familiar pain at the back of my eyes, and I’d realize my screen was too bright — but by this time it was already too late, the migraine cascade had started. So, manually adjusting the brightness has been worth the convenience trade-off.

While most of my changes benefit eye strain in general, this one is a bit more specific to migraines. Motion sensitivity is a common symptom in migraines, and I find that certain motions on my smartphone can make my nausea worse.

That’s why I always ensure that my display refresh rate is set to my phone’s maximum (120Hz). This higher refresh rate reduces stuttering on my screen while scrolling, which in turn helps me not feel as sick from the jittery motion.

Of course, increasing my screen’s refresh rate doesn’t do anything when it comes to watching videos that trigger my motion sensitivity — like videos recorded with a shaky camera. But at least I can easily scroll through my phone’s settings and Reddit threads without causing issues (as long as I don’t scroll too fast).

Making these changes not only reduced my eye strain and light sensitivity but also made my phone much less of a trigger for my migraines. When a migraine does hit, these changes allow me to still use my device when I’m stuck in bed and need to catch up on messages.

If you find yourself having a similar experience or experiencing eye strain from screen use, I’d also suggest trying out different ways to reduce the impact of screen use — both on your smartphone and your computer.