If your monitor is so bright that a white rectangle hurts your eyes, you need to turn it down.
On my current monitor I go from 100% brightness during the day to around 20% at night. I change it roughly twice a day.
I don't understand how, even with dark mode, someone could run a modern panel full tilt at 100% through the evening. My brain can sense the intense heat of that backlight behind every pixel. I don't even want the possibility of a momentary dark mode glitch to be a concern. It took me a long time to appreciate the harm of not controlling this stuff.
For me 100% brightness is way too much when inside even during the day. Maybe the monitors I have are exceptionally bright to start with, which I doubt, but whenever I get new monitors I usually put them down to about 30-40% for usage during the day. Which is the level which to me makes it looks as if white on the screen roughly matches a white wall in a similar location in the room. This just feels the most natural and least fatiguing, probably because looking at the screen or surroundings hardly changes pupil size. Which I confirmed with a research-grade eyetracker.
If your monitor is so bright that a white rectangle hurts your eyes, you need to turn it down.
On my current monitor I go from 100% brightness during the day to around 20% at night. I change it roughly twice a day.
I don't understand how, even with dark mode, someone could run a modern panel full tilt at 100% through the evening. My brain can sense the intense heat of that backlight behind every pixel. I don't even want the possibility of a momentary dark mode glitch to be a concern. It took me a long time to appreciate the harm of not controlling this stuff.