Sensitivity to bright light

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For those of you who are overly sensitive to bright light (like sunlight), how does that manifest for you, psychologically?
I'm wondering if very bright sunlight like we often have here in the high desert is affecting me more than I've noticed, and I've just "adapted" to the annoyance/suffering over the years.

To that end, I've ordered a pair of very dark (CAT 4) sunglasses to experiment with, to see if they have any noticeable effect on my state of mind.

I've certainly noticed over the years that I squint terribly all the time when I'm out in full daylight, but beyond that, I'm not sure what's going on.

For me I am only just starting to work it out....

I made a comment to my mother today about the dentists. In the past they had those traditional very bright lights (Or they seem to be) which will be close to ones face and shine in ones eyes.
My dentist has a new light which has either four or six blueish little lights, and I noticed that I am calmer with it. Also I am less likely to shut down or have issues. I still am nurvous! But the light itself does not effect me.

wow had relatives that i visited in the desert areas and you would never see them outside without some good sunglasses. i can tolerate sunlight pretty good . Maybe even desert with extra dark lenses. But its indoor lights that are the worst .. With flourescent being the absolute worst.
Halide lamps can be aweful too i think. Think i would rather stare into the sun sometimes than
look at some of the more brilliant indoor lamps , i have seen... ......lolz

Bright light doesn't really "hurt" my eyes or anything, but it makes it very hard to focus on things and can be very overwhelming. I'm also not used to it because in my area of WA it's usually cloudy, so when it's super sunny it's worse due to me having no tolerance to it. Bright indoor lights also particularly stress me out for some reason.

My light sensitivity gets worse as my physical or mental health does.

It can range from a slight, subconscious sense of discomfort and stress to full blown vampire mode where a well lit room is painful and the sense of relief and relaxation from being in a dark room feels like walking into a well air-conditioned room after getting out from a heatwave.

...unless you count the tension headaches caused by anxiety from autism stuff, in which case blinding pain which makes it difficult to form thoughts is the new limit.

Typically it just means that I dislike rooms lit more brightly than they need to be, and unshielded lights are quite unpleasant. Unshielded lights at eye level are obnoxiously unpleasant and I can't tolerate them. Bright sunny days don't make me feel bad, but it does make me feel some kind of pressure. Being on the road at night with all the bright car lights against a dark backdrop is right on the fence between painful and not-painful. Highbeams from oncoming traffic is painful.

Just a question, are you on Trazedone? It made me SO MUCH MORE sensitive to light than I already was

I had been on Trazodone, and I think it might have aggravated my light sensitivity a bit but I can't remember if was the one that did it. It was like two years ago.

I'm not on anything right now. Perhaps what makes my light sensitivity so bad how closely linked poor health and my migraines are. I wouldn't be surprised if it that's a symptom that pops up before the pain. My migraines have a very significant light sensitivity aspect to it.

I often see "fluorescent lights" singled out as being especially irksome.

To be clear, there are several factors with artificial lighting sources that are likely to trigger an annoyance threshold:

1) Flicker:
“old-fashioned” fluorescent lights (think long tubes in a ceiling fixture in an office, warehouse or shop) usually had magnetic ballasts. This is a device that limits current to the lamp, allowing it to work without drawing too much current and failing. But a fluorescent lamp driven this way will flicker badly, since the ballast outputs a 60 Hertz sine wave (in the United States, or 50Hz in much of the rest of the world- even worse), meaning that 120 times a second, the current going through the lamp drops to zero, and with some types of lamps, the light output also drops to near zero at the same time. Also, the color of the light being emitted by the lamp changes continuously through this cycle, due to the lamp phosphors emitting a different balance of colors at varying currents. This “flicker” (varying light amount and color) can REALLY annoy some people.

Note that almost ALL electric lights driven by alternating current will flicker to some degree, even incandescent and LED (some LEDs are terrible in this regard).

Solution:
If you have fluorescent lamps around that aren’t practical to replace entirely, changing the ballast to a modern electronic type will likely help a LOT. These ballasts still have an oscillating current output, but instead of it being 60 times per second, it’s more like 40 THOUSAND times per second, way above the “flicker integration threshold” of any human, and therefore should be much less annoying to live under. Even these electronic ballasts are now becoming obsolete, due to LEDs being the “new thing”, and can be had for free in some cities on Craig’s List (I have a bunch I need to give away at some point).

Switching to LEDs may make the problem WORSE, since many are driven by the cheapest, crappiest “drivers”, and will flicker like mad. The LEDs themselves have NO native flicker if driven by pure DC current (such as when connected DIRECTLY to a battery), but the circuits in between the AC power source (or even a battery) and the LED(s) will often make the LEDs flicker at a rate that can be SUPER annoying.

2) Glare:
Glare means how bright the surface of a light source is, per area (Lumens per square centimeter, or whatever). Any light source that outputs a lot of light, but does so from a small surface area will likely be VERY hard to live with, due to the perceived intensity of the light.

Solution:
Diffusion!- for example, you’ve all seen the recessed “troffer” lighting used in offices. These usually have a large diffuser (often poorly designed) to spread out the light from, for example, a pair of 4-foot long fluorescent tubes. This diffusion can help a LOT, since the same amount of light is now coming from a MUCH larger area.

3) Color temperature:
Sunlight at high noon on a cloudless day has a “color temperature” of about 5,000 to 5,500 Degrees Kelvin. This is what to most people looks like a “clean, pure white”. Cloudy days and in shadows are more of a “bluish” white , perhaps well above 8,000 degrees Kelvin. Old-fashioned incandescent bulbs emitted light at roughly 2,700 to 3,200 degrees Kelvin, quite “yellowish".

Solution:
Since modern LED and fluorescent lamps are available in a WIDE range of color temps, experiment with a few and see if some are more soothing than others to you (I like 5000K).

I'm not generally sensitive to bright lights, but if I'm outside on a sunny day and I'm tired, I can barely open my eyes without squinting because I feel like I'm going to sneeze. I did have prescription sunglasses but I lost them, and it's socially unacceptable to wear sunglasses in the winter even though the winter sun can be just as bright as the summer sun.

But it's not overly an issue for me, as I prefer daylight to the dark, and I feel comfortable in a brightly-lit room rather than a dimly-lit room.

I actually get on well with the old filament bulbs, but sadly these are no longer allowed to be sold for household use as when we were in the EU, the EU banned them. The modern low energy types do have that horrible flickering effect and do not give out the brightness I want without them being white but dim. I get on better with the yellowy type of older lights.
The flurescent tube lights give off a better shade of white light to the modern types, but they flicker which is the issue...

Overall, I get on better with the old filament types, but we only have a few left and they are 100W so are a bit too powerful for our light fittings.

I find the noise from the modern low energy bulbs as annoying as the noise from flurescent types, and this makes my ability to relax an issue. The old filament lights were quiet unless they were about to blow!

Strange.
It's not artificial lights that bother me at all.

And for some reason, the sunlight does.

Not sure when it started or why, but I seem to squint and constantly look down whenever I go out without tinted lenses.
I can't look up the sky without hurting my eyes a bit.

It gives me this constant like ache from some glare and some dry like watering for some reason I can't explain.

It's not like I cooped up all day, or that I wear tinted lenses too often. I don't actually had this sensory issue before. Yet I seem to be gradually lost something here...


Maybe it's just my eyes than sensory processing.
Had a brief check up and my eyesight lens changed. My nearsightedness didn't became worse yet it became uneven, and also I developed astigmatism.

And... Contact lenses seem to get rid of this sensory intolerance.

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