Personally I find the bright red that CF defaults to as incoming now to be perfect. Each computer screen shows color very differently, and especially the normal ansi blue is extremly hard to read on my screen against the black background. I suspect your screen has a very bright color setting if you find the light red to hurt your eyes. (I even use normal bright white as the "general text color", and it is not very bright and suits me fine.

Oh and I find it much harder to catch something important that happens with a color. Its much easier to echo it in cyan like #echo *** Bash protection down!! ***