Night Shift is now available on your Mac so you can finally get some damn sleep

Be the ruler of your sleep domain.
 By 
Jack Morse
 on 
Night Shift is now available on your Mac so you can finally get some damn sleep
It's so bright! Credit: Stephen Lam/Getty Images

It's hard out there for a keyboard jockey.

Thankfully, Night Shift is here to save the day (er, night).

Spending long hours staring at a computer has its ill effects, one of which being that the blue light pouring out of the screen is thought to wreak havoc on people's circadian rhythms. This in turn makes it harder to fall asleep at night once that laptop is eventually put away.

In other words, your beloved MacBook might be messing up your slumber time.

MacOS' Sierra 10.12.4 update takes care of that inconvenience by making standard a feature that once required the third-party app f.lux. Night Shift, as it's called, works by reducing the amount of blue light used by your screen in the evening — switching over to warmer colors in the process.

"Night Shift automatically shifts the colors of your display to the warmer end of the color spectrum after dark," Apple explains. "This may help you get a better night's sleep."

How to enable this feature and reclaim the sleep that's rightfully yours? It's pretty easy, actually.

First, make sure you update your macOS to 10.12.4. Done? Cool. You're now one step closer to catching those vital z's. Next, go into "System Preferences" and select "Displays." You should see a "Night Shift" option right on the screen.

There are several different ways you can set the feature up. Do you want it to engage and disengage automatically at sunrise and sunset? There's an option for that. How about custom times because you're not to be dictated to by the rotation of the Earth? Yup, that's an option.

Maybe you want a little bit of blue light (you always did like living on the edge), but still want to get the alleged benefits of that sweet warm color spectrum. In that case, simply adjust the "Color Temperature" slider to find a setting that works for you.

If you just want to get this Night Shift thing happening ASAP, you can skip all of the above and use Siri to do it for you.

Pretty easy, right? For the bedtime trifecta, enable Night Shift on your iPad and iPhone.

You are now once again the ruler of your sleep domain. Go forth and rest.

Topics Apple MacBook

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Jack Morse

Professionally paranoid. Covering privacy, security, and all things cryptocurrency and blockchain from San Francisco.

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