You may not even consider it at times. After setting your pillows, blankets, sheets, and other bedding in place, you grab your iPhone and quickly browse TikTok or Bluesky. But isn’t it never fast? Time can easily be lost, and that quick scroll turns into a doomscroll.

As you are undoubtedly aware, blue light exposure prior to bedtime can interfere with sleep. Night Shift, a long-standing iOS function that adds a warmer tone to your iPhone’s screen to counteract the impacts of blue light, doesn’t fully address other elements that also affect your sleep. Fortunately, though, you can.

The most recent iPhones, however, have the ability to reduce the brightness to as low as one nit, which essentially puts your phone’s screen in an extremely low-power mode that is not only better for your battery but also easier on your eyes in the dark. Additionally, there are several adjustments in iOS itself that can make your display a little bit dimmer than what the conventional brightness slider permits. Below, we’ll demonstrate how.

For additional tech advice, see how to customize your iPhone’s Messages with iOS 18 and how to add or remove lock screen features.

iPhone Pro Advice
For the iPhone 14 and later generations, this tempered glass screen protector shields your screen from dust, scratches, and cracking. In order to preserve your privacy, the screen protector is covered with a unique filter that lets light in only from specific directions.

Specifics
Use this iPhone screen protector for privacy and security.
$7 on Amazon

1. Turn on Night Shift first.

As the day turns to night, the iPhone Night Shift feature automatically changes your screen to warmer, more aesthetically pleasing hues by utilizing your phone’s internal clock and geolocation. The display reverts to its default settings each morning. It can be activated in the Control Center or in your Settings.

Even if Night Shift may not be as successful at suppressing melatonin as we once thought it was, it still has advantages since it reduces the blue light on the screen, which is unquestionably a positive thing.

Method 1: Configurations

Select Night Shift under Settings > Display & Brightness. From here, you can either set the function to activate at a specific time or turn it on all day and turn it off in the morning. Using the slider at the bottom of the page, you may also change the color temperature, selecting between warmer and colder settings.

Technique 2: Control Center

To reach the Control Center, swipe down from the upper-right corner. Then, to toggle Brightness on and off, tap the Night Shift button while holding down the Brightness symbol.

iPhone’s Night Shift feature
Night Shift is accessible through the Control Center or your preferences.
Nelson Aguilar/CNET 2 screenshots.

Utilize this accessibility function to lessen the white point on the screen.

To change how strongly colors appear on your iPhone, you can also lower the white point. Try this setting to slightly tame bright hues, which are particularly accentuated at night.

Toggle on Reduce White Point under Accessibility > Display & Text Size in Settings. You can use the marker that will show up under the option to change the brightness of the vivid colors to your preferred level.

Lower the iPhone’s white point setting
This modifies how intense the vivid colors are on your screen.
Nelson Aguilar/CNET 3 screenshots.

Use Zoom’s accessibility tool to apply a low light filter.

You can reduce the brightness of the display alone if you’re only interested in lowering the brightness and don’t want any warmer or less vibrant colors. You can make your display darker than usual by applying a low light filter over it using Zoom’s accessibility feature.

Open the Settings app, select Accessibility > Zoom, and confirm that Zoom Filter’s Low Light option is selected. Although you can turn on Zoom here if you’d like, it’s far simpler to utilize Zoom by triple-clicking the side button on your phone from anyplace.

Even if your brightness is already at its lowest, when Zoom is turned on, your phone will immediately apply the low light filter to your screen, making it darker. Zoom is now enabled, as shown by the tiny floating circle that appears on your screen. The controller can be hidden by tapping it. Simply triple-click the side button once again to turn off Zoom.

Zoom accessibility feature on iOS Triple-clicking the side button fast is the simplest way to activate the low light filter.
Nelson Aguilar/CNET screenshots
Do you need more IT advice? When you install iOS 18, make sure you make the following seven adjustments to your iPhone.