Night Shift mode in iOS 9.3: how to make sure that your iPad and iPhone let you sleep at night

With the release of iOS 9.3, owners of iPhone, Apple iPad Pro and iPod Touch, have gained a new feature designed to make it a little easier to drift into sleep at the end of the day.

Night Shift mode, is a feature introduced with the latest version of iOS, announced last monday at Apple’s “Let Us Loop You In” keynote. When enabled, Night Shift mode changes the color hues of the screen, to a warmer tonal range, which promotes the production of the brain chemical needed to induce healthy sleep patterns: Melatonin.

Poor production of Melatonin causes sleep deprivation and the inability to reach REM sleep, and to dream, which is important to allow for the release of stress accumulated during the waking hours.

How to turn on Night Shift manually

At the end of the day, when it’s time to finally get some sleep, the first thing we do is to... check our phones. Facebook, emails, and a dozen YouTube videos later, it’s the dead of night, and we find ourselves more wired than on a busy morning at work.

Let’s learn how to put an end to those sleepless night.

From the iOS home screen, whether we are on an iPad or an iPhone, all we need to do is swipe up from the bottom edge of the display, and select Night Shift from Control Center.

Setting Night Shift mode automatically

While manually activating Night Shift mode is easy enough, we are creatures of habit, and we won’t always remember to add that extra little step at the end of our day. This is where a little automation goes a long way.

To schedule Night Shift mode to engage automatically, all that’s needed is to simply open Settings and choose “Display & Brightness”. Under “BLue Light Reduction” we’ll be able to select how warm we want to set the colors when using Night Shift mode, and directly under that slider, we’ll find “Schedule”, where we can set our daily schedule for Night Shift mode.

Scheduling Night Shift mode is easy. The Schedule screen offers three settings:

• Off - turns off Night Shift mode
• From Sunset to Sunrise - Automatically detects day/night cycles and selects the best time to engage Night Shift mode
• Custom Schedule - uses a time selector to manually specify when Night Shift should engage and deactivate.

The last setting is useful when traveling internationally, as it allows to schedule Night Shift mode for different time zones.