Night light and brightness

Make the screen kind to your eyes in the evening, and stop it glaring at you in a dark room.

The tiredness people blame on their eyes is often the screen being far brighter than the room around it.

There are three separate controls, and they do genuinely different things.

Key points

• Match the brightness to the room rather than leaving it at full
• Set night light to run from sunset to sunrise, once, for ever
• Switch the whole machine to dark mode under Personalization, then Colors
• Know which setting affects the battery and which only affects the color

What to remember

• Sunset to sunrise means you never think about it again. The computer knows when the sun sets where you are.
• Brightness for battery and for glare. Night light for comfort and for sleeping afterwards.
• Dark mode changes menus and windows. Web pages mostly stay white, because that is up to whoever made them.

Try this

This evening, turn your brightness down until the screen looks about as bright as a sheet of paper on the desk beside it. Most people are surprised how far down that is.

Practice: Night light and brightness. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.

Related guides

• Dark mode, night light, and which one helps
• Read comfortably at night
• Let it read the page out loud to you
• Make the screen comfortable
• The settings worth changing on day one