Create a shortcut for even lower phone brightness

This practical betterment presupposes that…

You use your phone in bed
You know staying up until 3am scrolling through contextless rage fuel is bad for your sleep, your mental health, and possibly even your eye balls
You’re going to do it anyway

We’re all addicted to our phones and many of us go to sleep with them in our hands— so it’s odd that manufacturers choose the default minimum brightness to be brighter than the sun.

It turns out you can go lower than the minimum brightness.

Save your eyes from strain, increase your phone’s battery life2, and better ease yourself into a slumber by creating a shortcut to turn your phone brightness lower than the minimum.

When you go to bed, or are trying not to disturb others on a sleeper train, or just want to save battery, you can quickly enable this shortcut.

Here’s how…

How to create a extra low brightness shortcut on iPhone

On iOS this setting is called Reduce White Point.

Here’s how you enable it:

Open Settings
Navigate to Accessibility
Navigate to Accessibility shortcut
From the menu select Reduce White Point

That’s it. Once you’ve set this up you can triple-click the side button and your phone will be significantly dimmer.

How to create an extra dim shortcut on Android

On android phones this feature is called extra dim.

Android phones are all different from one another so the instructions are not consistent — but you can search for “extra dim shortcut” in settings and follow the instructions from there.