For many of us, our lives happen on a screen. You’re sending emails, watching Netflix, chatting with co-workers on Slack or playing Candy Crush on your smartphone — basically, you’re staring at your phone 24/7. Unfortunately, this all spells out to super tired eyes. While, yes, cutting back on screen time is always a great idea to give your eyes a break once in a while, here are a few tricks built right into your iPhone that will help you ease your stressed out peepers.
1. Reducing Brightness: This one’s kind of a no-brainer. Bright light can be super harsh on your eyes (plus, it’s a total battery drain). This can easily be done by swiping up your iPhone’s Control Center, and just scrolling the bar down. Warning: Going to dark with your display will still cause eye strain.
2. Blow Up That Font: Sure, you might not want the person sitting across the room to be able to read your text messages because your font is so big, but honestly, enlarging your font really helps. Simply go into Settings > Display & Brightness > Text Size, and slide the bar up to make your text a little bigger.
3. Zoom In: The iPhone has another nifty feature that allows you to view your home screen zoomed in. I mean, those widgets for your various apps are so tiny, a little zooming in doesn’t hurt. You can do this by going into Settings > Display & Brightness > View and simply toggling over to “Zoomed.”
4. Invert Colors: This trick is helpful on multiple levels. Not only does it go easy on your eyes, it also is a great way to keep from disturbing other people when you’re using your phone at night. Inverting colors is exactly what it sounds like — white becomes black. You can enable this by going into Settings > General > Accessibility and toggling on “Invert Colors.” In case you want easy access to this feature, though, you can then scroll to the bottom of the screen and select Accessibility Shortcut, then make “Invert Colors” your choice. This option allows you to use this function by clicking your Home button three times fast.
5. Night Shift: Here’s the new feature that was just introduced with this week’s iOS 9.3 update unveiled at Apple’s March Event. Night Shift reduces the amount of blue light your phone emits (blue light inhibits melatonin production, which in turn can give you insomnia), but it’s a godsend for helping relax your sight. You can enable Night Shift by swiping up on Control Center and tapping on the center icon on the bottom row. It will turn on Night Shift immediately until 7:00 am the following day. Otherwise, you can go into Settings > Display & Brightness > Night Shift, and set a schedule for it to turn on automatically each day.
6. Increase Display Contrast: Here’s a fact of life: Bolder colors equal better visibility. Same holds true for your iPhone. You can increase the contrast on your iPhone for better legibility by going into Settings > General > Accessibility > Increase Contrast and toggling on “Reduce Transparency” and “Darken Colors.” To ease the blinding brightness of white and light colors, you can also toggle on “Reduce White Point.”
Will you be trying out any of these tricks? Tweet us @BritandCo!
(Featured photo via Getty)
