How to customize the automatic sleep time of your Mac display

Ankur Thakur ∙ March 23, 2023

Your Mac is set to turn off its display and enter sleep state after a few minutes of inactivity. However, if you’re charging your devices like the Magic Keyboard or iPhone, have opened a file for reference, or just don’t want your Mac to turn its screen off, you have the option to extend the automatic sleep time.

In this short tutorial, we will show you how to change the sleep time settings of your Mac, and also explore some other related options.

MacBook Lock Screen showing the enter password field

Change the sleep time of your Mac

  1. Click the Apple icon  and choose System Settings on macOS Ventura and later.
  2. Select Lock Screen from the left sidebar.
  3. Click the drop-down menu next to “Turn display off on battery when inactive” and choose from 1 minute up to 3 hours. You can also choose Never.
  4. If you’re on a MacBook, you can also set “Turn display off on power adapter when inactive” as per your preference.
Change the automatic sleep time on Mac

After this, your Mac will automatically go to sleep if it has been inactive for the duration you chose in steps 3 and 4. By inactivity, we mean you have not touched its mouse, trackpad, or keyboard, are not watching a video, or have not interacted with your Mac in any way.

On macOS Monterey or earlier: Go to System Preferences > Battery on MacBook and Energy Saver on Mac desktop > set the “Turn display off after” slider as needed.

Other sleep and wake settings on Mac

Some sleep and wake options are hidden at various locations inside macOS Settings.

In Battery or Energy Saver settings

MacBook:

  1. Go to System Settings > Battery.
  2. Click Options.
  3. From here, you can choose to wake your Mac for network access on battery, power adapter, or never.
  4. On some Macs, you may see additional options like Put hard disks to sleep, update your system while it’s asleep, or allow your Mac to wake briefly so users can access shared services. You can set them as per your need.
Wake for network access in MacBook's battery settings

Mac desktop: The basics are the same as MacBook. The only difference is you need to go to System Settings > Energy Saver.

In Display settings

  1. Open System Settings and click Displays.
  2. Click Advanced.
  3. Under Battery & Energy, you can choose to enable “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off.” After this, your Mac will not sleep when it’s plugged in, and its display is off.
  4. Finally, click Done.
Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off on Mac

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