Modern smartphone screens are incredibly vibrant, designed to capture your attention and keep you scrolling. If you are trying to reduce your daily screen time, one of the most effective psychological tricks is to completely remove the colour from your display.
By turning your iPhone screen entirely black and white (grayscale), social media icons, notification badges, and photos become significantly less stimulating and addictive. Apple includes this feature natively as an accessibility option.
How to Enable Grayscale Mode
You can turn on grayscale mode deep within the iOS Settings app.
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
- Scroll down and tap on Accessibility.
- Under the “Vision” section, tap on Display & Text Size.
- Scroll down and tap on Colour Filters.
- Toggle the switch at the top of the screen to turn Colour Filters On.
- A list of options will appear. Select Grayscale at the top of the list.
Your entire iPhone display will instantly change to black and white. This applies to all apps, videos, and games. Do not worry—any photos or videos you take with your camera will still be saved in full colour; they will just appear black and white while you are looking at them on your screen.
How to Create a Quick Toggle Shortcut
If you do not want your phone to be black and white all the time, navigating through the Settings app every time you want to toggle it is tedious. You can set up a shortcut to toggle it instantly.
- Go back to the main Accessibility menu in Settings.
- Scroll to the very bottom and tap Accessibility Shortcut.
- Tap on Colour Filters to place a checkmark next to it.
Now, whenever you want to switch between full colour and grayscale, simply triple-click the side power button (or the Home button on older iPhones). The screen will instantly switch modes without needing to open the Settings app.