I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time on the computer – way more time than I should.
Sometimes, I’m up early looking at my computer screen or reading emails. Other times, I’m staying up late at night playing video games.
I may spend a lot of time on my computer, but thanks to Flux, at least I don’t have eye problems or sleep problems.
Flux is a free program you may have heard about. Flux – which is officially known as “F.lux” – is an app which silently runs in the background of your PC all the time.
It identifies your geographic location and uses that location to calibrate the brightness of your screen. When the sun is up and bright, your computer’s monitor is fully powered and bright as a midday’s sky.
But when the sun goes down, Flux goes to work: it changes the temperature of your screen from a cool daylight color with white and blue hues to a reddish warmer color at night.
Why is that important? It does this to protect your eyes and promote a natural sleep cycle.

How F.lux Protects Your Eyes

When we’re sitting in a dark room looking at a bright monitor, it puts a lot of strain on our eyes.

Every time you look away from the monitor – to grab a textbook from your bed, for example – your eyes have to open the pupils to let in more light so you can see the dark room.
Then, when you turn back to your computer monitor, your eyes need to rapidly close to avoid letting in too much light. This might happen 12 to 15 times during a normal day at your computer.
Doing this once or twice won’t have a huge effect on your eyes. But if you repeatedly stay up late looking at your computer screen, you may be doing irreversible damage to your eyes.

How F.lux Helps You Sleep

Do you know why we feel sleepy at night? It’s because our bodies release a sleep hormone called Melatonin into our brains.

This melatonin is produced when it gets dark out. Basically, when our eyes stop noticing bright light, they start producing melatonin because it’s time for us to fall asleep.
When we stay up after sundown using our mobile devices, it tricks our brain into thinking that it’s still sunny outside. So when you try to go fall asleep, your body will be like, “No, it’s still daylight, you can’t be tired right now.”
Ultimately, the electronic light from our computer screens messes up sleep cycles.

How to Use F.lux

Flux is ridiculously easy to use. In fact, I’ve barely ever adjusted the program’s settings and it seems to work just fine.
First, download Flux from its official website and install it like you would install any other Windows software.
After you’ve installed Flux, it will sit quietly in your taskbar without bothering you. It’s smart enough to configure your settings based on your time zone and location. However, you should still take a quick look into the settings menu to adjust the program as needed.
Here are some of the settings you can change while using Flux:

Some people prefer the “Slow” transition speed, which takes 60 minutes to go from day to night as opposed to just 20 seconds.
You can also adjust your daytime and nighttime brightness settings. By default, “daytime” brightness uses your monitor’s full power and shouldn’t change your color temperature. If you want to make nighttime power darker or brighter, however, you can do that as well.
The default power is 6500K/calibrated for day and 3400K/calibrated for night.
What do those numbers mean? Well, 6500K is the color temperature of natural midday full spectrum sunlight. On a cloudy day, it will be a bit less than that.

Who should use Flux?

If you spend your days in a windowless room and don’t go outside very often, then you probably don’t need F.lux.
However, F.lux is particularly useful if you have a window in your room and want to save your eyes when the lights go down.

F.lux doesn’t just save your eyes: it also saves your sleep cycle and promotes a healthy, natural, and restful night’s sleep.
Whether you’re trying to get a better sleep, reducing eye degradation, or just want to save energy, there are a lot of good reasons to use Flux.
Once again, you can download Flux today from here.