10 Ways To Put Your Mac To Sleep

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.  Want to know the best way to put your Mac to sleep? I'll show you all the different methods and you can decide which is best for you. 

A common question Mac users have is what is the best way to put their Mac to sleep. Well, there are many different methods. Which is best varies from person to person. So let's start with the most direct way, which is to go the Apple Menu and then choose Sleep. This is the obvious way and, unless you're playing a game that really gets rid of the Menu Bar, the Apple Menu is always available and you can always find Sleep there. But some of the other methods I'm going to talk about sometimes can be hard to remember. It's easy to remember that you'll find Sleep next to Restart, Shut Down, and Lock in the Apple Menu. 

Now the second method I want to mention is probably the easiest way for most MacBook users. That's to simply to shut the lid of your MacBook. So I have noticed that some Mac users will first put their Mac to sleep and then close the lid. But there's no need for that first step. Just close the lid. You can be right in the middle of doing something with all sorts of apps open, just close the lid and your Mac will go to sleep. For most MacBook users this is the best way. Close it. Put the MacBook in your bag and go. 

Another option, which definitely has to be the easiest if the situation is right, is to do absolutely nothing. Just walk away from your Mac. If you go into System Settings and then go to Lock Screen, the settings here will determine when your Screen Saver starts and when your Display is turned off, which is the same thing as Sleep. So typically when you use your Screen Saver that will go on first. In this case I have it set for five minutes. But in reality I have it set to Never. I don't use the Screen Saver. But it is up to you. Then after a total of ten minutes of inactivity the display will turn Off. In other words,  just walking away from your Mac and waiting ten minutes will put your Mac to sleep. Now you may see two Settings here. One for Battery and one for Power, if you are using a MacBook. I'm using a Mac Studio so there is no setting for battery. Now this is a great way to have your Mac sleep if it's in a secure location. In other words if it is sitting in your home and nobody else has access to it you can simply walk away from your Mac knowing that in ten minutes it will go to sleep. If it is in a secure location and power saving is the main reason you are having it sleep anyway then you can just use this and not worry about manually putting it so sleep.

But the other thing this does, is it locks your Mac. So if your Mac is not in a secure location, someplace where others can get to it, then you want to put your Mac to sleep so it locks. Then this setting is very important here. This determines how long after your Mac goes to sleep will it Lock. You want this set to either to immediately or 5 seconds. Any longer and then you have a period of time where it looks like your Mac is sleeping but somebody can actually wake it up and get access to everything you're doing just by pressing a key on the keyboard. Five seconds is really useful if you find yourself often sitting in front of your Mac when it goes to sleep, like maybe you take phone calls or work on another device. You can see the screen flash off and press a key to wake it up again without having to enter in your password. Although sometimes if you use certain apps or have certain settings immediately may be your only option here. But I never use anything more than 5 seconds. 

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When now when thinking about this you've got Start Screen Saver, then Display Off, and then your Mac is locked. You can set the times for each one of these. But you can have your Mac lock first by going to the Apple Menu and then Lock Screen. There's a keyboard shortcut for that already, Control Command Q. If your main reason that you want to put your Mac to sleep is to secure it then you can use the Apple Menu or that keyboard shortcut to lock it first and then it will follow this rule here for actually putting it to sleep. So a good option for some people is to use Control Command Q, lock it, and then walk away. Then let it go to sleep after five or ten minutes on its own. 

Now I know a lot of you want to use your keyboard to put your Mac to sleep. There are a couple of ways to do that. If you've got a newer Mac and it has a Power or Touch ID button on the keyboard, right above the Delete Key, then usually you can put your Mac to sleep by pressing and holding it for 1.5 seconds. So a typical press, like you would type a letter on the keyboard that is NOT longer enough. You don't want to hold it too long either. Just about one and a half seconds, release and then your Mac will go to sleep. But it really depends on how new your Mac is, what model you've got, and lots of other factors. So what you need to do is just try this. Try it a few times. Try to get that 1.5 seconds down, and if it is not working on your Mac it may be that your Mac's hardware simply doesn't support this. 

But you can also assign your own keyboard shortcut to the Apple Menu, Sleep. You see it doesn't have a keyboard shortcut by default. But if you go to your Keyboard Settings and then go to Keyboard Shortcuts you can add one by going to App Shortcuts. Click the Plus button and want to have it set to All Applications. Then the menu title is exactly what you see here. Sleep. So just type that exactly. Then you want to set a keyboard shortcut. Be careful not to use like a standard key, like don't do Command S, which is typically save in most apps. So I'm going to use F6 here because it has a little picture of a moon which to me indicates sleep. Of course that's really for focus mode but I don't intend to use my keyboard to set the Do Not Disturb Focus Mode. So I'm going to use F6 for that. Then I'm going to click Done. Now you may change your mind later or you may find that particular key combination doesn't work really well for you. So you can always go back in here and then you can double click where it shows the keyboard shortcut and set it to something else. Like you can do Control Option Command and say the zero key, like that. If you do use something like F6 then you want to make sure you go to Function Keys. You've got this switched On. With it switched Off you're going to need to Add the Globe or fn key in order for it to work. 

So here's the thing about assigning a keyboard shortcut to Sleep. It doesn't work right away. For whatever reason the Apple Menu is really slow to pickup on those keyboard shortcuts. So if I go to the Apple Menu now, I look at Sleep, I don't see F6. But you'll find that if you're patient it will show up. It will show up slowly on an app-by-app basis. It's very strange. If you look at the Apple Menu now you can see I'm in the Finder and it's not there. If I go back, say, into System Settings and I look at the Apple Menu it's there! For the Finder, in particular, I find ii helps if you hold the Option Key down, click on the Finder in the Dock there, and then it relaunches. It basically quits and restarts the Finder and now you'll find it finally appears. The same with other apps. Sometimes quitting them and relaunching them will force the keyboard shortcut to show up. 

Keep in mind you can usually use Control F2 to activate the Menu Bar and then you can move with the arrow keys to the Apple Menu, down, and go to Sleep and press Return. It also works if you do Command Shift and then the Question Mark Key and then you can arrow over to the Apple Menu and then down to Sleep and Return. It is not quick to do but it does give you an option if you don't want to use the Mouse or Trackpad, only the keyboard. 

Now there is an alternative to a keyboard shortcut. You've got something called Hot Corners which can trigger actions when you move your pointer into a corner of your screen. You can get to it in System Settings by going to the Desktop & Dock setting. Going all the way to the bottom and clicking on Hot Corners. Then you can assign an Action to each of the four corners. You can see you can use Put Display to Sleep as the Hot Corner action for the bottom left. So all I need to do is move my Pointer all the way to the bottom left and it will go to sleep. Note you can also have it Lock the screen. This is great because you can almost do this without even looking. You can drag your mouse or swipe your trackpad down to that corner and it will put your Mac to sleep. It has to remain there for about a second but it is easy to do even as you're getting up to walk away from your desk. 

Now if you don't mind a little less convenience you can also assign modifier keys to this. So instead of just selecting Put Display to Sleep, I hold something like the Command Key down or the Option Key or Shift, you can see how it adds that key there. Now just putting the Pointer in the bottom left won't put your Display to sleep, you also have to be holding down that modifier key. 

There's also a way to use a Terminal command to put your Mac to sleep. You just use poset,. PM stands for Power Manager, and then you put sleepnow. Now It doesn't seem to be very convenient to launch Terminal and type this, but if you're already working in Terminal, as many people do, then this is a handy way to do it without having to go into a menu or anything like that. Also, if you're writing Shell Scripts that do a variety of things it is handy to know you can issue this command at the end to put your Mac to sleep after it does some task. 

Now there is also a way to do this in Shortcuts. Let's create a new shortcut here and I'm going to call this Sleep Now. What I'm going to add here is a sleep command. That's all this does, is to put the Mac to sleep. So I can run this or I can add it, say, pin in Menu Bar and now it will appear here. I could also add a keyboard shortcut and have the keyboard shortcut for this. Let's do Control Option Command 0, and then I'll see this appear in the Services Menu as Sleep Now with that keyboard shortcut. So it is another way to add a custom keyboard shortcut to make your Mac sleep. You can also use this action as part of another sequence of things. So, for instance, you can have a shortcut that sends a message, does a few other things, and then puts your Mac to sleep at the end of it. 

A shortcut like this is also handy because by adding it I now have a way to put my Mac to sleep using either Spotlight or Siri. So I can use Command Space to launch the Spotlight Menu. If I type the name of that shortcut you can see it appears as the first hit there. So just pressing Return now will run that shortcut and put my Mac to sleep. Really handy if you're used to using Spotlight for tons of different things. Now you can issue the Sleep command with Spotlight as well. This works for Siri too. If you activate Siri and then either type to Siri or speak the name of a shortcut it will run that shortcut and put your Mac to sleep. This is when it comes in handy to have a unique name for your shortcut. So don't name your shortcut just sleep. Name it something like Sleep Now or Go To Sleep or something like that so it won't be mistaken for any other Siri command or any other Spotlight search.

Now you may have heard of a few other ways to activate Sleep that don't seem to work anymore. That's because they work on older Macs. For instance, there are a few keyboard sequences like Command Option and the media eject key or Control Command and the media eject key or a power button on an older Mac. Those simply just either don't work on current Mac hardware or even on older hardware if you're running the most recent operating systems. Also just using Siri used to work. But it doesn't work anymore. You tell Siri to sleep or put my Mac to sleep without using that shortcut's method then Siri just doesn't know what you're talking about. (Playing Siri saying, sorry I don't understand.) So out of all these methods one of them should turn out to be the best one for you to put your Mac to sleep on a regular basis. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.