You may have noticed that your Mac falls asleep pretty quickly once you stop actively interacting with it. Even if you weren’t intending to quit using your computer, your Mac can fall asleep if it finds you aren’t using it. It’s even worse when you’re running on battery power alone.
This is because your Mac is taking full advantage of its power-saving and battery-saving options. While this sounds good, it can be quite annoying, for example, when your Mac decides to go to sleep while you are downloading something and you have to start over.
Fortunately, there are several ways to block hibernation on your computer and prevent your Mac from going into hibernation.
Why are you preventing sleep on your Mac
One obvious reason you might want to block your Mac’s power saving mode is because it starts interrupting active tasks. For example, you start a download and go to bed expecting you to wake up after the download is complete. Instead, your Mac goes to sleep at the same time as you, and the download is canceled.
Another case might be when you leave your computer for just a few minutes, expecting to come back and resume work immediately. Instead, you go back to your Mac in sleep mode and have to interrupt your schedule to bring it back to life.
Whatever your reason, it’s always good to know a few tricks to keep your computer awake.
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How to prevent your Mac from sleeping
There are several different methods you can use to temporarily shut down your Mac from sleep. If you need more features, download a utility or third-party application that will give you better control over your Mac’s sleep mode. If you don’t want to bother installing new software, try one of the following built-in methods.
Using Mac Power Saver
Energy Saver is a built-in tool on your Mac that you can use to customize your computer’s sleep mode.
Using Energy Saver, you can set the exact time when your computer will go to sleep after you stop using it, both on battery power and when using the AC adapter. You can set the time from 1 minute to 3 hours or Never. The latter means completely disabling the automatic hibernation of your computer.
The best part of Energy Saver is the Power Nap feature. When Power Nap is turned on, your Mac can automatically back up with Time Machine and check for new email and calendar alerts while it sleeps. If you’re plugged into a power adapter, your Mac can also turn off the screen without going to sleep.
To access Power Saver, go to System Preferences Power Saver.
You will also find it in the drop-down menu under the battery icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
If you just want to put your Mac to sleep and wake up at a specific hour, select Schedule at the bottom of the Power Saver window and set a time.
Use Terminal
If you don’t like power saving on Mac, you can use Terminal as an alarm clock for your computer to fix your sleep problem.
To open Terminal, go to Applications Utilities. Or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd (Command) + Space and search for Terminal in Spotlight.
Once you open a terminal window, type caffeine into it and press Enter. This will keep your Mac awake while you have a terminal window open. You can minimize or hide it and it won’t affect your Mac’s locked sleep.
To re-enable hibernation, either exit the terminal or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + C to end the command.
Use Keep-Awake Utility amphetamine
If you want some extra control over how your Mac sleeps, try a Mac app called Amphetamine. You can download it for free from the App Store. It will then appear as a small pill icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
Later, you can customize the icon to look like an owl, everything related to coffee, sun and moon, emojis and even your own image.
The application menu is quite simple and easy to navigate. In addition to the standard keep awake feature, Amphetamine invites you to control your Mac’s sleep mode with various triggers.
For example, your computer will not go to sleep while an application is running or a file is downloading. You can set up a whole panel of custom triggers to give you full control over your Mac’s sleep mode.
Use Caffeine application strong
The Caffeine app is really “old but golden”. This is a free simple anti-sleep app that has been around for many years.
To activate caffeine on Mac, download it and move it to your apps.
The application will then ask you for permission to control your computer.
After that, all you have to do is click on the coffee cup icon that appears in the Mac ribbon menu at the top of the screen. Click the cup icon again to turn it off. The beauty of this app is its simplicity.
Alternatively, you can set up automatic activation of caffeine at lunch time or when you log in. The duration also ranges from 5 minutes to Infinite.
Learn how to control sleep mode on your Mac
As you experiment with Mac sleep mode, pay attention to what settings you change and what utilities you use. Otherwise, you might find a way to put your Mac to sleep next time.
Have you ever had to interrupt your Mac from sleeping? What method did you use? Share your Mac life hacks with us in the comments below.
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