There are four realistic options, and they differ almost entirely in one respect: how easily you can undo them at the exact moment you most want to. Here’s each one, honestly.
“In peace I will lie down and sleep.”
until wake
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No password · No timer · Releases at 6:30 AM
Built in, free, and genuinely fine if your problem is absent-mindedness rather than willpower. System Settings → Screen Time → Downtime, then set a passcode. The catch: you chose the passcode, so “Ask for more time” is four digits away.
Silences notifications and can hide distracting apps on a schedule. Excellent at reducing interruption, no barrier at all to opening something deliberately — Focus is about attention, not enforcement.
You can schedule a Mac to sleep at a set time. It works exactly once per night, since nothing stops you pressing the power button and carrying on ninety seconds later.
A separate category: something designed on the assumption that the person it’s stopping is the same person trying to bypass it. That’s what Sleep Well is.
If you’re evaluating anything in the fourth category, these are the failure points worth asking about. Each is a real way people get back onto their machines.
A lock covering only the main screen is no lock at all. Every display needs its own cover, including one plugged in after the night has started.
Command-Tab, Mission Control and a new desktop Space all need to lead back to the lock rather than around it.
If enforcement dies with the process, force-quit ends it. If the schedule lives in memory, a restart clears it. Both need to survive.
Sleep Well covers all three, and you can try each of them yourself on the front page.
If your late nights are accidental — you looked up and it was 1am — Screen Time downtime is genuinely enough, it’s free, and it’s already on your Mac. Use that first.
If your late nights are a decision you keep making and regretting, no setting you control will hold, because you’ll unmake the decision at the worst possible hour. That’s the only case where something like Sleep Well is worth paying for.
Why nearly every blocker opens from the inside.
The physical-key model, and why handing it away is the point.