The Apple Watch is honestly one of the most impressive devices released in the past decade. Integrating lifestyle tracking (like Fitbit) and being able to see messages and calls at a glance is nothing short of miraculous. The watch tracks my heart rate, how much exercise I exercise, and how much I stand.
There are third-party sleep tracking apps to help users get a better idea of how well they sleep. The Apple Watch even reminds you to breathe every now and then, a push towards awareness.
That said, awareness loses its appeal when the Apple Watch reminds you to breathe at 3am while wearing the sleep tracking watch. Many of the default alerts can get annoying after a while, but it’s not always clear how to disable them.
Here’s how you can turn off the most annoying default alerts so your sleep tracking is accurate and doesn’t log a sudden awakening followed by a heart rate spike.
How to disable notifications on Apple Watch
- Start by opening the Watch app on your iPhone.
- You’ll see a number of options, starting with your watch itself at the top, your choice of watch faces below, and then a list of four tabs that you can tap – Complications, notifications, app layout and Dock.
- Faucet Notifications.
By default, there are two Watch apps that will send notifications and reminders: Activities And To breathe.
- Faucet Activities. The easiest way to disable it completely is to tap Notifications disabled on the next screen.
If you want to customize exactly the notifications you receive, you have the following options:
- Standing reminder (you get a reminder to stand up if you’ve been sitting for the first 50 minutes of an hour).
- Daily training (reminder to complete your business goals).
- Goal Completions (notifications when you reach your Move, Exercise or Stand goals for the day).
- Special challenges (notifications on the completion of special results).
- Activity sharing notifications (notifications when someone you share an activity with completes a challenge).
Each of these can be activated or deactivated individually. You can also check the grouping of activities from this screen.
Disabling Breath Reminders
- Breathe is a guided breathing and meditation app on Apple Watch. Faucet To breathe under Activities to open it.
- Again, the easiest way to turn off notifications is to simply set all notifications to Turned off. You can also choose to send them to your phone’s Notification Center.
- To change individual settings, tap Breathe in reminders. You can choose from zero to ten reminders per day.
- Under this option you will see a sliding tab for Weekly summarywhich is exactly what it sounds like: a summary version of how often you used the app in the previous week.
You can deactivate the app for just one day, control the grouping of notifications, and even change the amount of haptic feedback the watch provides.
The Breath frequency is more interesting. Through this setting, you can control how many breaths you are required to perform per minute of using the app. By default, it’s set to seven, but you can choose from four to ten.
To change the duration of your breathing session, open the app on your watch and turn the knob.
At the bottom of the screen, you can choose Use Previous durationwhich causes each new Breathing session to have the same duration as the previous session by default.
Disabling other notifications
By default, your Apple Watch will mirror notifications from your phone. From the Watch screen, scroll down and you’ll see a list of all apps that mirror these notifications. You can disable them individually until only the apps you care about are left.
The Apple Watch is a great tool for keeping track of your activity and improving your health, but you don’t want a reminder in the middle of the night to get you up and stretch. This is the opposite of sleeping better. Follow the steps above to turn off notifications or limit them to a specific time of day so that nothing interrupts your sleep.