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I started using an Apple Watch to assist in a CBTI effort1 to slightly increase and regularize my sleeping hours.

My first impression is very positive and I'm finding various reminders (related to sleep and exercise) quite helpful. However a few times I've been woken at odd hours in the early morning by the "Time to stand!" message.

It's not a big deal and I easily fall asleep or decide to stay awake if it's close enough to 06:00 the time I've set as my goal, but I'm still curious if there's some adjustment to the software's settings or things in my behavior or environment that can be adjusted to reduce this.

I'm assuming that if the software is telling me to stand, it means that it calculates that I'm awake when I'm actually sleeping. Certainly there will always be some noise in this calculation, but perhaps I can change something to reduce this noise?

Question: What (if anything) can I do to stop my Apple Watch from waking me up to say "Time to stand!"?

On my watch under >Focus I see both >Do Not Disturb and >Sleep options, which I think means that I can prevent the phone from issuing the messages during certain times, but I'm wondering if there are other ways I can prevent this, perhaps by enhancing the watch's ability to know when I may be asleep in the first place.

I keep my watch and phone linked via Bluetooth most of the time, so if there were for example some way that my phone's light sensor (that it uses for screen brightness) could tell my watch "Shhh... sleeping" via Bluetooth that would work nicely in my case.

  • iPhone SE II (v15.3.1)
  • Apple Watch S7 (v8.1)

1from the link:

People with insomnia should evaluate or have their sleep patterns evaluated and take into account all possible factors that may be affecting the person's ability to sleep. This would involve keeping a sleep diary/journal for a couple of weeks. The journal will help to identify patterns of thoughts or behaviors, stressors, etc. that could be contributing to the person's insomnia.

I snapped a photo of my watch waking me up and telling me to stand at 02:51 by fumbling for my phone in a dark room:

I snapped a photo of my watch waking me up and telling me to stand at 02:51 by fumbling for my phone in a dark room

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Apples primary solution to this is to use the "Sleep" focus.

The Apple Watch has a full Sleep tracking feature that is detailed here: https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/sleep-apd830528336/watchos

You can set up the following:

  • A sleep goal (how many hours of sleep you want to get)
  • What time you want to go to bed and wake up
  • An alarm sound to wake you up
  • When to turn on the Sleep Focus, which limits distractions before you go to bed and protects your sleep after you’re in bed
  • Sleep tracking, which uses your motion to detect sleep when you wear Apple Watch to bed and the Sleep Focus is active

These last two bullet points being the solution you are after probably.

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There is a simple straightforward setting for disabling this:

  1. Open up the Watch app on your iPhone.
  2. Scroll down and select Activity.
  3. Switch off the “Stand Reminders” toggle.
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  • Yes I suspected there would be. This is certainly a brute-force way to address the messaging but not the underlying problem of (presumably) the AI thinking that I must be awake when I'm actually asleep. "...but I'm wondering if there are other ways I can prevent this, perhaps by enhancing the watch's ability to know when I may be asleep in the first place.", since that may also improve the accuracy of the AI's reporting of my sleeping hours. But I will certainly keep this in mind as a last resort.
    – uhoh
    Mar 19, 2022 at 1:39

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