At yesterday’s WWDC keynote, Apple introduced the new version of watchOS. The new operating system, called watchOS 7, brings a few new features and improvements. However, the biggest feature is probably the natural sleep detection on the Apple Watch. Our Apple Watch is loaded with the developer beta of watchOS 7, so if you’re wondering how to enable sleep detection in watchOS 7, we can help.
Enable Sleep Detection on Apple Watch
Enabling sleep detection on Apple Watch is pretty easy. However, I will mention all the steps with screenshots so that you can follow them smoothly.
Note: I use Apple Watch Series 5 for this. However, this feature is also available on Apple Watch Series 3 and Apple Watch Series 4.
- Press the digital crown to go to the application screen. Find the new ‘Sleep’ app here and tap on it.
- Tap ‘Next’ and then Decide on your sleep goal. By default, the Apple Watch suggests 8 hours of sleep, which sounds right. You can set this goal according to your preferences but I’ll leave it at 8 hours. Just tap ‘Next’.
- Tap on ‘Active On’ Personally, I would set this to ‘Everyday’.
- Now choose the time you want to wake up. I usually wake up around 9am so I’m setting it up here.
- You can enable or disable the alarm according to your preference. If you only want one alarm to sound, tap ‘Sound’ and select ‘None’ at the bottom of the list.
- Set your sleep time. It’s up to you, but if you set a sleep timer that gives you fewer hours of sleep than your sleep goal, Apple Watch will warn you about it.
- When done, tap ‘Next’.
That’s it, your sleep schedule is set. If you set a schedule for weekdays only, you can create a second schedule for weekends as well. This is great if you like to sleep in on the weekends and don’t want your clock to wake you up early in the morning.
- Your watch will then ask you to enable ‘Sleep Watch’. Just tap ‘Enable’. You can also skip this if you want, but in this case your watch will not track your sleep.
- You can also choose to enable or bypass Sleep Mode on Apple Watch and iPhone. Personally, I want to use this feature, so I enable it.
- You can then set a Deceleration time if you wish. This turns on DND on your Watch and iPhone.
If you later want to change any of these settings, you can do so without any problems. So don’t worry too much about setting up sleep tracking perfectly on your first try. Play around with the settings until you get the perfect mix of options that work best for you.
that’s it. You have successfully installed sleep monitoring on watchOS 7. If you don’t want to install the developer beta on your watch, you can wait until July when Apple releases the public beta. This will be more stable than this version so you can install it without much worry. Anyway, have you used any third-party apps to track your sleep, or did you wait for Apple to bring sleep tracking to the Apple Watch? I know I’m not, but let me know in the comments.
