The Apple Watch is heavily focused on health and wellness. One of its signature mindfulness features is the “Breathe” app (now integrated into the Mindfulness app in newer watchOS versions). Throughout the day, your watch will occasionally tap your wrist and display a notification encouraging you to take a minute to perform deep, guided breathing exercises. While this can be a helpful way to reduce stress, it can also be incredibly annoying if it interrupts a busy workflow, a meeting, or if you simply have no interest in guided meditation. Fortunately, you can completely silence these reminders.
How to Disable Breathe Reminders
The easiest way to configure this setting is using the Watch app on your paired iPhone.
- Open the Watch app on your iPhone.
- Ensure you are on the My Watch tab at the bottom left of the screen.
- Scroll down through the list of installed applications and tap on Mindfulness (or Breathe if you are running an older version of watchOS).
- At the top of this menu, you will see the “Notifications” section.
- Tap on Notifications Off.
Alternative: Reducing the Frequency
If you don’t want to completely disable the feature, but simply find it too aggressive, you can adjust how often it bothers you.
Instead of turning notifications off, look for the option labelled Reminders. You can change the frequency from the default (which is usually a couple of times a day) down to just one notification per day, or tie it to the start and end of your day. By turning notifications off completely, however, the app will never interrupt you, though you can still open the Mindfulness app manually anytime you wish.