The Medical Alarms
The Apple Watch constantly monitors your pulse using its optical heart sensor. By default, it is programmed to send aggressive, vibrating alerts if it detects your heart rate spiking abnormally high while you are resting, or dropping dangerously low for a sustained period. While intended as a life-saving medical feature, if you have a known condition, are taking specific medications that naturally lower your heart rate, or simply suffer from anxiety where these alerts cause more panic than help, the constant medical warnings are incredibly disruptive. You must disable the cardiovascular monitoring alerts.
How to Turn Off Heart Rate Notifications
You can permanently silence the cardiovascular alarm system via the Heart settings.
- Open the Settings app directly on your Apple Watch (the grey gear icon).
- Scroll down the main list and tap on Heart.
- Tap on High Heart Rate Notifications and select Off at the top of the list.
- Tap the back arrow, then tap on Low Heart Rate Notifications.
- Select Off at the top of the list.
- (Optional) Scroll down and toggle off Irregular Rhythm Notifications if you also want to disable atrial fibrillation alerts.
Silent Health Tracking
The change is instantaneous. The Apple Watch will completely terminate the background diagnostic daemon responsible for analyzing your pulse against Apple’s emergency thresholds. The watch will still quietly record your heart rate in the background and log it to the Health app on your iPhone for later review, but it will absolutely never again trigger a vibrating alarm on your wrist regarding your cardiovascular data.