Turning off Sleep Focus no longer turns off alarm on my Apple Watch

5/21/25:

Today I was going to test if handling my phone & moving about would trigger the phone to offer turning the alarm off. I picked up my phone off the bedside table, unplugged it, and used it continuously for 5 minutes or so. It never said “It looks like you’re awake, etc.” At 7:01 (still in bed) I happened to launch a meditation app I use, which (I had forgotten) is set to trigger a “Meditation Focus.” At that point I got the pop-up from the phone to turn off the Sleep Focus, which I did, and that created the blue “Good Morning” screen on the Watch.

I was thinking maybe a workaround is to pull up the Watch’s Control Panel and tap the focus button to change the focus, but looks like the first tap just turns off the current focus, so I’d have to tap it again to see if it would then trigger the phone to realize that I’m no longer sleeping. I might try that, or I might just try to retrain myself to turn off the focus on the phone.

5/22/25:

Today I decided to try bringing up the Watch’s Control Panel and switching off the Sleep Focus but then immediately turning on some other focus. I tried that and again it did it not turn off the alarm, which still went off at 8:00am.

I had awakened around 3:45 and had a bout of insomnia that lasted over 90 minutes. I eventually fell back to sleep until I was awakened by my (external, non-iPhone) alarm at 6:55. That’s when I tried to change Focus on my Watch. When I checked the Health app on my phone I noticed it showed no sleep after 3:45am even though I know I had slept more. It stayed that way until the iPhone/Watch alarm went off at 8:00am and then I got the blue “Good Morning” screen on my Watch. At that point the Health app started showing one of those fuzzy blue bands you sometimes get when you take a nap, which stopped at 6:55am. Which seems weird: even though a little over an hour had passed and I had been up & moving around, some kind of sleep tracking was still going on, apparently, or at least it wasn’t ready to report the end of my sleep, until the Sleep Schedule 8:00 alarm went off.

I’ve about run out of ideas to try to get the Watch to behave the way it used to, allowing me to turn off Sleep Focus & the Sleep Schedule alarm using the Watch’s Control Panel.

I had given up trying to solve the problem, and turning sleep focus off on the iPhone seemed to be the workaround. It's been working as expected since 5/22/25.

However, today I did that (at 7:33am) and it did NOT prompt me to turn off the alarm (which went off at 8:00am, and generated the blue “Good Morning” screen on the watch). Curious.

👍🏻

Thanks for the tip. I just checked what you suggested and everything was enabled on that page. However, I found another settings page that might be involved. See today's report for that.

😁 I sometimes suspect that I'm a little OCD. And I used to work in tech support for many years (long ago), and my attitude is that I hate to let the computers win.

This is definitely one I can live with. I'm just curious as to why the behavior changed without warning.

Thanks :-)