Why won't my MacBook Pro go to sleep?

furthark wrote:

I have a 2023, 16" MacBook Pro with Sequoia 15.5 installed. Currently it's on batter power and connected to an external monitor. At night it has my Apple Watch connected.

The problem I'm having it that it won't go to sleep either automatically or manually. If I select sleep from the apple menu, the monitors (laptop and external) and pop right back on. If I close the laptop the external monitor will stay on. If I leave it alone, either with the laptop open or closed, it will never go to sleep and the monitors stay running all night long.

I've looked through the system settings and the documentation. Of note, the documentation describes the settings that I'm familiar with but they don't appear to available any longer. Is this a documentation bug?

Also note, I do have "Prevent automatic sleeping on power adaptor when the display is off" turned off.

Any help is appreciated. I do not want my computer to run all the time.

A SafeBoot Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support will sort many anomalies

Reboot as normal and test. Caches get rebuilt automatically.