Buzz
My bedroom is often shared with one or more people, and sometimes even children who wander in during the night. This makes me feel like I possess a unique ability when I wake up and silence my alarm just moments before it sounds. It’s not magic—it’s the silent alarm feature on my Apple Watch.
The silent alarm ensures I’m up for my early morning exercise sessions, and its sleep tracking capability allows me to monitor whether I’m hitting my bedtime goals. While nightly tracking isn’t essential, devices like the Apple Watch or Fitbit provide automatic insights into whether you’re consistently achieving sufficient rest.
Another benefit of wearing a heart rate-monitoring tracker to bed is the ability to measure your true resting heart rate. This rate is at its lowest when you’re completely at rest—lying still in bed for several minutes, not moving or engaging in any activity. (It’s also challenging to measure accurately if an alarm startles you awake first thing in the morning.)
Understanding your resting heart rate isn’t a must, but it’s a valuable metric. As you improve your fitness through exercise, your resting heart rate tends to drop. Conversely, stress from medical issues or overtraining can cause it to rise slightly.
To enjoy the advantages of sleep tracking and silent alarms, you’ll need to configure a few settings beforehand.
Charge Your Watch During Your Shower
The first challenge is finding time to charge your Apple Watch. Unlike Fitbit devices, which can last up to seven days on a single charge, Apple estimates that the Watch’s battery will last around 18 hours with typical use—checking the time 90 times, receiving 90 notifications (which is excessive), and working out for an hour while streaming music. A full charge takes two hours, but you can reach 80% in just 90 minutes.
The optimal charging routine involves two sessions daily—morning and evening. I place my charger in the bathroom and charge my watch while I shower, right after my morning exercise. It stays there while I get ready, prepare my kids’ lunches, and handle other morning tasks. I put it back on before leaving the house and repeat the process in the evening. Forty to 60 minutes twice a day ensures you’re always powered up.
Enable Theater Mode on Your Watch While Sleeping
The Apple Watch prides itself on being clever. It activates when you glance at your wrist, which is convenient but can illuminate the room if you move in the dark. Luckily, there’s a simple setting to prevent this.
Swipe up from the bottom of the watch to access the control center, where you’ll find a button with small happy and sad mask icons. This activates Theater Mode, keeping the screen dark unless you tap it or press a button. Notifications are muted, but alarms will still vibrate as scheduled.
Disable Cover to Mute
Another potential issue is the “Cover to Mute” feature, which lets you silence notifications by covering the watch face. This can also unintentionally turn off your alarm if it vibrates to wake you up.
To adjust this, open the Apple Watch app and navigate to the Sounds & Haptics settings menu, where you’ll find the Cover to Mute option.
Select a Reliable Sleep App
I prefer Sleep Watch, which automatically monitors your sleep and provides useful statistics each morning. It also asks how rested you felt upon waking, offering a more subjective yet valuable measure of sleep quality than purely electronic data.
For alarms, I rely on the Watch’s built-in alarm functionality.
Sleep++ and Pillow offer more straightforward metrics, focusing on sleep duration (useful) and “sleep quality,” which can be inconsistent across apps. Pillow includes a “Smart Wake Up” feature, aiming to rouse you during your lightest sleep phase within a 30-minute window (or a customizable 15 to 60 minutes). Note that other alarms won’t function while Pillow is active, so choose wisely.
If you’re already using Sleep Cycle on your phone, it’s compatible with the Watch, though it still requires your phone to be nearby, listening via its microphone. (The Watch integration adds heart rate monitoring, but this feature requires a premium subscription.)
