Sleep mode focus problem on WatchOS 8

Tried all of these but nothing helped. And then I figured out that after installation watch OS 8 somehow mirroring of sleep mode was turned off. So if you’re “lucky” like me, you need to go to general settings on your Watch, then Focus, then turn on “mirror sleep mode”

Hi there tzubairi,

Welcome to Apple Support Communities. We understand you have some concerns with your Apple Watch display staying bright even with Focus for sleep on. Let's walk through a few steps that should help. For your Sleep settings on your watch, do you have Winding Down setup?

Track your sleep with Apple Watch

"To reduce distractions before your scheduled bedtime, sleep mode turns on during Wind Down. Sleep mode turns off the watch display and turns on Do Not Disturb."

Yes, you will want to set up bedtime schedules so you can also use Winding Down which should help auto-dim your display when you are set for sleep.

Take care.

None of these solved my problem until I figured out that I needed to "create the sleep focus". Once I did that I was able to turn it on... silly me, I should have known better.

I had the same issue last night, and couldn’t even open settings (it just kept showing the loading indicator) and toggling sleep or do-not-disturb mode did nothing. Restarting the watch fixed it. However, I found it didn’t track any sleep either before or after the restart.

i have been using the sleep focus religiously since that function was introduced and it worked beautifully. All I had to do was set the focus on my phone and all of my devices would switch to that focus. Tonight, I can’t get it to work on my watch to save my life. I’ve tried everything suggested above and so far nothing.

Apple, please solve this! I can’t use it to track my sleep if it keeps me awake all night! Why did it just start tonight‽‽

Same here too… it was working perfectly well and not,9 times out of 10, watch goes to sleep mode as expected, but screen stays on… for now I manually switch on the theater mode, which does the trick, but still frustrating that the feature is broken :(

For some reason I don’t see a separate “Sleep” setting inside the settings, and can’t find any of the following settings you write about

My settings are already set as you suggested and I still have the same issue. I have to turn on theater mode now to get my display to turn off during Sleep Focus.

It’s the same for me too. I reset the watch and that worked, but it’s just started staying lit all the time again. Grrrrr

But what do I do if my sleeping schedule is extremely inconsistent. Most often when the scheduled wind down turns on, I miss important notifications and hate it. I loved the opportunity to turn on the sleeping mode from the watch itself. The system is so messed up and confusing now.

if I turn on the sleep focus from the phone, the watch doesn’t act like it is I’m the sleep mode, just like Do not disturb. The screen is not dimming and blinds me during the night with accidental touches.

if I turn on the sleep focus from the watch, it works as expected, the screen dims and I have no issues. However, when I turn off this sleep focus from my phone, the watch stays in the sleep mode and I have to manually scroll rhe Digital Crown, go to settings, turn it back on and off after that.

Extremely unintuitive and useless

Worked perfectly on my AW 6, just switched to AW 7 last week and sleep focuse is broken. I checked all the settings, everything is as described above. I have sleep schedule set up, it used to dim my screen and prevented it from unlocking the screen by requiring me to scroll the digital crown. On AW 7 at night screen is as bright as thousands of stars, and no Digital Crown spin requirement to unlock screen. Fix this! Keeps waking me up at night

Soosie_J215: your response does not answer the question in any way.

In the meantime I have the same problem as tzubairi and tbolshev and I would appreciate the assistance.

Thank you tzubairi, it resoled this problem for me too :)