Starting with iOS 15, and watchOS 8, when I get a Reminders notification while I am in a breathing session on my watch, the session stops and just gives me credit for the time to that point. I then have to start another session to continue. Reminder notifications are not set to time sensitive. Is there a way to keep this from happening?
Adjust or turn off reminders
You can also adjust the haptics of your reminders or tap Weekly Summary to receive a notification on Monday with the previous week's Mindfulness activity.
From this page;
Thanks. This absolutely nailed it. Within the mindfulness focus template, there is an option to automatically turn this focus on when you start mindfulness on your watch. That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again for taking the time to point me in the right direction.
Thanks for the response. I appreciate it. The mindfulness reminders are not the problem. They are off. The interruptions are coming from the notifications for the Reminders app. I like to have those notifications on so that I don’t miss time sensitive reminders that I need to deal with. The settings are the same as they were before iOS 15, but before the reminders notifications would not interrupt a breathing session. Thanks again for your help.
Thanks, but this is not the issue. Let’s say I set a reminder to start the oven at 7 AM. If I am in a breathing session at 7 AM, the breathing session is interrupted. Since I use time sensitive reminders a lot, I run into this conflict regularly.
The struggle is real. I am frustrated with this too. If Im trying to meditate, the watch should ignore notifications till Im done. Something has changed in the new OS to accidentally break this I think.
While I agree it seemed more like something broke, I believe it is actually more of a shift in how they handle silencing notifications. With the new Focus modes, this can be achieved fairly quickly/easily. It can also allow you more granular control over what kind of notification CAN break your session due to it's importance. Kudos to the Redditor who cued my brain to realize the new setup.
Click into the Focus settings on your phone (not sure if you can do directly on watch, but it'll be easier on phone anyway). Tap the + button to create a new Focus. There should be a pre-configured Mindfulness one there. Fill in the required information about allowing certain people/apps to interrupt or not. The last screen should automatically prompt for an option to Automatically activate when you start a Mindfulness session. Finish up, and now when you start a Breathe session for example, it should automatically switch to this focus, allowing you to not require manually switching. Once complete and you exit the app, it turned it back off for me as well. Now peaceful mindfulness sessions can continue.
FWIW - this irritated me so much at first. And of course as you often see, all online posts tend to go toward turning off the actual notifications to start a Mindfulness session - not what you desire here to stop notifications from interrupting the sessions themselves.
Mindfulness App and Reminder App Notifications
