Anyone who updated to watchOS 3 or higher will notice a new app called Breathe on their Apple Watch. This application allows you to take more advantage of your smartwatch to monitor your breathing and learn how to reduce stress.
You must be wondering, don’t we all breathe continuously? What’s the best use of this app? Well, open the Breathe app on your Apple Watch and give it a try. Simply put, it gets you to focus on your own breathing, similar to meditation. As a result, your health can greatly benefit from it.
Another useful feature that the Breathe app provides is setting up your breathing reminder. I personally set my Breathe Reminders to happen five times a day. The occurrence numbers are optional for each individual.
Unfortunately, after getting the Apple Watch Series 3 with watchOS 4 installed, the Breathe app no longer work. Like I mentioned earlier, I depend on getting breathing reminders on my watch, but so far, I’ve only received one throughout the entire day.
How to Fix the Breathe App on your Apple Watch
If you’re not getting any breathing reminders on your Apple Watch, please follow some of the steps below.
Update to the latest watchOS
Believe it or not, I spoke to a customer support rep from Apple, and she believed that I might be having a “bad copy” of the watchOS 4 version. She recommends that I update my Apple Watch to the latest watchOS.
You can do so by:
- Open the Watch app on your iPhone
- Go to My Watch tab
- Select General > Software Update
If that doesn’t help, keep on reading.
Turn off Do Not Disturb mode
When you’re using Do Not Disturb, the mode can really crush your notifications. This could be the reason why you don’t see any reminder to breathe notifications.
To disable Do Not Disturb mode:
- Access your Watch face
- Swipe up to open the Control Center
- Tap on “Do Not Disturb” to disable the switch
You can also do this on your iPhone by opening the Apple Watch app.
Stop using the “None” option
At first, you may be annoyed by your Apple Watch for reminding you to breathe every once in awhile. That resulted in you turning the feature off.
To turn the reminder back on:
- Open the Watch app on your iPhone
- Select Breathe
- Tap Breathe Reminders
- Choose between every hour, three hours, or seven hours
As long as you don’t select None as the frequency.
I hope that helped you troubleshoot the problems with your Breathe app. Now that the Reminders feature is working again do not ignore any breathing notifications.
My problem wasn’t fixed by this, but just cleared up, for the first time since I went to WatchOS 4 (which was on the first day) after I went to Health->Mindefulness->Mindful Minutes and fiddled around with Show All Data and Data Sources & Access. I didn’t actually change anything, just fiddled around.
So that fixed the problem for you?
After months of vain attempts, it seems to have done it. I actually switched from an Apple Watch (original) to a Series 3 a few weeks after watchOS 4 came out (unrelated reasons), and the bug carried over, and it occurred to me just today that, given that, just maybe the problem involved the iPhone, and not the Watch itself; so I went poking in the iPhone end, and suddenly I started getting Breathe reminders.
I’ll feel more certain tomorrow, if it carries over, but things are looking good.
Do you remember what you did?