Can you meditate with AirPods in? Yes, and here’s what they notice

Plenty of meditation teachers would raise an eyebrow at earbuds on the cushion. I understand the instinct. But if you live above a busy road, or share a wall with a neighbour who loves his television, a pair of AirPods with nothing playing can decide whether you sit today or give up.

And there's a second reason to wear them that has nothing to do with sound, which I'll come to.

Should you wear AirPods to meditate?

The obvious case is quiet. Active noise cancellation takes the edge off traffic, the fridge, the next flat. You can also play a bell to start and end, or a low drone, without bothering anyone else in the room.

The case against: some traditions use the sounds of the room as the thing you meditate on. If that's your practice, switch to transparency mode or leave them in the case.

Noise cancellation or transparency?

Go with noise cancellation if outside noise keeps dragging you away, or if you're still learning to settle at all. Go with transparency, or Adaptive mode, if you practise open awareness or sound meditation, or if you need to hear a child or the doorbell.

Neither is more correct. What matters is deciding before you sit, so you aren't reaching up to fiddle with a stem five minutes in.

Staying comfortable on longer sits

Pick the ear tip that seals without pressing. On AirPods Pro, the fit test in Settings will tell you. Charge them first, too. Head tracking and noise cancellation running together drain the battery faster than music does.

Some ears get sore after half an hour or so. If yours do, take the AirPods out for long sits and let the Watch work alone.

What AirPods notice while you sit

Here's the second reason. AirPods that support spatial audio with dynamic head tracking contain motion sensors, and Apple lets apps read them, with your permission, through an interface called CMHeadphoneMotionManager. That covers AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and AirPods (3rd generation) and later. The app gets a running stream of how your head is oriented and how it moves.

Watch that stream during a sit and you can see when you arrived. The first minutes are full of small searching movements: adjusting, turning toward a sound, settling. When they stop, you've usually landed.

You can see roughly when you came back, too. A shift of the head in the middle of a sit often travels with a shift of attention, since people whose minds wander more also fidget more.

Most usefully, you can see when stillness turned into sleep. A watch can't do this. When you nod off your hands stay perfectly still, but your head sinks forward slowly and then jerks back. In head motion that shape is easy to spot, and it's what separates a calm, alert sit from a drowsy one (more in falling asleep during meditation).

Once in a while, if you're very still, the tiny lift of each breath shows up in head movement as well. It's faint and easily drowned out, so treat it as a bonus when it appears.

Where AirPods go quiet

A still head proves nothing about a focused mind. You can sit motionless while planning dinner. Head motion is a mirror for the body and a decent clue about attention, and that's as far as it goes. Read it next to your own sense of the sit, and only against your own earlier sits, as I explain in how to measure meditation.

Privacy

Head motion sits behind the Motion & Fitness permission, and iOS asks the first time an app wants it. Raw motion during a sit is detailed data, so find out whether an app keeps it on your phone. Dhyaan turns head motion into a few per-second features on your device and throws the raw stream away. Nothing goes to a server.

How Dhyaan uses AirPods

In Dhyaan the AirPods are the head half of the reading, and the Watch is the hands and heart. The AirPods report whether your head settled, how often it moved, and whether a still patch was really a slow nod. When the bell taps you say how the sit felt first, and only then see what they noticed.

It's in beta soon. Join the waitlist and bring your noisiest room.