How to meditate without your phone (using only Apple Watch)

You pick up your phone to start a ten-minute timer. There are three notifications waiting, a headline you can't ignore, and a message that “only needs a quick reply”. Twenty minutes later you still haven't sat.

For a lot of people the hardest part of meditating with an app is where the app lives. The phone is tied to nearly everything you're trying to set down for those ten minutes. The Watch gets you out of this, as long as you set it up for the job.

Why the phone gets in the way

Opening it to start a sit is often the moment the sit dies. And it doesn't stop at the start. An alarm-style chime at the end can yank you out of a quiet that took you twenty minutes to reach. Then you pick the phone up to look at your session and you're straight back in the stream.

Meditation apps haven't helped. Many now wrap the timer in prompts, upsells and pop-ups before and after, and long-time users complain about it in every app review section I've read.

Setting up a phone-free sit

First, check that your meditation app really runs on the Watch by itself. Some Watch apps are just remote controls for the phone and stop working the moment it's in another room.

Next, open Control Centre on the Watch and turn on Do Not Disturb, or a Mindfulness Focus, so calls and notifications stay silent. Add Theater mode if you don't want the screen lighting up every time your wrist shifts.

Set the bell to a tap. One haptic at the start and one at the end is plenty. If the app offers interval taps, use them sparingly or skip them.

Then put the phone somewhere else. Another room is ideal. Face down on the far side of this one is the fallback. Choose your length on the Watch, start, rest your hands and close your eyes.

When the end tap comes, stay a breath or two. Notice how you feel before you look at anything. Check the Watch after that, and the phone later still.

What the Watch still sees

Leaving the phone behind costs you less than you'd think. Apple Watch still records your heart rate through the sit and how still your hands stayed. Once it syncs, a good app turns that into a picture: how fast your heart settled, when your hands stopped adjusting, how often you moved. Add AirPods and head motion shows whether stillness slid into sleep. The Apple Watch and AirPods guide covers the rest.

Breathing and japa on the wrist

Two practices fit the Watch especially well. For paced breathing, haptic taps can guide every in-breath and out-breath, so you never need to look at a screen. For japa, repeating a mantra a set number of times, the Digital Crown can stand in for a mala. Each click is a bead, and a tap marks the end of a round of 108. I go into the practice itself in japa meditation.

How Dhyaan does it

Dhyaan's Apple Watch app runs by itself. You hold to begin on your wrist, feel the bell as a tap, and pause or end without touching a phone. Paced breathing runs on haptics and japa runs on the Digital Crown.

When you open your eyes, the reading of your sit is waiting on the phone in the other room. It can wait there as long as you like.