Here’s How Your Apple Watch on WatchOS 6 Can Improve Your Mental Health

Written by Cheryl Tan

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We all know the importance of taking breaks for your sanity, there’s been debates and studies on how taking a mental health day off from work is necessary for stress relief. Some of us don’t have that luxury, but there are definitely small ways in which we can destress and the Apple Watch has been doing a great job with all the apps for mindfulness and reminding users to take breaks.

With the new Noise app in WatchOS 6, it’s been brought to another level. Say your colleagues all go out for lunch and you desperately need a break to yourself, you can use your Apple Watch to detect decibel levels around you and put yourself in the optimal environment for a quick meditation session with the Calm app.

Credit: Calm

Plug in your AirPods or other earphones (you can also use the speakers on the watch in a pinch, but I highly recommend using earphones), and start the Calm app. You’ll be able to select from a few meditation options, and the one I went for was the 3-minute quick calm option because of time constraints.

I started out with a resting heart rate of 83BPM and went through the 3-minute guided meditation session. There’s a soothing voice that will instruct you to breathe in and out, as well as to relax. I definitely felt lighter once the session ended (and felt that I wanted a longer session!), and my resting heart rate dropped to 79BPM.

It’s not reflected in the photo since I took it a minute after the session already ended, but if you look closely under the current heart rate section, you’ll be able to see my 79BPM heart rate.

It’s difficult to gauge exactly how useful this will be in an everyday setting as I only got to try it out for a 3-minute session, but I left feeling much better and more relaxed. For people who take the time to do this once or twice a day, possibly for a longer session, I’m quite certain that the results will be much more pronounced.

The Calm app for the Apple Watch can be downloaded here. The Noise app is available on Apple Watches running WatchOS 6.