Apple Watch Mindfulness

This past Christmas Pam got me an Apple Watch. I didn’t ask for it but she knew I would like it, and I do. It is especially helpful when you’re on a run, what with all of its health monitoring capabilities. The thing keeps track of my heart rate, blood pressure, pace, elevation change and even maps out my run for me. Pretty cool. But, the minute I strapped this baby on Christmas morning I immediately became aware that the people who are responsible for conceiving and building this devise…aren’t like you and me. I knew in an instant that these men and women probably all live in California, drive Teslas, and enjoy hot yoga. Not there’s anything wrong with that.

Every morning I get this message on my watch:

When you hit that open mindfulness button, you are instructed to reflect. Just in case you aren’t clear on what exactly you should reflect upon, it gives you this helpful hint:

After this reflection thing, you are then asked to concentrate on breathing, which sounds easy enough, but in the event that you’re the kind of person who doesn’t generally give breathing a whole lot of thought, these handy tips are helpful:

Again, absolutely nothing wrong with any of this stuff, it’s just that I’ve never been the type of guy who feels comfortable with anything that requires such blatant self-consciousness, not to mention the fact that softly touching my heart while breathing would bring back some rather horrible memories from a health scare I endured 20 years ago!

So every morning when all these self reflection prompts pop up on my Apple Watch, I hit the clear all button and get on with my day. For me, I don’t need a mindful moment to “decide how I want to be today”. Every day when I wake up, I want to be a good person, maybe slightly better than I was the day before. This was drilled into my head by my father, a man who believed that most of the horror and sinfulness in the world was a result of people far too obsessed with themselves and not nearly concerned about their neighbor. He would say that we should probably seek something more grand, more noble, more majestic to reflect upon than ourselves. Even the term, self-reflection, would for him be suspicious. But, he was a man born in a different time. A man who came of age in the Depression and spent his 19th birthday in a jungle in the New Hebrides Islands. Mindfulness would have been a foreign concept.

Here’s my question though, aimed at my tech-savvy readers. Is there a way to turn off these daily notifications?  That might be helpful.