You’re probably familiar with your iPhone’s Do Not Disturb feature. The Focus mode feature works like a more customizable version of Do Not Disturb. In fact, Do Not Disturb is actually one of the Focus modes you can choose from.
The various Focus modes take the basic idea of Do Not Disturb—shutting off notifications on your phone—and build on it. You get the option to set different settings for a variety of scenarios: Driving, exercising, working, or whatever you want.
You might not want any interruptions at the gym, for example. At the office, you might only let Slack and Outlook ping you. While you’re driving, only your family can contact you. The feature reflects the different stages of each day.
And that brings us to Sleep Focus: A particular mode designed for nighttime, with a few extras attached: Not only can you set who is allowed to contact you and who isn’t, you can also use it to build up a healthier, more regular sleep pattern.
Set up Sleep Focus
You can have multiple Sleep Focus modes on your iPhone: You might have one for weekdays, one for weekends, and one for when you’re on vacation, for example. Head to Settings on your iPhone, then tap Focus and Sleep. If you don’t see Sleep listed, tap + (the plus icon, top right), then Sleep and Customize Focus.
Next, you can set the rules for this mode, as you can for any other Focus mode. Tap People, and you can select specific contacts who are allowed to get in touch with you while the Sleep Focus mode is active, and specific contacts who aren’t. Select Apps, and you can do the same for apps (remember many apps will have their own notification rule settings you can configure as well).
Further down is an Options menu: From here you’re able to customize how silenced notifications are handled—those are the alerts that aren’t allowed to distract you, based on the People and Apps settings. You can choose hide notification badges, for example, and hide these notifications from the lock screen.
Additional customizations can be added by tapping Choose under the Lock Screen or Home Screen thumbnails—your iPhone can then switch to a specific lock screen or home screen when Sleep Focus is active (maybe one with fewer distractions). There’s another Options menu here, which lets you enable a special Sleep Screen lock screen: A simplified version of your current lock screen that hides the wallpaper.
The last bit of customization on offer is the Add Filter button. Tap this and you can tell certain apps and system settings how to behave when Sleep Focus is enabled: So you can always switch to a more limited tab group in Safari, for example, or always have dark mode turn itself on at the same time.
Set a sleep schedule
You can also set a sleep schedule to go alongside your Sleep Focus mode, if you want: This means Sleep Focus kicks in automatically at certain times of the day, saving you having to enable it manually (though you can do that too), and hopefully ensuring you get to bed at a consistent time each night.
This sleep schedule will be displayed on the Sleep Focus setup page, but you actually need to head over to the Health app to configure it. In the Health app, tap Browse > Sleep > Sleep Schedule, then turn on the toggle switch. You’ll then get another toggle switch that sets whether or not your Sleep Focus mode and sleep schedule work in tandem.
With the feature enabled, you can customize it: Tap Add Schedule to create a new schedule, or Edit to change an existing one. This is where you can set your phone up to work differently on different days of the week. Each schedule can have different times for getting to bed and getting up, and you have the option to set an accompanying alarm on your phone for each schedule.
Further down the screen you can set up prompts, reminders, and tracking for your sleep schedule—essentially telling iOS (and your connected Apple Watch, if you have one), how much help you’d like to stick to the schedule. You can choose to set a sleep goal for each night, for instance, which the Health app will keep track of.
If you link Sleep Focus with your sleep schedule, then it’ll turn on automatically. If you ever need to to turn Sleep Focus on or off manually, swipe down from the top right of the screen to access Control Center, then tap Focus and Sleep (tap the three dots next to Sleep then Settings if you want to customize it first).
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