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- Your AirPods can detect when you’ve fallen asleep and pause your media.
- AirPods use an accelerometer, not a heart rate sensor, to detect when you’ve fallen asleep.
- This feature requires a pair of AirPods Pro 2, Pro 3, or AirPods 4, and iOS 26.
If you’re like me, the one place you can sleep straight is on an airplane, but to do that you’ll need a pair of noise-canceling headphones. Most of the time, I will fall asleep during a “Real Housewives” scene and wake up two episodes later.
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There’s a feature in your iPhone’s Settings that can enable some AirPods to pause your audio content when they detect you’ve fallen asleep. Here’s how to turn it on and how it worked when I tried it.
What is AirPods sleep detection?
In the iOS 26 software update, Apple implemented a new sleep detection feature for AirPods. This feature is disabled by default, so you’ll need to access your iPhone Settings to enable it. If you do this, place your AirPods Pro 2, Pro 3, or AirPods 4 in your ears and play media. Your AirPods can detect when you’ve fallen asleep and respond by pausing the media.
Once your AirPods are connected to your iPhone, open your phone’s Settings, tap your AirPods’ settings, and scroll down to “Pause media while sleeping.”
How does this work?
I’ve only tried the sleep detection feature with the AirPods Pro 3. Every time I wore my AirPods while flying, I connected them to my MacBook and played my TV show. This feature worked every time, the MacBook went to sleep as soon as I woke up, but my show was paused a few minutes after I went to sleep.
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Since the AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 2 lack in-ear heart rate monitoring and are not compatible with this feature, it’s likely that the AirPods use their internal accelerometer instead of your heart rate to detect sleep. These accelerometers are the same sensors responsible for wear detection, a feature that pauses your media when you remove an earbud from one ear.
The Apple Watch also uses its accelerometer to detect when you’ve fallen asleep, depending on the lack of activity.
However, unlike the Apple Watch, the AirPods Pro 3 don’t passively track your heart rate, so when you fall asleep wearing the AirPods Pro 3 without the Apple Watch, there’s no heart rate data for sleep in your iPhone’s Health app. To track your heart rate with the Pro 3 earbuds, you need to start a workout in the Fitness app.
