Apple’s new iOS 17 and watchOS 10 introduce numerous initiatives that are aimed at providing mental health support and promoting emotional wellness.
One of the salient features of this new offering is the ability to enter your State of Mind into your iPhone or Apple Watch. Essentially, your iPhone and Apple Watch can be set up to send you reminders during the day to enter “how you are feeling” or mood details.
Users can access reports showing their mood details using the new Mental Wellbeing section on their iPhone’s Health app.
When you are setting up the State of Mind section, you are prompted to set up the associated ‘reminder’ functionality.
This influences how often you get the automatic reminders on your iPhone or Watch to enter your mood details and answer the optional mental health assessment questions.
You can customize these mental well-being reminders to your preferences.
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How to disable the Mental Wellbeing Reminders to enter mood on your iPhone
If you manage your mental well-being using other ways or established third-party apps on your iPhone, you can disable the iOS 17 offering easily with these quick steps:
- Open the Health App on your iPhone and navigate to the Browse tab at the bottom.
- Tap on Mental Wellbeing.
- Next, tap on State of Mind.
- Scroll to the bottom of the screen and tap on Options.
- Disable the two State of Mind Reminders here (During the Day & End of Day.)
Can I customize these reminders to my preference instead of totally disabling them?
Yes. You absolutely can.
The new Mental Wellbeing section provides you with flexibility.
Instead of the system deciding when to prompt you to enter your mood or emotions, you can disable both ‘During Your Day’ and ‘End of Day’ completely and instead set up a conducive time.
To set this up:
- From the Health app on your iPhone.
- Navigate to Mental Wellbeing > State of Mind.
- Scroll to the bottom and tap on Options.
- Disable both ‘During Your Day’ and ‘End of Day’ here.
- Tap on ‘Add Reminders..’
- Choose the time that is most conducive for you to log your mood or emotion and tap on Add.
How to Disable Mood / Emotion log entry reminders on Your Apple Watch
You can access how the Mental Wellbeing features will work on your Apple Watch in two ways. The first is directly on your Apple Watch.
- Open the Settings app on your Apple Watch.
- Tap on Mindfulness.
- Disable Start of Day and End of Day under Reminders or customize according to your choice.
- Optionally customize the time of the day by tapping on Add Reminder.
The second way you can access these settings for Apple Watch is directly on the Health app on your iPhone.
- Navigate to Mental Wellbeing section on the Health app.
- Tap on State Of Mind.
- Scroll to the bottom of the screen and tap on Options.
- Tap on ‘Manage Mindfulness in the Apple Watch app.‘
This takes you to the mindfulness settings section in the Watch app on your iPhone. Here, you can set up the various attributes for this feature.
How to Customize the Mental Health Questionnaires Offering on your iPhone
This section also allows you to customize your preferences for the mental health questionnaires. You can receive prompts to take the mental health quizzes several times a year. 
Additionally, users who plan on using the iOS 17+’s Mental Wellbeing function can choose to set up the ‘Unpleasant Logging’ feature.
This feature prompts you to take the mental health questionnaires automatically if it notices a pattern from your mental log entries.
It will be important to see how Apple links this section to the new Journal app that is coming later to iPhone users via iOS 17+. Please take a look at the new Health features coming to your iPhone this year.
