Excessive stress alerts on your Galaxy Watch stressing you out? You're not alone

One UI 8 Watch is one of the biggest updates Samsung has released for its smartwatches, but it looks like a notable issue may have slipped through during development.

As spotted by Android Authority, some Galaxy Watch owners using models such as the Galaxy Watch 7, Galaxy Watch 8, and Galaxy Watch Ultra are reporting that their devices are showing unusually high stress notifications, even when they’re not actually feeling stressed.

Samsung smartwatches track metrics like heart rate, heart rate variability, and daily activity to estimate stress levels. When the watch detects high stress for an extended period, it sends an alert to the user. Of course, not feeling stressed doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t. But in this case, users say the number of stress alerts has gone up significantly after installing the One UI 8 Watch update.

It’s unclear what’s behind the sudden increase. It’s possible Samsung tweaked the stress detection algorithm in One UI 8 Watch to make it more sensitive or better at detecting subtle signs of stress that the previous version might have missed.

Interestingly, this issue follows another one where some users reported their sleep scores being unusually high all the time, suggesting that health tracking on Galaxy Watches may be acting up on both ends of the spectrum right now.

While some of us at SamMobile experienced the sleep score bug, the stress detection issue seems to have missed us so far. Still, given how widespread user reports are becoming, it’s likely that Samsung will take note and address the problem in a future update.

Until then, if the stress notifications are stressing you out (no pun intended), you can turn them off and/or disable automatic stress management. Follow the steps below to do that: