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There’s lots to recommend about podcasts (and lots of podcasts to recommend), but one of their biggest benefits—for me, anyway—has little to do with what a particular show is about or even who hosts it: They’re great for dissociating. I often have a podcast playing to distract my anxious brain from whatever I’m worried about (which, in 2026, is usually slightly less than everything).
Any time I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts (say, when commuting or doing mindless chores), I can put on a podcast and be entertained by a couple of goobers talking about movies rather than spinning my wheels about my son’s middle school applications. And there’s no time I want to disassociate from reality more than bedtime.
For years I’ve used podcasts as a non-pharmaceutical sleep aid, and few things are more effective at helping me drop off quickly. Unfortunately, for years this also meant that once I fell asleep, the podcast kept playing. I have my podcast app set to delete episodes once finished, so if it was a show I cared about, I’d need to do a lot of redownloading and scrubbing through to find where I left off—that is, until I upgraded my earbuds to the AirPods Pro 3.
The AirPods Pro 3 “Pause Media When Falling Asleep” setting is a game-changer
The AirPods Pro 3 launched alongside iOS 26 in the fall of 2025 with flashy features like vastly improved noise cancellation, Live Translation, Heart Rate Sensing, and hearing health settings, all of them quite welcome on a set of $250 premium earbuds. But the best new AirPods feature was one I didn’t even know about when I decided to upgrade my four-year-old Beats Fit Pro.
In the AirPods settings (accessible via your iPhone’s Settings app), if you tap Audio & Routing and scroll down, you’ll see an option to turn on a setting called Pause Media When Falling Asleep. I don’t think I need to tell you what this setting does. I can tell you that it works great.
According to Apple, the feature works by sensing when you’re drifting off using the earbuds’ built-in accelerometer to track your movement (or lack thereof). Once your earbuds have determined that you’re falling asleep, they will pause your audio for you. And it isn’t just the 2025 AirPods Pro 3 that support it—it also works on the second-generation AirPods Pro as well as the AirPods 4 and the AirPods 5.
No need for dedicated sleep earbuds
I’ll admit that I don’t really understand how the AirPods Pro 3 can tell I’m falling asleep versus just lying very still, but I’ve never had them pause accidentally during active listening. Conversely, whenever I go back to the podcast I was listening to the night before, I’ll find that the audio paused within a minute or two of the last part I remember hearing.
The AirPods Pro 3 aren’t the only earbuds with a feature like this, but you’ll most often only find it in dedicated “sleep earbuds” designed specifically for the purpose. While many of those offer extra health features like the ability to track your sleep cycles, I’m not really interested in that (my Apple Watch does most of it, and I don’t look at that data anyway). Pausing my audio when I’m asleep is really all I need, and the AirPods Pro 3 do it well enough that I don’t need to bother with a pair of dedicated bedtime buds.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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