Opening airpods disconnects mac from hdmi/dp external monitors, why?

Opening airpods break macs displayport and hdmi connection, what is going on? This is driving me crazy, what happens is when i open my airpods, to use with my iphone the mac screen goes grey for half a second then goes back off. Monitors do the same. after that, no matter what i do it requires a restart to be functional again. My theory is that mac wakes up, goes back to sleep but has woken monitors. Somehow this confuses the graphics card in the mac intel imac with radeon pro 5700