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Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
- Cerium 7y agoI regularly wake up about 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm goes off. I think it has a lot to do with light levels. I tend to set my alarm to go off about 7:00 in the winter and earlier in the summer, so there is some light outside to wake up to.
- iamatworknow 7y agoI'm also one to wake up 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm, but my alarm often varies. Some days it's 5:30 AM. Others it's 8 AM. So the ambient light level theory is out for me. But probably 6/7 days per week I find myself waking up a few minutes before it goes off.
- XCSme 7y agoI also wake up sometimes 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm goes off and it's pitch black in my room, so probably by "internal clock" knows the time.
- paxpelus 7y agoI almost never use an alarm to wake up. Whenever I use an alarm I wake up 5-10 minutes earlier and I wonder if the alarm went off or not. I consider this some kind of anxiety because usually I use an alarm to e.g. catch a flight
- sharkmerry 7y ago>> A couple of days ago I lay in bed thinking “the alarm is just about to go off” and then a second later it did go off and I thought “how come I woke up just before the alarm went off?” What is the alarm like? A beep every 10 seconds? I dont follow how a consistent sounds would not be recognized. This seems to posit. Alarm is recognized by the brain, he then has enough time to have a conscious thought but then the ears arent passing the signal they've already received, (which triggered the wake up), to the brain to "hear" it? Does this happen to anyone else? I've never heard of it before
- gowld 7y agoIt's more that the conscious brain incorrectly orders events when building memory. Deja Vu is a common phenomenon of falsely feeling a memory of something that was just learned.
- downerending 7y agoI discovered at an early age that I could "will" myself to wake up at a desired time. It's certainly not perfect, but my accuracy is way better than chance. Living things have all sorts of biological clocks, so this isn't really magic. Rather, it might be a bit surprising that we have some conscious control over it.
- UI_at_80x24 7y agoI can do this too. Like you it doesn't work all the time, but far better then coincidence would allow. For fun I try variations: I will wake up in 6hrs. vs I will wake up at 7 o'clock. vs I will wake up 10 minutes before my alarm. ...or whatever my target is.
- krick 7y agoYeah, I'm pretty much sure OP is unnecessarily complicating things. It I am getting up like 5 minutes before the alarm every time I know I really need to get up at that specific time (because I know something more important than just dragging my ass to the fucking office needs to happen this time), well, that means I somehow know subconsciously really well what's the time is. Because either I'm living in my sleep ever since, or I actually got up, turned off the alarm clock so it won't bother me, got dressed and went on with my day. Not just lied there fooling myself I'm awake before I actually got awake.
- Dylan16807 7y agoYeah but 5 minutes is much much easier than 3 seconds.
- Talanes 7y agoBut even if your brain is measuring time operating at a precision of "around five minutes before," the variance will sometimes cause that to be 3 seconds before.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
- md_ 7y agoThe famous experiments from Benjamin Libet seem relevant here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_of_Libet's_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_of.... In particular, see Daniel Dennett's response (the relevant aspects of which are quoted on the Wikipedia article linked above). I will say, I don't think this is a terribly interesting _example_; as others have noted, it's not uncommon to actually wake up minutes before the alarm goes off. (I commonly wake up 20 or 30 minutes before my alarm goes off; I can be reasonably sure my subjective experience is accurate because I look at the clock!) But what the author hits upon (apparently naively, but it's nonetheless a useful insight) is that cognition (if one is a materialist) is not a monolith and that, as a result, various timing issues can confuse observers (as with Libet).
- 3pt14159 7y agoDuring high school I had an alarm. I would wake up within about 1 to 3 seconds of it going off, stand up, walk to the alarm that was in my washroom and turn it off just as it was starting. Every school day for years. I became convinced that the precision of the brain at a task is partially a function of its reliability long before learning anything about machine learning.
- projektfu 7y agoYes, I believe this is the same phenomenon as the "long second", where you glance at a clock and it takes longer than your perception of 1 second for the clock to move, then it ticks along normally. This is because the brain noticed you changed your view and didn't want a discontinuity in processing so it makes itself think that there is a fraction of a second more of the initial image. (or something like that, probably more complicated.)
- ryanwinchester 7y agoI had an alarm clock for a long time. My alarm set for 6:00am and I would wake up and look at the clock at 5:59. So, I would actually just wake up just before the alarm.
- Stierlitz 7y agoYou didn't wake up before the alarm went off. What happens is your mind is dreaming about a minutes worth of some random scenario. At the moment the alarm sounds, this scenario undergoes an alternation to incorporate the alarm into the dream and is then stored in your short-term memory. When you fully wake-up, your mind replays the dream, the last bit of which contains the sequence of you waking-up just before the alarm going off.
- perl4ever 7y agoI used to dream I was waking up, dream I was doing stuff more or less normally, and then things would get really weird and I would semi-lucidly conclude I must be still dreaming, and force my eyes open to wake up again. On occasion it happened repeatedly. And in retrospect, it was obvious that when I was dreaming, my ability to tell I was dreaming was impaired. But then I worried, what if I think I'm dreaming and I'm not?
- throwaway_tech 7y agoI think even more interesting is when I wake up before my alarm and actually get up/out of bed I feel like I had proper sleep. However, if I decide to go back to sleep for the short period of time before my alarm, I usually wake up by the alarm and feel like I got terrible sleep.
- krick 7y agoYes! Basically, every time I wake up because of alarm I feel disgusting. But the most bizarre thing for me is that I pretty much always get up before the alarm (and hence feeling perfectly fine) if I drastically changed my regimen recently (which normally is pretty much non-existent), even if it leaves me with 5 hours of sleep. But once I get comfortable with it, I start sleeping longer, waking up after the alarm (even if I set it purposefully late, making place for, like, 9-10 hours of sleep), waking up tired and hating my life.
- oliveshell 7y agoThis phenomenon is known as “sleep inertia”: if you’re awakened during certain stages of deep sleep, you’ll generally feel foggier and tired for longer after waking up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia#Causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia#Causes
- Dylan16807 7y agoThat's a lot simpler. The deeper asleep you are, the less pleasant it is to be dragged out of sleep. When you wake up on your own, that effect is basically at zero.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- RossBencina 7y agoI couldn't find a reliable reference quickly, but I believe humans have a "90 minute sleep cycle." (Search for that if you wan't a bunch of half-baked hints.) If you wake up (and get up) during the correct phase of the cycle, then you'll feel good. Otherwise you won't.
- coding123 7y ago100 years from now the conversation will be about how back in the day we didn't know all of the ways time, space and quantum mechanics worked and we thought it was just a coincidence or some psychological brain function that has a highly tuned timer.
- AgentME 7y agoIf there was some kind of backwards-time effect going on, then you would expect the experience of waking up just before unexpected interruptions to be just as common as waking up before scheduled interruptions (alarms). Personally I have a lot of experiences of waking up right before an alarm that was scheduled at a time I knew and not as many experiences of waking up right before something unscheduled.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y agoPersonally, I rarely wake up before my regular alarm goes off. However, if I have to wake up earlier than I normally do for something (dr's appt, scheduled flight, etc), my body seems to wake itself up every couple of hours out of fear that I will sleep through the alarm. So I normally wake up at 8 and sleep soundly through the night, but if I've gotta be up at 7 for some reason, even if I have an alarm set, I seem to wake up in a panic at about 4 AM, 6 AM, 6:30 AM, etc.
- stingraycharles 7y agoVery recognizable. What I found interesting is that, even though apparently my brain can time the alarm really well, but I cannot actively rely on it: if I choose not to set an alarm, I will wake up a dozen times before, like you describe. It’s easy to explain why, but still a pity.
- csours 7y agoMonday plant startups were the worst back when I did manufacturing plant ops. Line start time was 6 am, so I had to check everything before 5:30, so I had to be in the plant at 4:30. Naturally I woke up at 2:30 and 3:30 for good measure. Fortunately the regular day shift ops also showed up at 6:30 or 7, so there was someone around with actual brainpower.
- city41 7y agoI do this as well. Having to wake up to an alarm means I will almost certainly get a bad night of sleep. For my day to day I don't use an alarm because I wake up at the correct time naturally. This probably compounds the problem for me on alarm days.
- jonplackett 7y agoExact same experience. Me and my stupid brain are not alone!
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoNope. I slept in a common room with 3 brothers. If my alarm went off (half an hour before they needed to get up) I got a whopping. So I would wake up moments before the alarm, scramble from bed to my desk and slap the snooze button sometimes just as the buzzer started to sound. This guy is over-thinking it. And underestimating the human brain.
- henrikschroder 7y agoYeah, it's not a cognition re-ordering event that's happening. You simply wake up just before the alarm because the human brain be crazy, yo. I have, many times, with many different alarm clocks or phones, woken up a minute or so before the alarm is set to go off, and usually I unset the alarm and get out of bed. There's no prep noise, no early warning, no re-imagining how things happened. I just do it, sometimes.
- xthreen 7y agoThough I don't have the common room experience that you had, I too regularly wake before my alarm goes off with more than enough time to turn it off. The answer isn't that I have a clock in my brain, but rather that waking phases occur regularly during sleep. I start to wake up, think "what time is it?" and check my phone. If it's within 30 minutes of my alarm, I just turn my alarm off and get up. No magic required.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoThat's a reasonable scenario. But not the one I experienced. My history is of waking up seconds before the required time.
- henrikschroder 7y agoFor what it's worth, I have the same experience as you. I wake up, once, maybe a minute before the alarm is supposed to go off. And I'm immediately clearly awake, not groggy, not sleepy, no gradual slow awakening.
- 7y ago
- syntheticnature 7y agoI've definitely had the experience, mentioned else-thread, of waking minutes before the alarm, and learned through experience not to roll back over if I wanted to feel awake that morning. I'm also old enough to have had an alarm clock with an internal relay for the alarm, whose click was sufficient to wake me before the alarm proper sounded.
- Trowter 7y agoThis may be the case for some but for me my alarm pretty much never goes off It's set for 6am everyday and I usually turn if off around 5:55
- art4ur 7y agoI often wake up two to three minutes before the alarm. It happens often. I just think my internal clock is just getting in habit.
- bwi4 7y agoNot a biologist, but circadian rhythms are attributed to light. Could the light level in the room be the trigger for waking before the alarm goes off?
- projektfu 7y agoLight mediates them, but there are a lot of clock-based behaviors in animals and they usually anticipate events. They can occur in complete darkness. Searching PubMed for "time sleep anticipation" produced interesting results.
- yoz-y 7y agoThis would be actually quite an easy theory to put to test. You could film yourself waking up, then you would know. And I would bet that they are actually waking up before the alarm clock, most of the time because of the regular schedule, the other times due to confirmation bias.
- Vysero 7y agoThe real question: Why is it that if you don't set your alarm you won't wake up before it would normally go off, had you set it.
- spacenick88 7y agoMaybe I'm missing something but e.g. on the Android clock you can dismiss an upcoming alarm. So now if you wake up, dismiss it and it never rings that kind of proofs you really woke up before, right?
- _ph_ 7y agoIt is not uncommon for me to wake up 2-3 minutes before the alarm goes off. As I switch off the alarm clock then, the alarm never goes off. So no funny brain things going on, the internal timer can be very precise. Of course it also happens, that I sleep like a log until the alarm warkes me. The waking up in time usually happens when there is an urgency to be on time.
- pajtai 7y agoCan't you just verify this by hitting a timer at the time you are thinking "this is just before the alarm will go off".... then you can verify if this is really just minutes before the alarms was going to go off. My guess is sometimes it's an hour before the alarm, but it just feels like a minute before, since you actually doze off again...
- kempbellt 7y agoAn alarm going off if a very disruptive disturbance to your sleep cycle, and it is predictable. Your subconscious mind perceives it as a predictable negative event and wakes you up in an attempt to prevent the disturbance. Goes to show how cool our brains are.
- thedanbob 7y agoAfter I got an Apple Watch I started wearing it to bed and using it as my alarm. I can't remember ever waking up just before it goes off although that would happen a lot with my old alarm. Perhaps because a vibration on my wrist, while still effective at waking me up, is not nearly as disruptive and negative as an alarm.
- kempbellt 7y ago>is not nearly as disruptive and negative as an alarm My personal experience says this is likely the cause as well. A vibration on your arm is a lot less disruptive as "EENENENNNG..... ENENENENNG....ENENNENN" right in the middle of a dream.
- gattr 7y agoI also often wake up before the alarm, and the delta is on the order of tens of seconds. I'd say I definitely get to become fully awake and start thinking about the upcoming day before it rings. Apparently, just a matter of quite a precise internal clock. Another situation when it can trigger is when I brew tea. I like a "reproducible" brew, so I'm used to setting the timer to 3:30 minutes after filling the cup with water. When I then go do something else and become engrossed in it, I'll often suddenly realize "Oh no, what about the tea?" I then look at the timer and see there are 5-10 s left.
- dctoedt 7y agoOur two dogs seem to do this. They sleep in our bedroom. We get up at 0500 to walk them before going to the gym. Usually we're up before the alarm goes off, but not always. If we sleep until the alarm goes off, typically around 0458 the dogs will be up and standing next to our bed; they shake their heads around so that the sound of their ears flapping will get us up.
- jonplackett 7y agoAm I colourblind or is booting orange not pink?
- cameronfraser 7y agoPeople attune themselves to repetition. They wake up before it goes off because they wake up around the same time almost every day. People are not imagining no alarm for 5 to 10 minutes.
- abacate 7y agoI don't see how this reasoning makes any sense: you just need to look at the actual clock time to find out if the alarm went off or not. For instance: alarm set for 8 AM. You wake up, look at the clock: if it says 7:59AM or earlier, you woke up before it had a chance to ring. If it says 8:00AM or anything past that, it already went off. Unless, of course, you have an alarm that does not show you the current time. Otherwise, it's pretty easy to figure out what's happening.
- aaron695 7y agoWhat about you woke up 10 times before the alarm and forgot them until the last time?
- AgentME 7y agoBesides the overlooked possibility that people are just better at waking up at specific times than is generally expected (which I think is true and probably explains most cases, but maybe not all), there's another explanation the author didn't consider: it's possible that people frequently half-wake-up, and then fall back asleep and forget the experience. However, if you half-wake-up right before the alarm, then the alarm interrupts you before you get the chance to fall back asleep and forget the experience. You just think that you unusually woke up right before the alarm, without remembering the many other times you woke up in the morning not immediately before the alarm. I used to have an alarm clock very close to my bed, and I would be able to turn it off or hit the snooze button very quickly after it went off without getting up. I believe I could hit the button in my sleep, or wake up just enough to hit it and then fall back asleep fast enough to forget the experience. I remember many times waking up at my alarm starting to go off at 9:30am (or some other round ten minute interval time after 9am) even though I scheduled it at 9am; I must have snoozed it several times and fell back to sleep quickly enough to forget the experience. I even switched to a phone alarm clock app where I had to solve simple arithmetic problems in order to snooze or disable the alarm, and I had the same experience. I'm not sure it if it makes sense to say that I was solving the math problems in my sleep; I think it's more correct to say I woke up, solved it, and then fell back asleep and forgot the experience because I fell asleep quickly enough.
- Izkata 7y ago> I believe I could hit the button in my sleep, or wake up just enough to hit it and then fall back asleep fast enough to forget the experience. I remember many times waking up at my alarm starting to go off at 9:30am (or some other round ten minute interval time after 9am) even though I scheduled it at 9am; I must have snoozed it several times and fell back to sleep quickly enough to forget the experience. That happened to me quite a lot during college, and due to a quirk of my alarm I know for certain I wasn't just sleeping through it: The snooze button was between the two arrow buttons for setting stuff, and if I hit an arrow by accident while the alarm was going off, the set alarm time would change. It pretty regularly ended up several minutes off of where it was supposed to be.
- yellowapple 7y agoThere's a simpler explanation: your brain is associating other environmental (internal or external) conditions with the alarm going off, and reacting to those instead of (or in addition to) the actual alarm. This seems to happen to me pretty often, given that I'll wake up in "the middle of the night" (usually because I need to use the bathroom, or because I want a glass of water), then check the clock, realize that the alarm goes off in 3 minutes, and grumble about the lost sleep time.
- perl4ever 7y agoI always thought that my alarm clock probably made some very soft sound shortly before the alarm. But maybe not. These days I seem to be waking up before my alarm, but several hours, not moments before.
- dang 7y agoSmall threads from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9365150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9365150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9134541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9134541
- veeenu 7y agoI have a visual alert on my computer to remind me of drinking water every half hour. After a couple of weeks, I regularly noticed myself feeling thirsty and reaching for the bottle a mere handful of seconds before the alert went off. I think our bodies are more capable than we believe to adapt to habits and tracking time, with or without environmental cues.
- maxk42 7y agoIn order to prevent this I bevel my week. M, T, Th I set my alarm for an hour earlier. W and F I set my alarm for the latest I can reasonably wake up and still make it to work on time if there is a minor hiccup. It prevents me from getting used to a particular schedule and waking up ahead of my alarm. When I wake up ahead of my alarm I tend to turn it off, thinking I'm awake, and subsequently fall back asleep, making myself late. Sleeping in on Wednesdays gives me a burst of energy just as everyone else is experiencing the mid-week "hump." And doing the same on Friday keeps me from checking-out an hour before the week is done. It's a good system.
- glangdale 7y agoI see a general chorus of disagreement in the comments, and have to agree - I wake up before my alarm and the clock is reading 6:42 or something when the alarm is for 6:45. It's not some exotic Lamport clock phenomena or some quote out of Nietzsche's "Human, All too Human" ("Everyone knows from experience how fast the dreamer can incorporate into his dream a loud sound he hears, bell ringing, for example, or cannon fire, how he can explain it after the fact from his dream, so that he believes he is experiencing first the occasioning factors, and then that sound"). We just get good at anticipating our alarms.
- magicroot75 7y agoI thought this was going to be an article about how this guy had a microphone in his room recording constantly, and analyzed the sounds around him that corresponded to times he woke up earlier than he wanted to. That would have been cool.
- jFriedensreich 7y agoI can't believe no one here seems to know who joe armstrong is / was and that he passed away, isn't this hackernews? This is a post from 2015. Joe was a wonderful person and this post shows a random funny/quirky thought he had. Writing things like "...by all means, keep doubting yourself and over-analyzing your own body..." is pretty inappropriate
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]