There is very little research on how common the experience of waking up a minute or two before the alarm is and why it happens. But it seems to be “a real phenomenon” that many people report, according to Russell Foster, head of the Institute for Neuroscience in Sleep and Biology at the University of Oxford in the UK.
For example, in a telephone survey published in 1997, researchers from Iowa and Minnesota randomly interviewed 269 adults. About three-quarters of the interviewees said they sometimes wake up before the alarm goes off, and just under a quarter say they wake up so reliably that they never have to use the alarm.
As it turns out, waking up a minute or two before the alarm is a common experience.Credit: iStock
After the research team posted a newspaper ad asking people to always or regularly wake up at specific times without using an alarm, they invited 15 of the respondents into the lab and track their sleep for three nights. They found that 5 out of 15 people woke up within 10 minutes of their target time of waking up all 3 times.
Timing is everything
No one knows exactly how or why the body is able to do this, but researchers say our circadian clocks, which keep track of time, are involved.
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Ravi Allada, a neurobiologist specializing in sleep and circadian rhythms at Northwestern University, says just above the optic nerve in the brain is a master clock known as the super-chiasmatic nucleus.
This clock synchronizes and coordinates our body’s circadian rhythms, helping us prepare for things that happen at different times of the day – such as going to bed at night and waking up in the morning. bright.
One way our bodies do this, says Foster, is by sensing the light levels around us. He said: ‘Special cells in our eyes detect changes in light levels, such as just before and at dawn – even through the eyelids when we close our eyes. These cells may not tell our bodies exactly what time it is, but they can tell us that we are approaching the time we normally wake up.
