In view of the nature of my job, I wake up much later than a lot of people do. In fact, I don’t get to leave my house for 8am sometimes.
Therefore, during periods when I need to be out very early, maybe for a meeting or traveling, I end up relying on my alarm bells. But I’ve noticed that on the rare occasions when I have to wake up early in successive days, I sometimes wake up before the alarm bell rings. And then when I don’t set them, I wake up late.
Does this happen to you? This was a question I sought to ask and decided to ask guys who wake as early as 4 or 5am every working day.
Amazingly almost everyone I asked had a similar experience as I did? They all wake up before the alarm bells!!! What could be the cause of that? Researchers say human beings all have a body clock which is controlled by the ‘suprachiasmatic nucleus’, a part of the brain that controls the body’s biological rhythms. They go on to say that people usually have trouble waking up probably because their inner clock is by default set to late “wake-up and sleep times, a condition known as phase delays.
Based on that it is possible that the reason why you sometimes wake up earlier than your alarm is that your inner clock is reset and as such adjust the ‘phase delays’. The adjustments can be caused by psychological and social changes in your behaviour or sleeping pattern. Like anxiety or training your self to sleep early or sleeping early on weekends. I’m not a scientist but reading this up online did help give me an acceptable explanation.
So sadly alarms do work because If you turn off the alarm clock beside your bed or you wake up late, if you turn it on you wake up before it. The problem is just that you now have to keep both clocks. The physical one by your bedside and the one inside you. They are inversely related. If your inner clock is on adjusted( not on phased delays)then you wake up before the outer clock and conversely if your inner clock is a phased delays you depend on your outer clock. Too bad yeah?
