![]() Jan Born, one of the study's authors, says they knew that levels of a hormone that's stored in the pituitary gland, called ACTH, start increasing in advance of the time you habitually wake up, which in turn signals the adrenal glands to release cortisol, a so-called "stress hormone" that helps wake you up, among other things. In the late '90s, a group of researchers in Germany wanted to figure out how expecting to wake up influenced what's known as the HPA axis - a complex system in the body that deals with our response to stress and involves the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland and the adrenal glands. Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. OK, so the scientific evidence isn't exactly overwhelming.īut there was one intriguing line of evidence that caught my eye, thanks to Dr. Indeed, Stickgold says it's quite possible that "like a lot of things that we think we do all the time, we only do it once in a while." In one such study, more than half of the respondents said they could do this. Other researchers have taken more subjective approaches, asking people to report if they have the ability to wake up at a certain time. Another small experiment let the participants choose when they'd get up and concluded that about half of the spontaneous awakenings were within seven minutes of the choice they'd written down before they went to sleep. ![]() The two subjects who did the best were then followed for another week, but their accuracy quickly plummeted. Scientists get curious - with mixed resultsĪctually, some scientists have looked into this enigma over the years with, admittedly, mixed results.įor example, one tiny, 15-person studyfrom 1979 found that, over the course of two nights, the subjects were able to wake up within 20 minutes of the target more than half of the time. "I think it's that anxiety about being late that's contributing." If you are getting enough sleep and your lifestyle is aligned with your circadian rhythms, you should typically wake up around the same time every morning, adjusting for seasonal differences, says Philip Gehrman, a sleep scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.īut that still doesn't adequately explain this phenomenon of waking up precisely a few minutes before your alarm, especially when it's a time that deviates from your normal schedule. Somewhat shaped by our exposure to sunlight, caffeine, meals, exercise and other factors, these processes regulate our circadian rhythms throughout the roughly 24-hour cycle of day and night, and this affects when we go to bed and wake up. Of course, it's well known that humans have an elegant and intricate system of internal processes that help our bodies keep time. "I can wake up at 7:59 and turn off the alarm clock before my wife wakes up." At least, sometimes. "This kind of precision waking is reported by hundreds and thousands of people,'" he says, including himself. "I can assure you that all of us sleep researchers say 'balderdash, that's impossible,' " he says.Īnd yet Stickgold still believes there is something to it. Stickgold even remembers bringing it up to his mentor when he was just starting out in the field - only to be greeted with a dubious look and a far from satisfactory explanation. ![]() "This is one of those questions in the study of sleep where everybody in the field seems to agree that's what's obviously true couldn't be," says Stickgold, who's a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Robert Stickgold over the years wondering about this phenomenon. It turns out many people have come to Dr. What's going on here? Is it pure luck? Or perhaps you possess some uncanny ability to wake up precisely on time without help? The next morning, you wake up on your own and discover you've beat your alarm clock by just a minute or two. You go to bed with some morning obligation on your mind, maybe a flight to catch or an important meeting. Maybe this happens to you sometimes, too: ![]()
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