The 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.
Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
31–40 of 86 posts
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#32Nope. 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.
Yup. I grew up in dorms at boarding school. The art was to wake up five minutes before the bell, so you could be first in line for the showers and get hot water, and then to breakfast before they ran out of the good choice. You couldn’t have an audible alarm, as you’d wake others and then you’d have competition.
So, you just trained yourself to wake on time, at 0657 or whatever time shortly before 0700 you thought wise - after all, you didn’t want to be early, as then you’d just stand in a freezing corridor, and you’d have wasted precious minutes of sleep. Eighth was the perfect place in line, as that was how many shower heads there were. I digress...
To this day, I have zero need for an alarm clock - I just pick the time I want to wake at, and I do, within a minute. I can decide to have a 15 minute nap and it’s exactly that. If I don’t set a constraint, I sleep on until I “naturally” wake up.
I have absolutely no idea how this unconscious dead reckoning of time works, but it does. I’m not as good at it awake as I am asleep - I only manage ten minute accuracy.
Another plus is that you don’t get sleep inertia like you do when woken by something suddenly, and instead wake up, well, awake.
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#33Maybe 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?
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#34It 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.
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#35Can'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...
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#36An 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.
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#37The 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.
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Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#38The 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.
Come again? English is such a funny language.
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#39Personally, 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 t…
I 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.
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#40Nope. 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.
Though 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.
That's a reasonable scenario. But not the one I experienced. My history is of waking up seconds before the required time.