internal alarm clock

30 Aug internal alarm clock

Have you ever woken up 5,10 or 15 minutes before your alarm goes off? As though your internal clock knows exactly what time it is! It is an unusual sensation, but it happens to lots of people.

Some of these people believe they have superpowers, and others talk about a ‘click’ that sounds a few moments before the alarm which wakes us up. Other people refer to Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance, which reminds me how much I love that theory and how I will have to share it with you here one day!

There were also funny stories of people tapping their foreheads 6 times if they had to wake up at six. Lol. And stories of waking up just before your train gets into the station. We are a funny species.

Internal alarm clock

The science behind this is that apparently we do have an internal clock and if you have planned to wake at a certain time, your body will release stress hormones in preparation for the ‘stress’ of waking up.

This was shown in a study where Jan Born and fellow researchers at the University of Lubeck in Germany put people to bed at 12 am and told them that they would be woken at 6 am one day and 9 am the following two days. On the day that the participants expected to wake at 6 am, the researchers saw a surge of the hormone adrenocorticotropin beginning at 4.30 am. However, when the participants thought they were to be awoken at 9am and were rudely awaken at 6am, there was no such rise in the levels of this hormone.

Some of the ‘stress’ might be related to the awful sound of the alarm as it disturbs everything within living radius. haha.

Not tomorrow though 🙂 Joy! It is the weekend 🙂 Happy Friday 🙂