
Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015) - gloftus
https://joearms.github.io/published/2015-03-02-Waking-Up.html
======
JoeAltmaier
Nope. 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.

~~~
madaxe_again
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.

~~~
rconti
The book Why We Sleep discusses the phase of our sleep that has extremely
accurate timekeeping. I've forgotten the details, of course. But I think it's
quite clear our brains know precisely what time it is.

~~~
kranner
A book on sleep (and more) that deserves to be much more widely known is The
Head Trip by Jeff Warren:

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2168851.Head_Trip](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2168851.Head_Trip)

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AdmiralAsshat
Personally, 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 to wake up in a panic at about 4 AM, 6 AM,
6:30 AM, etc.

~~~
stingraycharles
Very recognizable. What I found interesting is that, even though apparently my
brain can time the alarm really well, but I cannot actively rely on it: if I
choose not to set an alarm, I will wake up a dozen times before, like you
describe. It’s easy to explain why, but still a pity.

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throwaway_tech
I think even more interesting is when I wake up before my alarm and actually
get up/out of bed I feel like I had proper sleep. However, if I decide to go
back to sleep for the short period of time before my alarm, I usually wake up
by the alarm and feel like I got terrible sleep.

~~~
krick
Yes! Basically, every time I wake up _because of_ alarm I feel disgusting.

But the most bizarre thing for me is that I pretty much always get up before
the alarm (and hence feeling perfectly fine) if I drastically changed my
regimen recently (which normally is pretty much non-existent), even if it
leaves me with 5 hours of sleep. But once I get comfortable with it, I start
sleeping longer, waking up after the alarm (even if I set it purposefully
late, making place for, like, 9-10 hours of sleep), waking up tired and hating
my life.

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Cerium
I regularly wake up about 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm goes off. I think
it has a lot to do with light levels. I tend to set my alarm to go off about
7:00 in the winter and earlier in the summer, so there is some light outside
to wake up to.

~~~
iamatworknow
I'm also one to wake up 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm, but my alarm often
varies. Some days it's 5:30 AM. Others it's 8 AM. So the ambient light level
theory is out for me. But probably 6/7 days per week I find myself waking up a
few minutes before it goes off.

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AgentME
Besides the overlooked possibility that people are just better at waking up at
specific times than is generally expected (which I think is true and probably
explains most cases, but maybe not all), there's another explanation the
author didn't consider: it's possible that people frequently half-wake-up, and
then fall back asleep and forget the experience. However, if you half-wake-up
right before the alarm, then the alarm interrupts you before you get the
chance to fall back asleep and forget the experience. You just think that you
unusually woke up right before the alarm, without remembering the many other
times you woke up in the morning not immediately before the alarm.

I used to have an alarm clock very close to my bed, and I would be able to
turn it off or hit the snooze button very quickly after it went off without
getting up. I believe I could hit the button in my sleep, or wake up just
enough to hit it and then fall back asleep fast enough to forget the
experience. I remember many times waking up at my alarm starting to go off at
9:30am (or some other round ten minute interval time after 9am) even though I
scheduled it at 9am; I must have snoozed it several times and fell back to
sleep quickly enough to forget the experience.

I even switched to a phone alarm clock app where I had to solve simple
arithmetic problems in order to snooze or disable the alarm, and I had the
same experience. I'm not sure it if it makes sense to say that I was solving
the math problems in my sleep; I think it's more correct to say I woke up,
solved it, and then fell back asleep and forgot the experience because I fell
asleep quickly enough.

~~~
Izkata
> I believe I could hit the button in my sleep, or wake up just enough to hit
> it and then fall back asleep fast enough to forget the experience. I
> remember many times waking up at my alarm starting to go off at 9:30am (or
> some other round ten minute interval time after 9am) even though I scheduled
> it at 9am; I must have snoozed it several times and fell back to sleep
> quickly enough to forget the experience.

That happened to me quite a lot during college, and due to a quirk of my alarm
I know for certain I wasn't just sleeping through it: The snooze button was
between the two arrow buttons for setting stuff, and if I hit an arrow by
accident while the alarm was going off, the set alarm time would change. It
pretty regularly ended up several minutes off of where it was supposed to be.

------
downerending
I discovered at an early age that I could "will" myself to wake up at a
desired time. It's certainly not perfect, but my accuracy is _way_ better than
chance.

Living things have all sorts of biological clocks, so this isn't really magic.
Rather, it might be a bit surprising that we have some conscious control over
it.

~~~
krick
Yeah, I'm pretty much sure OP is unnecessarily complicating things. It I am
getting up like 5 minutes before the alarm every time I know I really need to
get up at that specific time (because I know something more important than
just dragging my ass to the fucking office needs to happen this time), well,
that means I somehow know subconsciously really well what's the time is.
Because either I'm living in my sleep ever since, or I actually got up, turned
off the alarm clock so it won't bother me, got dressed and went on with my
day. Not just lied there fooling myself I'm awake before I actually got awake.

~~~
Dylan16807
Yeah but 5 minutes is much much easier than 3 seconds.

~~~
Talanes
But even if your brain is measuring time operating at a precision of "around
five minutes before," the variance will sometimes cause that to be 3 seconds
before.

~~~
Dylan16807
The premise is "I often think that I wake up just before my alarm goes off."

If 90% of the time you wake up well before the alarm, the clock saying fifty-
something, and can shut it off before it starts,

9% of the time you wake up noticably past the alarm,

and 1% of the time you appear to have woken up just before it goes off,

then that's not very confusing, and isn't going to prompt something like this
article.

The article is about being _much_ more precise on a regular basis. Or the
illusion of it.

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kempbellt
An 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.

~~~
thedanbob
After I got an Apple Watch I started wearing it to bed and using it as my
alarm. I can't remember ever waking up just before it goes off although that
would happen a lot with my old alarm. Perhaps because a vibration on my wrist,
while still effective at waking me up, is not nearly as disruptive and
negative as an alarm.

~~~
kempbellt
>is not nearly as disruptive and negative as an alarm

My personal experience says this is likely the cause as well. A vibration on
your arm is a lot less disruptive as "EENENENNNG..... ENENENENNG....ENENNENN"
right in the middle of a dream.

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coding123
100 years from now the conversation will be about how back in the day we
didn't know all of the ways time, space and quantum mechanics worked and we
thought it was just a coincidence or some psychological brain function that
has a highly tuned timer.

~~~
AgentME
If there was some kind of backwards-time effect going on, then you would
expect the experience of waking up just before unexpected interruptions to be
just as common as waking up before scheduled interruptions (alarms).
Personally I have a lot of experiences of waking up right before an alarm that
was scheduled at a time I knew and not as many experiences of waking up right
before something unscheduled.

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syntheticnature
I've definitely had the experience, mentioned else-thread, of waking minutes
before the alarm, and learned through experience not to roll back over if I
wanted to feel awake that morning.

I'm also old enough to have had an alarm clock with an internal relay for the
alarm, whose click was sufficient to wake me before the alarm proper sounded.

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paxpelus
I almost never use an alarm to wake up. Whenever I use an alarm I wake up 5-10
minutes earlier and I wonder if the alarm went off or not. I consider this
some kind of anxiety because usually I use an alarm to e.g. catch a flight

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md_
The famous experiments from Benjamin Libet seem relevant here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_of_Libet's_experiments).

In particular, see Daniel Dennett's response (the relevant aspects of which
are quoted on the Wikipedia article linked above).

I will say, I don't think this is a terribly interesting _example_; as others
have noted, it's not uncommon to actually wake up minutes before the alarm
goes off. (I commonly wake up 20 or 30 minutes before my alarm goes off; I can
be reasonably sure my subjective experience is accurate because I look at the
clock!)

But what the author hits upon (apparently naively, but it's nonetheless a
useful insight) is that cognition (if one is a materialist) is not a monolith
and that, as a result, various timing issues can confuse observers (as with
Libet).

~~~
3pt14159
During high school I had an alarm. I would wake up within about 1 to 3 seconds
of it going off, stand up, walk to the alarm that was in my washroom and turn
it off just as it was starting. Every school day for years.

I became convinced that the precision of the brain at a task is partially a
function of its reliability long before learning anything about machine
learning.

------
Vysero
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.

~~~
oyebenny
Come again? English is such a funny language.

~~~
kaybe
They wonder why this natural waking up before the alarm only works if you
actually set the alarm and does not work if you do not set it.

------
dctoedt
Our two dogs seem to do this. They sleep in our bedroom. We get up at 0500 to
walk them before going to the gym. Usually we're up before the alarm goes off,
but not always. If we sleep until the alarm goes off, typically around 0458
the dogs will be up and standing next to our bed; they shake their heads
around so that the sound of their ears flapping will get us up.

------
art4ur
I often wake up two to three minutes before the alarm. It happens often. I
just think my internal clock is just getting in habit.

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dang
Small threads from back then:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9365150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9365150)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9134541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9134541)

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maxk42
In order to prevent this I bevel my week. M, T, Th I set my alarm for an hour
earlier. W and F I set my alarm for the latest I can reasonably wake up and
still make it to work on time if there is a minor hiccup. It prevents me from
getting used to a particular schedule and waking up ahead of my alarm. When I
wake up ahead of my alarm I tend to turn it off, thinking I'm awake, and
subsequently fall back asleep, making myself late.

Sleeping in on Wednesdays gives me a burst of energy just as everyone else is
experiencing the mid-week "hump." And doing the same on Friday keeps me from
checking-out an hour before the week is done. It's a good system.

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magicroot75
I thought this was going to be an article about how this guy had a microphone
in his room recording constantly, and analyzed the sounds around him that
corresponded to times he woke up earlier than he wanted to. That would have
been cool.

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glangdale
I see a general chorus of disagreement in the comments, and have to agree - I
wake up before my alarm and the clock is reading 6:42 or something when the
alarm is for 6:45. It's not some exotic Lamport clock phenomena or some quote
out of Nietzsche's "Human, All too Human" ("Everyone knows from experience how
fast the dreamer can incorporate into his dream a loud sound he hears, bell
ringing, for example, or cannon fire, how he can explain it after the fact
from his dream, so that he believes he is experiencing first the occasioning
factors, and then that sound"). We just get good at anticipating our alarms.

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gattr
I also often wake up before the alarm, and the delta is on the order of tens
of seconds. I'd say I definitely get to become fully awake and start thinking
about the upcoming day before it rings. Apparently, just a matter of quite a
precise internal clock.

Another situation when it can trigger is when I brew tea. I like a
"reproducible" brew, so I'm used to setting the timer to 3:30 minutes after
filling the cup with water. When I then go do something else and become
engrossed in it, I'll often suddenly realize "Oh no, what about the tea?" I
then look at the timer and see there are 5-10 s left.

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sharkmerry
>> A couple of days ago I lay in bed thinking “the alarm is just about to go
off” and then a second later it did go off and I thought “how come I woke up
just before the alarm went off?”

What is the alarm like? A beep every 10 seconds? I dont follow how a
consistent sounds would not be recognized.

This seems to posit. Alarm is recognized by the brain, he then has enough time
to have a conscious thought but then the ears arent passing the signal they've
already received, (which triggered the wake up), to the brain to "hear" it?

Does this happen to anyone else? I've never heard of it before

~~~
gowld
It's more that the conscious brain incorrectly orders events when building
memory. Deja Vu is a common phenomenon of falsely feeling a memory of
something that was just learned.

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spacenick88
Maybe 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?

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yellowapple
There's a simpler explanation: your brain is associating other environmental
(internal or external) conditions with the alarm going off, and reacting to
those instead of (or in addition to) the actual alarm.

This seems to happen to me pretty often, given that I'll wake up in "the
middle of the night" (usually because I need to use the bathroom, or because I
want a glass of water), then check the clock, realize that the alarm goes off
in 3 minutes, and grumble about the lost sleep time.

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jFriedensreich
I can't believe no one here seems to know who joe armstrong is / was and that
he passed away, isn't this hackernews? This is a post from 2015. Joe was a
wonderful person and this post shows a random funny/quirky thought he had.
Writing things like "...by all means, keep doubting yourself and over-
analyzing your own body..." is pretty inappropriate

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abacate
I don't see how this reasoning makes any sense: you just need to look at the
actual clock time to find out if the alarm went off or not.

For instance: alarm set for 8 AM.

You wake up, look at the clock: if it says 7:59AM or earlier, you woke up
before it had a chance to ring. If it says 8:00AM or anything past that, it
already went off.

Unless, of course, you have an alarm that does not show you the current time.
Otherwise, it's pretty easy to figure out what's happening.

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veeenu
I have a visual alert on my computer to remind me of drinking water every half
hour. After a couple of weeks, I regularly noticed myself feeling thirsty and
reaching for the bottle a mere handful of seconds before the alert went off. I
think our bodies are more capable than we believe to adapt to habits and
tracking time, with or without environmental cues.

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_ph_
It 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.

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pajtai
Can'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...

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yoz-y
This would be actually quite an easy theory to put to test. You could film
yourself waking up, then you would know.

And I would bet that they are actually waking up before the alarm clock, most
of the time because of the regular schedule, the other times due to
confirmation bias.

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perl4ever
I always thought that my alarm clock probably made some very soft sound
shortly before the alarm. But maybe not.

These days I seem to be waking up before my alarm, but several hours, not
moments before.

------
cameronfraser
People attune themselves to repetition. They wake up before it goes off
because they wake up around the same time almost every day. People are not
imagining no alarm for 5 to 10 minutes.

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ryanwinchester
I had an alarm clock for a long time. My alarm set for 6:00am and I would wake
up and look at the clock at 5:59. So, I would actually just wake up just
before the alarm.

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bwi4
Not a biologist, but circadian rhythms are attributed to light. Could the
light level in the room be the trigger for waking before the alarm goes off?

~~~
projektfu
Light mediates them, but there are a lot of clock-based behaviors in animals
and they usually anticipate events. They can occur in complete darkness.
Searching PubMed for "time sleep anticipation" produced interesting results.

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Trowter
This may be the case for some but for me my alarm pretty much never goes off
It's set for 6am everyday and I usually turn if off around 5:55

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Stierlitz
You didn't wake up before the alarm went off. What happens is your mind is
dreaming about a minutes worth of some random scenario. At the moment the
alarm sounds, this scenario undergoes an alternation to incorporate the alarm
into the dream and is then stored in your short-term memory. When you fully
wake-up, your mind replays the dream, the last bit of which contains the
sequence of you waking-up just before the alarm going off.

~~~
perl4ever
I used to dream I was waking up, dream I was doing stuff more or less
normally, and then things would get really weird and I would semi-lucidly
conclude I must be still dreaming, and force my eyes open to wake up _again_.
On occasion it happened repeatedly. And in retrospect, it was obvious that
when I was dreaming, my ability to tell I was dreaming was impaired. But then
I worried, what if I think I'm dreaming and I'm not?

------
aaron695
What about you woke up 10 times before the alarm and forgot them until the
last time?

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jonplackett
Am I colourblind or is booting orange not pink?

