Sarah Mosquera/NPR
Maybe this happens to you sometimes, too:
You go to bed with some morning obligation on your mind, maybe a flight to catch or an important meeting. The next morning, you wake up on your own and discover you’ve beat your alarm clock by just a minute or two.
What’s going on here? Is it pure luck? Or perhaps you possess some uncanny ability to wake up precisely on time without help?
It turns out many people have come to Dr. Robert Stickgold over the years wondering about this phenomenon.
“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.
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. “I can assure you that all of us sleep researchers say ‘balderdash, that’s impossible,’ ” he says.
And yet Stickgold still believes there is something to it. “This kind of precision waking is reported by hundreds and thousands of people,'” he says, including himself. “I can wake up at 7:59 and turn off the alarm clock before my wife wakes up.” At least, sometimes.
Of course, it’s well known that humans have an elegant and intricate system of internal processes that help our bodies keep time. 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.
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.
But 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.
“I hear this all the time,” he says. “I think it’s that anxiety about being late that’s contributing.”
Scientists get curious — with mixed results
Actually, some scientists have looked into this enigma over the years, with, admittedly, mixed results.
For example, one tiny, 15-person study from 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. The two subjects who did the best were then followed for another week, but their accuracy quickly plummeted. Another small experiment let the participants choose when they’d get up and concluded that about half of the spontaneous…
Read More: A sleep mystery: What’s behind ‘precision waking’ : Shots