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.

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.

> 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.

Are you getting restful sleep?

I can manage to do something like this within a 10-30 minute range where I’m lying in bed kind of half awake until I decide to just get up, or my alarm goes off and I hit it instantly and I’m ready to go. But I’ve come to realize that it’s not some super human time keeping ability—I’m basically staying up all night, not actually sleeping, anticipating the time I need to get up, and my mind just forgets all but the past few minutes.

I realized how I did it after I started taking naps at work. If I can get at least 20 uninterrupted minutes, I basically blink and wake up rested. If someone walks by or there’s a noise at some point during that period, it’s basically me just groggily sitting around for half an hour and then my memory of it all fades a bit after the break finishes and I forget I was basically awake the whole time.

Adapting to a schedule and waking up at the right time is one thing. Being able to arbitrarily set a time sounds either superhuman or like there’s no truly deep sleep occurring.

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.

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

i wake up before my alarm goes off in order to not wake my wife. if my alarm goes off and wakes her before her alarm then a "whopping" is an understatement of what follows hah.

Oddly, i wake up almost always 2 minutes before my alarm. self preservation is a hell of an instinct.

You reminded, my times at boarding school.

Yeah, it's not a cognition re-ordering event that's happening. You simply wake up just before the alarm because the human brain be crazy, yo.

I have, many times, with many different alarm clocks or phones, woken up a minute or so before the alarm is set to go off, and usually I unset the alarm and get out of bed. There's no prep noise, no early warning, no re-imagining how things happened. I just do it, sometimes.

Strange to say but I actually don't mind being woken up due to someone else's alarm. It lets me experience the pleasure of knowing I get to go back to sleep :)

Mine sounded like a foghorn...

The author is not necessarily wrong about his case, and this could be investigated experimentally - have someone else set the alarm to a time he does not know.

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.

For what it's worth, I have the same experience as you. I wake up, once, maybe a minute before the alarm is supposed to go off. And I'm immediately clearly awake, not groggy, not sleepy, no gradual slow awakening.

Can confirm. I wake up and disable my alarm before it goes off all the time. I think the brain just has an accurate timer.

It should be easy to test. Just set the alarm at a random time. Something like 5 to 10 minutes earlier.

To do it blindly you can have someone else do it, scramble the clock, use an app,...

In my experience, it only works if I know the time and want to wake up at that time. I'm more likely to experience it the more important it is that I wake up on time. If I have to wake up for travel purposes, it's almost guaranteed that I'll wake up before the alarm.

Please read the book "power of subconscious mind".

I had trained myself to fall asleep immediately after falling on bed and waking exactly at 6 without setting an alarm.

When I was young, I would prepare to wake up before the alarm if I really wanted to make sure I didn't oversleep. I would stare at the current time for about a minute and then go to sleep. The next day I would always wake up a few minutes before the alarm.

I don't think it's magic. There are plenty of cues (sound and light) that can tell you approximately what time it is without being conscious.

I often wake up before an alarm even when I've not set it, or it's set to silent. Actually I rarely set an alarm but usually wake up +/- 5 minutes of the same time.

Interesting hypothesis but so easy to disprove.

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.

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.

Monday plant startups were the worst back when I did manufacturing plant ops.

Line start time was 6 am, so I had to check everything before 5:30, so I had to be in the plant at 4:30. Naturally I woke up at 2:30 and 3:30 for good measure. Fortunately the regular day shift ops also showed up at 6:30 or 7, so there was someone around with actual brainpower.

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.

Exact same experience. Me and my stupid brain are not alone!

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.

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.

This phenomenon is known as “sleep inertia”: if you’re awakened during certain stages of deep sleep, you’ll generally feel foggier and tired for longer after waking up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia#Causes

That's a lot simpler. The deeper asleep you are, the less pleasant it is to be dragged out of sleep. When you wake up on your own, that effect is basically at zero.

I couldn't find a reliable reference quickly, but I believe humans have a "90 minute sleep cycle." (Search for that if you wan't a bunch of half-baked hints.) If you wake up (and get up) during the correct phase of the cycle, then you'll feel good. Otherwise you won't.

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.

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.

I also wake up sometimes 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm goes off and it's pitch black in my room, so probably by "internal clock" knows the time.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I can do this too. Like you it doesn't work all the time, but far better then coincidence would allow.

For fun I try variations: I will wake up in 6hrs. vs I will wake up at 7 o'clock. vs I will wake up 10 minutes before my alarm.

...or whatever my target is.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The famous experiments from Benjamin Libet seem relevant here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_of....

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).

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.

Yes, I believe this is the same phenomenon as the "long second", where you glance at a clock and it takes longer than your perception of 1 second for the clock to move, then it ticks along normally. This is because the brain noticed you changed your view and didn't want a discontinuity in processing so it makes itself think that there is a fraction of a second more of the initial image. (or something like that, probably more complicated.)

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.

Come again? English is such a funny language.

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.

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.

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.

Small threads from back then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9365150

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9134541

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.

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.

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.

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.

>> 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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

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

Am I colourblind or is booting orange not pink?