If You Always Wake Up Right Before Your Alarm Goes Off, There’s a Scientific Explanation Why

You have an internal clock that keeps track of time just like your alarm clock does. Here's why it can spoil a sound night's sleep.

Nearly everyone has experienced that disorienting, panicky feeling of waking yourself up before your alarm clock. You have a small heart attack as you jump out of bed—positive that you overslept again—only to realize your alarm won’t go off for another five minutes. Groan. That’s not enough time to fall back asleep, but too much time to consider getting out of bed, either. What gives?

Why you’re waking up before your alarm

You can thank your body’s finely tuned internal clock for the early wake-up call, according to a study published in Science. It’s all courtesy of the little-known KDM5A gene, dubbed “the alarm clock gene.” How does this tiny gene have such a powerful effect? First, you need to know a little bit about what makes your biological clock tick.

A protein called PERIOD (PER) rises in the morning and goes up through midday, signaling to your body that it’s time to be awake. As the day wanes, levels of PER drop. Falling PER protein levels at night causes your biological systems to slow: your blood pressure drops, your heart rate slows and your mental processes wind down. All of these signals tell your brain it’s time to hit the sack. The alarm clock gene encodes a protein, JARID1a, that activates the PER biochemical circuit that maintains our sleep-wake cycles.

How to wake yourself up

If you maintain a consistent sleep schedule, your circadian rhythm behaves accordingly, following a predictable daily pattern based on the rise and fall of your PER levels. Your body gets so good at predicting when you wake up that your PER levels will start to rise which releases hormones that tell your body to wake up, slightly before your alarm clock jars you awake.

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Reflection: Do you often wake up moments before the alarm rings? If so, do you feel positive or negative emotions?

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