I was just wondering what happens when we wake up naturally, so not because of an alarm or being woken up by a loud noise or our partner or something.
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Your circadian rhythm is a biological clock, which helps control your body using temperature and hormones. So when it’s dark and time to sleep it will release melatonin and drop your temp, which will help you sleep. Then when it’s the morning your temperature will increase and your cortisol levels will spike just before you wake up.
Also sleep isn’t like the brain is off or in standby. Some stages of sleep your brain is more active than when you are awake. Sleep is broken up into sleep cycles and you naturally wake up after a sleep cycle has finished. If you wake up due to an alarm then it will likely wake you up halfway through a sleep cycle, which some people notice as brain fog or just being extra groggy.
You wake up when your brain detects it being light outside, but in the times when we have had some sleep deprivation, our brains may need longer to get rid of waste products and start organising memories and learned functions over a longer period of time. The cerebellum is washed with a chemical that helps break down plaques and process the removal of dead cells to keep the brain healthy.
It’s also important to note that the brain works hard during sleep and typically if you dream then the brain is re-organising stuff. REM (Rapid eve movement) sleep is the stage where dreams happen and naturally the brain starts and stops these cycles when it has finished doing the organisation. When REM sleep stops, you are more than likely experiencing Deep Sleep which is similar but you are less likely to dream in Deep Sleep. Deep Sleep then progresses to Light Sleep which is where the brain starts to switch functions back on like detecting light, which is when you start to wake.
Thing is that we tend to use our everyday life as a metaphor regarding our body. In the era of steam engines people often used machine metaphors, as a frame of reference to the human body.
Now sometimes in some limited ways those metaphors may be useful or helpful, for example thinking of our memory as if a computer memory in a way may help understanding how our memory works. But it never should be taken as an actual truth.
As our body is not an actual steam engine, our body is not a computer either. And it definitely does not turn off when we sleep (on the contrary, it is very active), and does not kick start processes.
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