What makes our body decide, ok now it’s time to get up? Why do things like nightmares often allow us to shortcut sleep and wake up early?
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Not exactly answering your question but interesting and related to it
How does noise and pain wake us up?
There is an area of the midbrain, right where the cerebellum connects to the brain, that is called the leminiscus lateralis, this is an area with a lot of tiny grey matter spots and a huge amount of nerves going through, those grey matter spots do some basic interpretation of signals going through… Some of the signals that go through there are the signals coming from the cochlea, the organ we use for hearing and from the pain receptors in the body that come through the nerves in the spine, some of the little grey spots in the leminiscus lateralis connect to a few strands of those nerves and detect what is going through them and regulate sleep activity, heartbeat, blood pressure and alertness accordingly when there is a spike in signals or when there is continuous signals…
When there is a spike in signals coming from the ear, like a loud noise, or coming from the pain receptors, like a sharp pain, these little grey matter spots are responsible for making our heart race, blood pump, face flush, get all sprung up and alert, and if we are asleep, wake up almost instantly! And when there is a lot of low intensity signals like ambient noise or diffuse/slow pain (like backpain) it doesn’t reach the threshold for waking us up, but it still increases our alertness, leading to a lighter less profound sleep that is less efficient, leaving us feeling poorly rested and tense after sleeping with pain or noise…
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