Why do we seem to have an “internal alarm clock”? What causes this?
In: Biology
There are two things. Firstly you have a natural circadian rhythm caused by the production and breakdown of the hormone melatonin. In simple terms your body is able to measure the time of day based on how fast certain biological processes take and regulate your energy levels based on this. This rhythm will get adjusted by certain things like light, food and sleep to match the cycle of the sun. The problem is that this is not that accurate. So while it may get you to wake up in the morning the time may vary within an hour or two.
This brings us to the second way our body makes sure to wake up on time. When you sleep you do not become completely unconcious. The brain does turn off various different functions but not all of them. Even if you are sleeping you are still concious and aware of your suroundings. It is even possible for you to enable certain brain functions for short amount of times when needed. You normally do not remember any of this because one of the funcitons that are not used when you sleep is your ability to store new memories. And this fuction might not work the first few seconds after you have woken up. So even when you are sleeping you are able to react to certain things like sounds, even open your eyes and look at the clock or how bright it is, and determine if it is time to wake up or not. And you are able to go right back to sleep without ever remembering any of it. The only thing you remember from it is that you somehow woke up right before the alarm clock went off.
A circadian rhythm is a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and repeats on each rotation of the Earth roughly every 24 hours.
They’re biological processes that allow humans to take advantage of the daylight since we are diurnal animals and are biologically designed for the daytime. If we were nocturnal would have amazing night vision and other things that would be helpful in the night time.
How does my body know when to wake up, ill have to go to work and ill set 3 alarms knowing theyre not going to wake me up. But the action of setting them allows me to wake up.
Others have covered this well, if you’re interested in further information on the topics others have mentioned I’d recommend a book called “Why we sleep” by Matthew Walker.
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