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I guess this is a different thing, but... When I was a kid I read a book that said if before you go to sleep you think "I will wake up at Xam" (whatever time y
by yesenadam 6y ago
I guess this is a different thing, but...
When I was a kid I read a book that said if before you go to sleep you think "I will wake up at Xam" (whatever time you want) then you wake up at exactly that time. Which is pretty weird! We can't do that when we're awake. It actually works, and I've never needed an alarm clock. For a few ultra-important days I used one, like catching a plane, but I was always awake before it went off.
I have no idea how it works.
- artonge 6y agoI do it to when I need to wake up early so my body is not "surprised" by the low amount of sleep. Works well I think. Do you calculate how many hours you will sleep ? Maybe the brain set some kind of a timer.
- shannifin 6y agoI heard this from someone who swore it worked for her too, but it has never worked for me. It must be a superpower! :)
- csomar 6y agoIt's not a superpower. For me it's a combination of two: Urgency and having had enough sleep. If I have a flight, I almost always wake up 30 minutes before my timer go off; even if I didn't get enough sleep. If I have nothing important to do the next day, my brain will usually ignore the waking up part and carries on. One thing I noticed is that in the last year I have been waking up just a few minutes before my alarm goes off. My postulation is the iPhone alarm sound. It's bizarrely painful that I think I'm waking up just before it to avoid hearing it.
- rtx 6y agoYup, have experienced it personally. I usually wake up few mins before the alarm goes off. Though not proven through science you know something is there. Another thing I would like to add is that scientific community should be more open to test conventional wisdom.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoWhy do you think science has not researched this and found it largely to be true? Here's one article on the subject https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1087079201902023?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10870...
- rtx 6y agoThey have, and thats how its confirmed. My comment is more around the social or cultural wisdom being mocked or ignored. I understand where it started from or why it was necessary, but the pendulum has sung too far.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoBut the social or cultural wisdom wasn't ignored, it was tested and found to be accurate. It's not about the pendulum swinging too far, cultural wisdom is mocked because it is often nonsense people convince themselves is true.
- yesenadam 6y agoThank you! PDF here https://www.academia.edu/download/44704857/Awakening_from_sleep20160413-6994-h2mucd.pdf https://www.academia.edu/download/44704857/Awakening_from_sl...
- basicplus2 6y agoFor those who this does not work.. Try tapping your forehead with forefinger while counting up to the time you want to wake up just before you close your eyes to go to sleep.. eg to wake at 6am... tap six times while saying "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6" Repeat 2 times, (3 times in total)
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoThere’s a term / name for this method. Emotional freedom technique (EFT)?
- basicplus2 6y agoI had never heard of this.. Seems it is for relieving emotional stress but i had only used it specifically to wake up at a specific time. https://www.healthline.com/health/eft-tapping https://www.healthline.com/health/eft-tapping
- carapace 6y agoEFT is unrelated to head tapping for setting internal wake up calls. In EFT you're tapping on the end points of the meridian lines to send a kind of "reset pulse" to clear emotional issues. (At least that's the concept.) To set a "wake up call" you (basicplus2) tap your head with your finger, but probably not on a meridian point, and you're not trying to clear an emotional issue. Also, some people tap their whole head on their pillow instead.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoAh right, thanks, I wasn’t sure if the two were related.
- carapace 6y agoCheers!
- mbStavola 6y agoThere is definitely something to this. A similar phenomenon occurs on public transit-- waking up at (or just before) your stop. I found that if I've taken the trip at least once, I can wake up pretty much exactly when I need to. Nearly every other frequent commuter I've discussed this with has a similar experience. I used to believe it was related to subtle audio/visual cues while unconscious, but it might just be a function of a sense of time.
- yesenadam 6y agoYeah, does seem more likely it's my brain knowing the time fairly accurately from the early morning light levels, bird song, traffic noises, temperature, smells in the air etc, and other cues I'm not consciously aware of, than that I have a timer, accurate to a few minutes over 9 or 10 hours, in my body.
- andai 6y ago> We can't do that when we're awake I started using a timer about ten years ago for mundane tasks (getting done a chunk of unpleasant work, or for cooking) and these days I'll get up from my desk to go check on the oven right before the timer rings. It works regardless of the length of the timer, and even when I don't know exactly how many minutes it is (twisty analog oven dial). I don't consciously know how much time is left, but somehow I do know when "it's time." Haven't tested this on longer timescales (hours) though, but I did meet a guy who said he always knew what time it was because he used to work for a TV station doing the countdown til they go on air.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoIf someone asks me the time I'll often respond without looking "about 2.30". Then after digging out my phone check and see it's actually "2.35".
- xwdv 6y agoYour perception of time is off, you are perceiving time to be passing slower than it actually is. Right now it only seems like 5 minutes, but over time these error minutes will accumulate and you will feel like you have lived less life than you actually have lived in real time. If you did not know how old you were, one day you might be asked to guess, and think you are 63, but then be told the truth and come to the chilling realization you are actually 82 and near death. That is the danger of lagging time perception.
- kklisura 6y agoWas it "The Power of Your Subconscious Mind" that you read, by any chance? I remember reading that there and applying it as well and it did kind of work. I've read that as kid as well, so maybe that has to do with something. I regard that books as a pseudoscience from today's time, but who knows.
- yesenadam 6y agoNo, it was a book for kids about time and measurement or something..in the early 80s.
- davidn20 6y agoGary Halbert, one of the best copywriters of all time, uses a time method to check if his mind was sharp. He will guess at how much time has passed without looking at a clock. The closer he was to the real time the better.
- elliekelly 6y agoThat's interesting. I thought I had read that older people perceive time more slowly than younger people but I wonder if that can be overcome by keeping our sense of time-telling "calibrated" by periodically checking our accuracy.
- lathiat 6y agoI’ve heard that story before and it was effectively centered on the fact that each year was a proportionally smaller part of your life as you get older. But feels like it wouldn’t be hard for that long term sense of time to be fairly disconnected with a very short term one.
- ButWhatFor 6y agoI thought it was the other way around? As you get older your perceive time as moving more quickly? As you get older every hour is a smaller percentage of your total life, so that made sense to me?
- the_other 6y agoMy experiences with this suggest that “long” spans of time (weeks->years) follow the “smaller percentage of your life” principle. However, occasions “in the moment” get perceived according to the rules applicable for that moment: - boring things: usually a slow dirge or filled with brief distractions - novel things: either no sense of time passing, or a feeling of time going anywhere from slowly to “endless” - mundane things: time passes “at a familiar rate”, but I remember fee details later
- elliekelly 6y agoYou're absolutely right. Total brain fart and it's too late for me to correct it with an edit.
- Aperocky 6y agoYeah I had similar experiences. If I want to wake up really early for something I think is important, even if I stay up late, I just need to tell myself to wake up at $time and it works.
- skocznymroczny 6y agoWhen I was a kid, we used to have a radio/tape/CD player with a digital clock on it. Whenever I looked at it, as in whenever my body thought it would be a good idea to check the time, it was always something like 11:11 or 16:16.
- zabardasth 6y agoYes, I too am a fan of repdigits.
- yesenadam 6y agoMaybe that's true, but when I hear people say they always look at their watches at 12:34 or such a thing, I suspect (because it never happened to me!) it's probably something akin to the Baader-Meinhof illusion, "where something that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards." There are many similar phenonema humans fall victim to, thanks to our cognitive biases - our brains not as good at certain things as we'd like to think. You tend to only remember what seem those unusual times. And the more you freak out about it, and wonder what the hell's going on, the more you remember seeing them, and the more you look.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...
- scruple 6y agoIt happens to me pretty frequently. In truth, I know that I look at the digital clock on my microwave probably 100 times a day.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoIt might also be precognition?
- scruple 6y agoOr 12:34 or sometimes my birthday.
- monster_group 6y ago
- secfirstmd 6y agoHaha, I know that's weird but actually I've noticed that myself happening a lot - thought I might be the only one! :)
- BlahGod420 6y agoLikewise. It works for insane times too; I've woken up in as little as 3 hours when I desperately needed 8 hours. There's a bit of a computational alarm clock in our brains somehow.
- tenaciousDaniel 6y agoA couple of weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night. My first thought was, it's 2:54am. I didn't have any visible clocks, so I looked at my phone, and it was 2:53am. I've had that happen multiple times. Very strange.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI noticed years ago when at a bus stop, I'd get impatient and antsy seconds before the bus arrived (on time). I figured it was my subconscious alarm clock.
- L_226 6y agoCurious if you play/ed a musical instrument? I learned violin as a child and also experience the same phenomenon you describe, but I always attributed it to some neural pathway that was created during musical training (i.e. reading sheet music).
- aeternum 6y agoIs it possible you are subconsciously waking up and looking at the clock (or doing it consciously at the time but just not remembering it)? Sleep generally triggers some unique memory suppression mechanisms.
- yesenadam 6y agoNo, I've never slept with a clock in my room.
- rekabis 6y agoMy asleep brain can do the exact same thing, even with consistent sleep deprivation (although it gets increasingly difficult beyond a sleep deficit of twelve hours per week). On the flip side, my awake brain is completely and totally time-blind. I can go _hours_ on a subject I am obsessing over, and think it’s been just thirty minutes. Asperger’s sucks.