3 Reasons You Wake Up Just Before Your Alarm Goes Off, According to a Sleep Expert

Has this ever happened to you? You set your alarm for, say, 7:30 a.m., drift off to sleep, and in the morning your eyes shoot open at 7:28. You may be resentful that your body has robbed you of an extra two minutes of precious sleep—or you may be wondering whether you have a supernatural ability to tell time while unconscious.

We asked a sleep medicine physician what exactly is going on when we wake up right before our alarm goes off. She gave us three explanations, and surprisingly, one of them does involve something of a superpower.

You Have a Healthy Sleep Schedule

Congratulations—you may be waking up right before your alarm rings because you’ve got your sleep routine down pat.

“If you go to bed around the same time every night, get at least seven hours of sleep, and wake up around the same time every morning feeling refreshed, then your body is in tune with its circadian rhythm,” says Andrea Matsumura, MD, who specializes in internal medicine and sleep medicine.

Our circadian rhythm, described as our 24-hour internal clock, tells our body when to sleep and when to wake up. It’s partly controlled by a region of the brain that’s sensitive to external cues, like light and dark. “When darkness falls, melatonin is released, which gets us drifting off to sleep. Light—like sunlight filtering in through your blinds—triggers your circadian wake cycle for the day,” Matsumura explains.

So keeping regular bedtime and wakeup hours, and especially properly cueing your body with dark and light, will help your circadian rhythm run like a professional orchestra—on time, every time.

You’re Stressed About Waking Up

You could be so nervous about sleeping through your alarm—you have a plane to catch or an early meeting, for example—that your body wakes you up prematurely.

“When the body anticipates waking up earlier, it can release stress hormones like cortisol and ACTH in preparation for the day, even before the alarm goes off,” Matsumura says.

In this case, you might be waking up briefly throughout the night, not just in the minutes before your alarm, though you may not remember doing so.

If this happens to you regularly and you’re always waking up anxious and foggy-headed, your circadian rhythm could be out of whack. “When somebody is a night owl and goes to bed after midnight, say, but they have to wake up for work at 6 a.m., they’ll develop this kind of hypervigilance in their sleep and feel like they’re sleeping with one eye open,” Matsumura says.

Luckily, you can take steps to realign your circadian rhythm.

You’ve “Manifested” Your Wake-Up Time

This is a weird one: Some people may be able to will themselves to wake up at a certain time, Matsumura says.

“There is neuroscientific research behind manifestation and the power of persuasion,” she says. “We see it all the time with athletes. They’ve trained their brain to visualize an outcome on the field, for example, and have it become reality. So it’s possible that people can develop the ability to wake up at a certain time without using an alarm clock.”

How exactly can we train ourselves to wake up when we choose?

“I have no idea,” Matsumura says. “That hasn’t been studied. But we can extrapolate that the power of manifestation can help us adjust our sleep timing, as long as it’s in line with our circadian rhythm.”

Try setting an intention tonight and see what happens! (But keep that alarm clock on just in case.)