Our Mind's Natural Alarm Clock : Wake Up on Time and Ditch the Noisy, Annoying Gadget

It’s Sunday night and before you finally shut the lights off you reach for the alarm clock to set it at 5:30 AM. You want to wake up early because you have a very important business appointment the following day. Unfortunately, you forgot that the clock’s battery was due for replacement and it stopped ticking just before the cock even crow. You enjoyed wandering in dreamland past 5:30 and by the time you do wake up it’s almost 7 Am. You rush to beat the 8 AM business appointment that was to be the first big deal of your life. Either you make it in time or you don’t, thanks to distance and traffic from your house to the venue.

Situations like that do happen and it’s relatively caused by our dependence on physical factors that influence our wake-up time. We tend to rely too much on external source like gadgets such as cellphones and alarm clocks, or someone to wake us up on certain time of day or night. Unknown to many, though, is that our brain is actually equipped with the ability to do just that task.





Separate studies conducted by Jan Born (University of Lubeck, Germany) and William Moorcroft (Director of the Sleep and Dreams Laboratory at Luther College, Iowa) demonstrated that certain hormone ACTH (Adrenocorticotrophic hormone) is secreted by the pituitary gland (pea sized body attached to the base of the brain) to act as our internal alarm clock. Our anticipation to wake up at a certain time triggers the release of this hormone during our intended wake up time. That means, we can actually wake up at will.

I have long employed this mind’s ability a long time ago and it almost never failed to wake me up on time. You too can tap your mind’s built-in alarm clock. You can practice on weekends when you can put off your alarm safely. Before you go to sleep focus and mentally instruct yourself to wake up earlier than you used to on weekends. Mentally focused, close your eyes and say, “wake me up at 5:00 am” as if you are instructing your mind. Do so two or three more times. You’ll be surprised to be even waking up before then. If it doesn’t work the first time it surely will work on your second or third attempt. When you’ve mastered setting your mind’s built-in alarm clock you can eventually ditch that annoying desk clock. The upside with your mind’s built-in natural alarm is that you will be more alert in getting up than you would with that annoying sound of the gadget. Go close that biggest business deal of your life.