#451 Somehow waking up at the right time even though you forgot to set your alarm clock

Neil Pasricha

That was a close one.

Last night you hit the pillow without a safety net and fell into a free-falling slumber with no end in sight. You could have slept all day, you could have slept all night, but somehow you got up just in time. Yes, you sprung up like a Jack-in-the-Box with your heart beating, eyeballs popping, staring in shock at your curiously quiet clock.

But that’s when you suddenly tap your temple with your finger and nod a slow nod at the genius of your own brain. Thank goodness that pink fleshy lump knew the deal and stayed awake counting seconds all night so you could pop up right when you needed to.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here and here

80 thoughts to “#451 Somehow waking up at the right time even though you forgot to set your alarm clock”

  3. This is so completely awesome. This even happens to me on the weekends! I pop up, ready to start the day, and then realize I have more sleep left than I realized. Truly. Awesome.

  4. No more email messages? I guess I was the only one who actually liked reading those.

    And yes, when my alarm for school doesn’t go off, and I end up waking up at 6:30 anyway, it’s a wonderful feeling. :]

    4. I liked them too but I think he said that he was only doing them for 100 days after the release of the book. Maybe he’ll bring them back for the second book. :-)

    1. Don’t beat yourself over it, it is not an every day thing. However I have an amazing tendency of waking up just moments before my alarm goes off, and I am left ruing those few seconds

  7. hmmmm… I’m so completely the opposite. I manage to hit snooze every 10 minutes for an hour without actually waking up (or remembering) and then wake up a little two hours later to glance over at the clock and jump out of bed screaming. Think: the start of 4 weddings and a funeral. not awesome :(

  8. Its also awesome when you wake up 5 mins before your alarm goes off and are able to just lie there happily waiting to get up =)

  9. I woke up 2 minutes before my alarm was due to go off this morning and I thought to myself ‘this should so be on this list’ and it kinda is!! AWESOME!

  10. This happens to me a lot. I found that I can tell myself what time I want to wake up before I go to bed, and then wake up at that time. Somehow the brain or the subconcious knows when to wake up.

  11. Whenever I do this I freak out. It doesn’t matter if I wake up the exact minute or not, I always think that since my clock didn’t wake me, I’m going to be late

    1. Haha, I know exactly what you mean Bekah! It’s the same feeling I get when I do something out of order, like getting dressed before brushing my teeth. Something just feels off about the whole morning!

  12. I usually wake up a minute or two before the alarm goes off, even on days I don’t go to work. Those are nice, because then I get to get up, do a little work around the house, then take a morning nap. It’s very important to get up early on those days, because if you don’t you might just sleep through your monring nap, and that would not be Awesome at all.

  13. I do this sometimes, but i tend to hit my alarm while i do it, even though it didn’t go off

  14. When I pulled up the blog this morning I just knew this would be the awesome thing of the day because this morning I got up at the time I was supposed to leave the house, but managed to get dressed, ready, and out the door in 5 minutes…AWESOME!

  15. It’s so cool that so many of us happened to wake up naturally at 6:30 or something like that. Today I woke up before my little one shuffled into the bedroom. So nice!

  16. Happened today! It’s even better, when my 1 year old pup knows that it’s time to go into her crate for a nap. Does it the same time each day when she hears a certain theme tune on the Today Show. Genius! Now that’s truly awesome.

  17. I love this one!
    On our last vacation, we needed to wake up at 5am to get to the airport, and the alarm clock we brought with us was pooched. We thought we’d figured out a way for the laptop to be an alarm, but ironically, the laptop went into “sleep mode” and the alarm didn’t go off.
    Good thing for the brain alarm in my head that went off at 5:20, giving us j-u-s-t enough time to get up and get ready. Whew!

        1. Being stranded in a foreign country would DEFINITELY be on the list of 1,000 NOT awesome things that Neil’s eluded to a few times, that’s for sure!

  18. Considering how early I have to wake up, it’s not an awesome thing when this happens to me. It’s a bonafide miracle.

    My alarm is my laptop. I managed to find a program that will set my iTunes a-blaring when 6:13 rolls around (for some reason, I never set my alarm in increments of 5 like, you know, a typical person).

    The other day I left my headphones in so there was no way I’d be able to hear it. Sure enough, I’m up at 6:15, cutting my breakfast time by that much, but not nearly enough to get me rushing.

    Nevermind…I guess that IS pretty awesome.

    1. 6:13…that’s my birthday time. June 13~ awesome

      I set my clock for 5:21. Don’t know why, that’s just where it is.

      1. Cool! I’m a 13’er, too!

        I set mine for 6:51, because then after the 9-minute snooze, it goes off again at the 7 o’clock news.

        P.S. Gross! You have to get up at 5:21?

        1. yes, i have to get up that early to get me and my daughter ready to head out the door. It sucks, but I get home earlier than most people which is awesome.
          My clock also only has a 4 minute snooze, so if I hit the snooze it takes me to 5:25… which I guess does make a little sense. Hmmm…… maybe I’ll hit the snooze more often.

            2. Does anyone want me to remind them of my wife’s former 1-minute snooze?

              I know I certainly don’t want to think about it again.

  19. I love this pictures. I try to guess what they are and how they apply to the blog before I read it. Haha

    1. I really like your thinking.
      This one in particular made me think Neil was going to discuss one of my glue-movies, “Drop Dead Fred!” Hilarious and heart felt too.

  20. I do this during the school year, but I really let myself go during summer. I woke up at *1 pm* today (granted, there was a crazy dream that had to be finished before I got up, but still)

  21. A couple years ago, I had a 7AM final on Good Friday. I set my alarm for 6:15…PM. Somehow I woke up at 6:50 and made it to the classroom seconds before the professor walked in. I called it an Easter miracle and it certainly was awesome!

    1. Awesome! The waking up at the same time without my alarm happens to me frequently, but it must not happen to my husband because one time, in college, we had an 8 am exam for the same class. He didn’t show up, and I pretended I was going to the bathroom 10 minutes into the exam to get out of the exam room to call him to wake him up and tell him to get his butt to our exam!

      His payback now is putting up with my 1-minute snooze button on my phone at 5:30 am. I think he’s getting the short end of the stick here…

      1. Ack!!

        The commenter above is “Mrs. Freddo” selling me out about my previous slacking ways, and how I almost slept clean through an exam… Oops!

        She was the best though – I made it to the exam only about 45 minutes late, and managed to finish enough of the exam to pass.. whew!

  23. I read this blog every day – and this actually happened to me this morning for the first time in probably a decade.

    Spooky.

  24. I love that you used Bobby ‘the brain’ Heenan. Notice the little ‘b’….awesome.

  26. This is my every morning… it’s a blessing, but a curse too. I always wake up two minutes before my alarm should go off… no matter what time I set it for. I love it, but it’s also kind of annoying when I could have slept for two more minutes.

  28. You know how we’ve all made the mistake of accidentally setting our alarm clock for PM instead of AM?

    The new technology version of this is when you set your alarm clock on your iphone/blackberry/whatever, and you set the right time, but forget that your alarm is only set for “weekdays”, and you need to get up early on a weekend to catch a flight, or what have you. That stuff never happened when we were kids. There are too many ways to mess up your alarm clock now!

    That’s another time when a moment like the one is this post is truly AWESOME!

    1. Or, conversely, you forget that something like, oh, say CHRISTMAS day is on a weekday and your silly husband’s blackberry goes off at 5:30 am, and you’re at your parent’s place, and it’s really dark and disorienting, and you can’t find it because it’s in a pocket on the floor in a heap of clothes, and you’re waking up the whole family…

      And then it HAPPENS AGAIN the next day…

      Thank goodness Christmas is on Saturday this year, is all I can say.

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  31. One time I woke up and hit the buzzer so precisely that the alarm did not go off and yet the time was exactly the time of my alarm, which basically meant that I had hit the button in that split second before the alarm went off. It was super cool.

  32. This happened to me like 5 days ago before work. I had a 6am shift and went to bed later than I should have while not as sober as I should have been and forgot to set my alarm. I’m the type who has no problem sleeping in till 1pm or later. I woke up at like 4:30am in one of those stunning “oh shit!” moments, glance at the clock, and realize somehow my body woke me up before I was screwed, it was awesome. That level of relief isn’t something I typically experience.

  33. Haven t woke up to an alarm clock in years, it a good thing as well as a bad thing at the same time!!

  35. This happens to me all the time and it truly is awesome. A lot better than those few times my brain lets me down, and lets me sleep through the snooze.
    My brain actually counted down this morning. I remember just before my eyes popped open, my dream/subconsious going 5..4..3..2..1. Very, very strange.

  36. I do think its awesome waking up on time even when I’ve forgotten to set my alarm… but I don’t think I could ever fall asleep with that creepy clown beside my bed!!! :S

  37. Thank you internal clock for waking me up exactly 1 min before I had to be to work, and I live close to my work so I got up and ran over there just in time.

  38. I love it whenthat happns, I like to think we have internal alarms that go ” hey you!!!!!!! ” at exactly he right time. Awesome.

  40. One of my favourite posts so far :D Too bad it so rarely happens. Maybe if I got more than 7 1/2 hours sleep regularly then I’d be able to get myself up earlier.

  41. That’s common thing if you get up every day at same time. Eventually you can do it without alarm clock. Now what really awesome is to train your brain to know when it is a week-end so you DO NOT get up too early :D never worked for me though =/

  42. This has happened to me even when I set my alarm for a different time to my usual waking up time! My brain must have programmed it into my biological clock when I set my alarm. Amazing.

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  45. Wow! it’s awesome. This has happened to me also. Actually i used to wake-up at 5:30am, every day and it’s my routine set since i was a student in the college. But on Sunday’s i don’t want to get up early, then also i will have to wake up as it is a continuous going process and i cannot interrupt my mind to do so. So nothing can be done for that. 5:30 that means 5:30, that’s it.

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