Illustration: Kieran Blakey

The Nuance

This Is Why You Keep Waking Up In the Middle of the Night

The science behind that silent, malfunctioning alarm clock in your brain

Elemental
Published in
5 min readJan 9, 2020

--

It’s three a.m., but you don’t need to check your phone to know that.

You know it’s that time because you always wake up at three a.m. It’s like your brain is equipped with a…

--

--

Markham Heid
Elemental

I’m a frequent contributor at TIME, the New York Times, and other media orgs. I write mostly about health and science. I like long walks and the Grateful Dead.