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

Markham Heid
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…

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Markham Heid
Elemental

I’m a long-time contributor at TIME and other media orgs. I write mostly about health. I grew up in Michigan, but these days I live in southwest Germany.