Shadowing Practice: Why Do You Keep Waking Up at 3AM (The Strange Psychology Behind It) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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3 .07am.
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Your eyes pop open.
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No noise.
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No nightmare.
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No reason.
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One second you're out cold.
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The next you're staring at the ceiling, wide awake, while your brain starts doing math.
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If I fall asleep right now, I still get three hours and 53 minutes.
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Sound familiar?
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You're in good company.
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In a survey of nearly 9 ,000 American adults,
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about one in three said they wake up in the middle of the night at least three nights a week.
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So tonight, millions of people will be lying in the dark doing that exact same math.
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But here's the strange part.
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For a lot of people, it's not a random time.
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Not midnight.
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Not five.
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It's that same dead zone around three night after night like an alarm you never set.
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The internet has theories.
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It's your liver.
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It's a spiritual sign.
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It's the witching hour.
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The real answer is stranger than all of them.
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And it starts with an experiment where scientists turned off the lights for 14 hours a night.
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Welcome back to Apex.
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Today we're finding out why you keep waking up at 3 a .m., and why it's so hard to fall back asleep,
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and most importantly, how to break this annoying loop so you can sleep straight through until morning.
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Grab your blanket and let's go.
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So, here's that experiment.
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In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Ware at the U .S.
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National Institute of Mental Health asked a simple question.
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What does human sleep look like without electric light?
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To find out, he gave a small group of healthy volunteers a very, very long winter.
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For four weeks, they spent 14 hours in darkness every single night.
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No lamps, no TV, no reading.
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Just darkness.
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And as much sleep as they wanted.
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At first, they slept like people paying off a giant sleep debt around 11 hours a night.
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But by the fourth week, something strange happened.
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Their sleep split in two.
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They'd sleep for about four hours, then wake up completely on their own and stay awake for one to three hours.
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Then they'd fall back asleep for about four more.
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Nobody told them to do this.
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No alarm went off.
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Their bodies just did it.
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And here's where it gets even more interesting.
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Historians have found the same pattern in diaries, letters, and court records from centuries ago.
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People casually wrote about their first sleep and their second sleep,
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as if waking up in the middle of the night was the most normal thing in the world.
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Scientists still argue about how common this two -part sleep really was.
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But Weir's experiment showed one thing very clearly.
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The human body is perfectly capable of waking itself up in the middle of the night.
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It's not a glitch.
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It may be an old setting your body, never fully deleted.
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And it's not just the long wake -ups.
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You also wake up far more often than you think.
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In a classic sleep lab study, people who complained about poor sleep were asked the next morning how many times they'd woken up during the night.
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Every single one of them reported fewer wake -ups than the lab had recorded.
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Short wake -ups are a normal part of healthy sleep.
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We just forget them.
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Why?
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Because the brain is terrible at remembering the last few minutes before you drift off.
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Researchers have shown that if people fall asleep for around 10 minutes, they forget much of what they heard just before.
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So a 10 -second wake -up at 1 .40 a .m vanishes like it never happened.
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But the 3 a .m one doesn't vanish.
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It comes with thoughts, with feelings, with that little voice going, oh no, not again.
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And moments that come with strong feelings are much easier for the brain to remember.
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That's why this is the wake -up you never forget.
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So waking up at night isn't the problem.
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The real mystery is why it keeps happening at 3 a .m.
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It turns out three things line up at almost exactly that hour.
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Reason number one, your sleep gets lighter.
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Sleep isn't one long dive.
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It comes in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, and they're not all the same.
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Early in the night, the cycles are packed with deep sleep, the heavy kind where someone could vacuum next to your bed and you'd barely notice.
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As the night goes on, deep sleep fades, and you spend more time in light sleep and dreaming sleep think of it like swimming.
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At the start of the night, you're deep underwater.
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By the second half, you're floating just under the surface.
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And the force that pulled you down is getting weaker too.
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All day long, sleep pressure builds up in your brain, and sleep clears it away fastest in those first deep hours.
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So if you went to bed around 11 or midnight, by 3am the deep sleep is mostly done,
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the pressure is lower, and you're closest to the surface.
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A creaky floor, a hot blanket, a partner stealing the covers, and pop, you're up.
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Reason number two, your body starts the morning early.
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Here's something most people don't know.
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Your body starts your morning while you're still asleep.
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Cortisol, a hormone that helps you wake up and get moving, is at its lowest around midnight.
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Then, in the hours before dawn, it slowly starts to climb, so you'll have energy when the alarm goes off.
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That's normal.
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It's the reason you can get out of bed at all.
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But cortisol is also a stress hormone.
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And when life is stressful, your body's alarm system is already running hot.
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In a small 2001 study at Penn State, researchers measured stress hormones around the clock in people with long -term insomnia.
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and in good sleepers.
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The people with insomnia had higher levels, including at night.
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Their problem wasn't a lack of sleepiness, it was too much alertness, as if part of them was still on guard duty.
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So at 3 a .m., two things meet.
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A morning signal that's starting to rise and an alarm system that never fully clocked out.
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It doesn't take much to tip you over into being awake.
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Try this.
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Think back to a time in your life when you slept like a baby.
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What was going on back then?
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For a lot of people, it was a calmer time.
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Now think about when the 3 a .m wake -ups get worse before a big deadline.
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After a breakup, when money is tight, your body isn't waking you at random, it's carrying your day into your night.
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Reason number three, last night's drink.
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A lot of people end a long day with a glass of wine or a beer to help them unwind.
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And at first, it seems to work.
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A major review of the research found that alcohol,
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at every dose tested, helps people fall asleep faster and sleep more deeply in the first half of the night.
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But alcohol is a terrible night shift worker.
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By the middle of the night, your body has processed much of it, the calming effect wears off, and sleep turns broken and restless.
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The same review found more disrupted sleep in the second half of the night, again at every dose.
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So the drink that knocked you out at 11 can be the very thing that wakes you up at 3.
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Add a warm room, or a trip to the bathroom, and in light sleep, that's all it takes.
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So that's why you wake up.
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But it still doesn't explain the worst part.
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Why are some nights over in 2 minutes, while others drag on until the birds start singing?
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The difference comes down to what happens next.
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Once you're awake, three traps are waiting for you.
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And the first one usually springs within seconds.
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Trap number one, checking the time. Be honest.
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What's the first thing you do when your eyes open at night?
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You grab your phone, it blinds you like an interrogation lamp, and you check the time.
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It feels harmless.
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Science says otherwise.
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In 2007, researchers at the University of Oxford tested what that little habit actually does.
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They asked some people to keep a clock in view and watch it while they tried to fall asleep,
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and others to keep it out of sight.
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The clock watchers worried more and took longer to fall asleep, and that was true even for people who normally sleep well.
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Then they ran a second experiment with people who had insomnia.
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This time some watched a clock and others watched a screen of meaningless numbers.
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So both groups had something glowing to stare at.
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The only difference was what the numbers meant.
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And again, the clock watchers worried more, and they guessed they'd been awake much longer than they really had.
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So the problem isn't the light, it's the meaning.
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307 isn't just a number, it's a countdown.
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The moment you see it, your brain starts calculating how much sleep you have left and how tired you'll be tomorrow.
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And every calculation sends the same message, this is urgent.
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That's the exact opposite of what sleep needs.
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Trap number two, the 3 a .m brain.
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Have you noticed that problems feel bigger at night?
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The bill you didn't care about at lunch suddenly feels like the beginning of the end.
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You're not imagining it.
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In 2022, sleep researchers from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Arizona put forward an idea they called the mind after midnight.
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After reviewing the evidence, they argued that when you're awake during your biological night, your mind works differently.
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It pays more attention to threats, it leans toward negative feelings, and the prefrontal cortex, the part that normally keeps your reactions in check,
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has a weaker grip.
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There's also a well -known experiment from UC Berkeley and Harvard.
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After a night without sleep, people looked at upsetting images while their brains were scanned.
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Their amygdala, the brain's alarm center, reacted about 60 % more strongly than in people who'd slept.
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That was after a full night awake, not one wake up at 3am.
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But it shows the direction.
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The more tired your brain is, the louder the alarm and the weaker the brakes.
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Here's what that looks like in real life.
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A friend hasn't replied to your message.
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At 3pm, you think, they're probably busy.
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At 3am, you think, they hate me and honestly they've hated me since 2019.
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Same message.
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Different brain.
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And once that thought shows up, it doesn't leave.
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It loops.
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Like a song stuck in your head, except the song is about your bank account.
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So your problems aren't bigger at 3am.
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The judge looking at them is just exhausted.
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And now for the strangest trap of all.
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Because it answers the question we started with.
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Why it keeps happening at the same time.
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Trap number three.
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A bed that learned to worry.
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You've probably heard of Pavlov's dogs.
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Ring a bell every time food arrives, and soon the bell alone makes the dogs drool.
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Your brain learns the same way.
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If your bed is where you lie awake, check the time and worry.
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Night after night, your brain starts to link the bed with being alert.
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It's why some people can nod off on the couch in five minutes, then walk into the bedroom and suddenly feel wide awake.
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The couch is just a couch.
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The bed has become the place where your brain holds its late night meetings.
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And your body doesn't just learn places, it learns times.
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In a 1999 study published in the journal
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Nature, researchers at the University of Lübeck in Germany had volunteers sleep in a lab.
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Some were told they'd be woken up at 6am, others were told 9am.
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In the people who expected to wake at 6,
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a stress hormone that tells the body to release cortisol started rising about an hour before the wake -up.
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Their bodies were getting ready for a time they'd only been told about.
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Your body, it turns out, is a very loyal assistant.
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It shows up early for every appointment, even the ones you'd love to cancel.
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Now think about what happens when you wake up at 3, night after night, and spend an hour stressed about it.
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Your body may start to treat 3am less like an accident and more like an appointment.
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So in many cases, that mysterious 3am alarm isn't your liver and it isn't a sign from the universe.
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It may simply be a habit your body learned one night at a time.
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The good news is that anything your body has learned, it can unlearn.
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Fix number one, hide the clock.
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Tonight, turn your clock to face the wall and put your phone somewhere you can't reach from bed.
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If you wake up, don't check.
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Not even a tiny peek.
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No number means no countdown, and no countdown means no math.
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It might feel strange at first because not knowing the time is uncomfortable, terrible, but knowing it has never once helped you fall back asleep.
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If your phone is your alarm, that's fine.
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Set it before bed, put it face down across the room, and let it be the one thing that tells you when the night is over.
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And here's something comforting.
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People with sleep problems often feel they've been awake much longer than they really were,
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and research shows they tend to underestimate how much they actually slept.
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So that whole hour at 3am may have been much shorter, with a few light naps you never noticed.
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Fix number two, don't trust your 3 a .m thoughts.
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When a heavy thought shows up in the middle of the night, don't argue with it and don't try to solve it.
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Just name it.
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Ah, this is my 3 a .m brain talking.
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The moment you see it as a tired brain talking, it loses a lot of its power.
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Then follow one simple rule.
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No big decisions, no life conclusions, and no texting your ex before sunrise.
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If the problem is real, it'll still be there in the morning and you'll face it with a brain that's working at full strength.
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You can also take away some of your mind's material before bed.
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In one study, students with insomnia spent a few minutes in the evening writing down their worries, and next to each one,
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a first small step they could take.
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Compared with students who only wrote down their worries, they felt less mentally wound up at bedtime.
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When a worry already has a plan, your brain has less reason to bring it up at 3 a .m.
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Fix number three, get out of bed.
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This one sounds backwards, but it's one of the best -tested tools in sleep medicine.
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If you've been awake for what feels like a while, don't just lie there and wait.
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Judge it by feel, not by the clock.
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Get up, go to another room, keep the lights dim, and do something boring, like folding laundry or reading the most boring book you own.
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Just don't pick up your phone.
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The goal is to stay bored and relaxed until your eyelids start to feel heavy.
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Then go back to bed, and get up at the same time every morning, no matter how the night went.
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Why does this work?
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Because every time you leave the bed, instead of lying there stressed, you teach your brain again that the bed is for sleeping, not for worrying.
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It might feel like you're giving up on sleep.
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You're not.
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You're giving your bed its old job back.
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This method is part of CBTI, a short therapy for insomnia that doesn't involve any pills.
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The American College of Physicians recommends it as the first treatment for adults with chronic insomnia before sleeping pills.
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And in a review of 20 clinical trials,
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CBTI cut the time people spent awake in the middle of the night by about 26 minutes on average.
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One important note, if you snore loudly, wake up gasping, or keep waking up too early with a low mood that won't lift for weeks,
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talk to a doctor.
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Early waking can sometimes be a sign of sleep apnea or depression, and those deserve proper medical care.
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So the next time your eyes pop open at 3 .07, remember, your body isn't broken.
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You just surfaced the way you do many times every night.
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What really matters is what you do in the next few seconds.
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Don't count.
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Don't believe everything the dark tells you.
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And if sleep doesn't come back, let the bed go for a while.
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Don't worry.
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It'll still be there when you're ready.
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Now I'm curious.
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Which trap gets you the most?
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Checking the time, the 3 a .m brain, or a bed that learned to worry?
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Type 1, 2, or 3 in the comments.
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And if you know someone who's always awake at 3am, maybe the friend who sends you deep thoughts at that exact hour,
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send this video to them.
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It might help them sleep a little easier tonight.
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I'm Apex.
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If this helped you decode your nights, hit subscribe, sleep well, and see you in the next one.
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Thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Do You Keep Waking Up at 3AM”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: sleep, wake, brain, bed, hour. This video has 255 sentences and 2848 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:07. The speaker talks fast, about 188 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| awake verb | /əˈweɪk/ | To become conscious after having slept. |
| clock noun | /klɑk/ | A chronometer, an instrument that measures time, particularly the time of day. |
| asleep adjective | /əˈsliːp/ | In a state of sleep; also, broadly, resting. |
| alarm noun | /əˈlɑɹm/ | A summons to arms, as on the approach of an enemy. |
| trap noun | /tɹæp/ | A machine or other device designed to catch (and sometimes kill) animals, either by holding them in a container, or by catching hold of part of the body. |
| experiment noun | /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/ | A test under controlled conditions made to either demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of… |
| researcher noun | /ˈɹiˌsɝ.t͡ʃɚ/ | One who researches. |
| midnight noun | /ˈmɪd(ˌ)naɪt/ | The middle of the night: the sixth temporal hour, equidistant between sunset and sunrise. |
| hormone noun | /ˈhoɹmoʊn/ | Any substance produced by one tissue and conveyed by the bloodstream to another to effect physiological activity. |
| argue verb | /ˈɑɹ.ɡju/ | To show grounds for concluding (that); to indicate, imply. |
| couch noun | /ˈkaʊ̯t͡ʃ/ | An item of furniture, often upholstered, for the comfortable seating of more than one person; a sofa. |
| mathematics noun | /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/ | An abstract representational system studying numbers, shapes, structures, quantitative change and relationships between them. |
| bore verb | /boɹ/ | To inspire boredom in somebody. |
| weaker adjective | /ˈwikɚ/ | Said of one proposition with respect to another one: that the latter entails the former, but the former does not entail the latter. |
| countdown noun | /ˈkaʊntˌdaʊn/ | A count backward in fixed units to the time of some event, especially the launch of a space vehicle. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| wake up verb | /ˌweɪk ˈʌp/ | To stop sleeping; to awake. |
| fall back verb | To retreat. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. | |
| go off verb | To explode. | |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. | |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. | |
| write down verb | To produce or set (something) down in writing; to record something. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- One second you're out cold.
- Grab your blanket and let's go.
- What's the first thing you do when your eyes open at night?
- Have you noticed that problems feel bigger at night?
- Which trap gets you the most?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have found · have shown · has processed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who complained · people who normally · people who had |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | were asked · were scanned · were told |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 69 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, isn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/, calculation /ˌkælkjuˈleɪʃn̩/, casually /ˈkæʒuəli/, interrogation /ɪnˌteɹ.əˈɡeɪ.ʃən/, vanish /ˈvænɪʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/, uncomfortable /ʌnˈkʌm.fɚ.tə.bl̩/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like awake, clock, asleep.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.