012 The Clock Inside
Hey Rooster, you crow before dawn even in a dark room. You keep time by a clock inside you, not by the sunrise.
Do we need an alarm, or have we built the habit?
Do you need an alarm to start your day, or have you built the habit?
It is still dark. No birds sing. No light shows on the horizon. Then, from a mud wall in the village, the rooster calls.
How does he know? He cannot see the sun. It has not risen yet.
What really happens
A rooster does not wait for the sunrise. He keeps time with a clock inside his own body.
When scientists kept roosters in constant dim light, with no day or night at all, the birds still crowed at about the time dawn would have come. Their body clock had learned the rhythm of the day so well that they no longer needed the sun to remind them.
How we know: Shimmura and Yoshimura, Current Biology, 2013.
The turn
Many of us start the day pushed by an alarm, a deadline or someone else's call.
The rooster is pulled by his own rhythm. He has repeated it so often that it has become part of him.
Three takeaways
- A habit repeated long enough becomes a clock inside you.
- You do not need the perfect signal to begin. Your rhythm can be the signal.
- What you do every day matters more than what you do once.
Do it often enough, and you will wake up already doing it.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.