A recent sleep study found that during certain sleep stages, the brain becomes far less responsive to sound but remains sensitive to other types of signals.
This helps explain why:
- One partner’s alarm wakes the other partner
- Yet the person it’s meant for often sleeps right through it
- Many adults wake up feeling shocked, stressed, or irritated
- Couples report small daily conflicts around morning routines
Researchers discovered that loud alarms, especially phone alarms, trigger an immediate stress response. Heart rate spikes. The brain jumps from deep sleep to full alert in seconds. It’s this abrupt jolt, not the actual alarm, that often wakes the partner first.
In other words:
Traditional alarms are biologically built to disturb the wrong person.