The early bird catches an early death; experts urge faith in our circadian clock

The circadian clock comes at no extra charge with every human body, and I’m convinced it features an alarm. It works like this: you tell yourself what time you want to wake up–at 7 a.m., say–and then you wake up at 7 a.m. Simple as that.
Only two paragraphs in and already the wary reader has cocked a skeptical eyebrow. Many people think they have no choice but to depend on electro-mechanical alarm clocks–pesky objects that ring, buzz, play music, interrupt good dreams and clutter the nightstand. But scientists are learning more about our built-in clocks and warning us that we disregard them at our peril.
Two studies of the circadian clock came out last week that reveal more about how–and how reliably–it works. Researchers writing in the journal Molecular Cell located the tick-tock of the circadian clock in a biochemical feedback loop involving proteins and phosphates within each cell. Every cell has its own little metronome. They know what time it is.
The other study, in the journal Cell, explains how the clock remains accurate even when temperature changes. Our metabolism changes with temperature, but our self-regulating circadian clocks remain true to their own timekeeping.
These studies arrive on the heels of a lovely proposal made in The New York Times by the biologist Leon Kreitzman, who argues we should adjust our society to our circadian clocks instead of adjusting our bodies to mechanical clocks, and for good reason:
Only cultural norms and the alarm clock give us the pretense of choice by overriding our inner rhythms — and there is increasing evidence that we are paying a high cost in terms of our health. Disruption of the circadian clock is linked with cancer, cardiovascular diseases, gastric illnesses, asthma, schizophrenia, learning disorders and other conditions.
So for your own sake, learn to trust your circadian clock. Trust, in fact, may be the switch that sets its alarm. When I finally gave up my noisy night-stand alarm, my circadian alarm embraced its duty.
As long as I’m sleeping well–that is, not too stressed out–I can not only wake up daily at a certain time, I can adjust the time by thinking about it. Tomorrow I’d like to wake up at 6:33, I’ll tell myself, or 8:42, and the circadian alarm clock will wake me up then. It doesn’t always work to the minute, but it’s close enough to make the morning train.
Still skeptical? If you use a night-stand alarm clock, perhaps you’ve noticed this phenomenon: sometimes you wake up a minute or two before the alarm goes off. That’s your circadian alarm clock at work. It knows the time you set on the night-stand alarm clock. It’s waking you up to give you a chance to turn the damn thing off before it makes that godawful noise.
I should warn you, before you try this at home, that the circadian alarm clock has one drawback: other people can set it too, like mischievous friends who wish you goodnight by saying, “4 a.m.! 4 a.m.! 4 a.m.!”