This is also why people suggest that you don’t set your favorite song as your alarm in the morning because you will learn to hate it by associating it with the anxiety and stress of waking up in the morning. One way to try to avoid this classical conditioning of the sound of an alarm and anxiety is switching up the sound that you wake up to each morning so that you are not conditioning your mind to hate a certain sound. People who fall into this category are at a higher risk to be stressed by certain sounds, which can also add to the stress of the conditioning of the sound of an alarm clock, making this conditioned aversive stimuli even more likely to be stressful. Some people also have a stronger sensitivity to sound than others, and after reading this article, I have realized that I definitely fall into this category. It also explains that stimuli that can not be controlled can cause more stress than stimuli under our control because humans like to be in control of their surroundings. In this article in Psychology Today, it explains that since noise is a stimulus, it can cause people to react negatively to it, like any other stimulus. While researching this topic, I also found an interesting topic that could be a reason as to why the tone of an alarm clock gives me anxiety. This supports my hypothesis, but now I know how and why this works the way it does. I am associating this sense of anxiety with the tone as well as with waking up early, and once it has been conditioned, this tone will cause anxiety in other environments. Since I have been using the same tone as my alarm clock since middle school, it makes sense that I would have learned to associate anxiety to this tone since waking up early causes me anxiety. In this article, it explains how a lot of anxiety is learned through classical conditioning as a child. Classical conditioning is a process believed by behaviorists that associates neutral stimuli with an unconditioned stimulus, and when this unconditioned stimulus is aversive, the neutral stimulus becomes unpleasant too. Kendall at Temple University, he describes that classical conditioning, which is very common in psychology, is the reason for this anxiety. Along with this, I want to find out why this sound still gives me anxiety completely out of context in the middle of class. My hypothesis is that our brains learn to associate this tone with anxiety after a long period of time of being paired together. From this experience, I began to question the real reason why this sound brings along such anxiety with it. I began to think, maybe my brain is conditioned to feel this anxiety, associating the sound with having to wake up. In fact, every day I have my educational psychology class a watch alarm goes off that sounds exactly like my morning alarm clock, and instantly I feel a twinge of anxiety and lose all focus. This sound makes me cringe at any time of the day. If I hear this tone go off in the middle of the day, I immediately feel anxious. I dread the sound of my alarm, but not only in the morning. The terrible sound of the alarm clock sounds, and somehow I get out of bed, running on a few hours of sleep and a cup of coffee. As the semester goes on, the sleep deprivation grows more and more and it gets harder every day to wake up for those 8am classes.
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