If I ask the question: what time do you get up in the morning? I will get a number of answers, ranging from 4 AM till 11 AM and everything in between. The early risers will advocate their cause and the late risers will give their reasons. However, what I won't hear is people telling me that they woke up when the sunlight came through their window or when they heard the birds chirping. Why is that? has the sun stopped rising or the birds stopped chirping? No, actually it's because we've stopped listening to and seeing them. In fact, more people wake up to the sound of an alarm clock than a body clock.

What does this tell you? It tells you that your brain is a brilliant device that can be configured to listen to an external influence even while asleep. It goes without saying that it can be influenced by things that it sees and hears while awake. We've already become prisoners to the clock but we don't believe it, because we tell ourselves that the clock is a form of discipline and being repetitive is good behavior and augurs well for discipline. We've become willing prisoners to the visible clock. However, there is a more sinister device out there, its The Invisible Clock. It feeds us stimulus in a way that we don't realize we're being fed. It shows us things that force us to think, but it chooses the direction of thought and even nudges us along the path. It shows us images and video that drive all sorts of emotions from happiness, sadness, anger, jealousy, generosity and everything in between.

The alarm clock has a simple task of waking us up in the morning and once we're awake, the clock goes to sleep till the next morning. It doesn't know how our day has been and doesn't decide whether it should wake us up earlier or later the next day. The Invisible clock on the other hand knows how our day has been and knows whether we should be woken up earlier or later. Disturbingly, it has increasingly become more powerful and has begun to determine how our day should be. It does it in subtle ways, ways in which we don't realize we are being influenced. Our brain being the brilliant device that it is absorbs these influences as help and willingly takes action as it deems fit without realizing that the action we take is being determined by the influencers.

The influencers of course wield real power in that they can control what people think and influence outcomes. At a small scale, these outcomes seem helpful to the individual but at a macro scale, these are used to determine public opinion, determine government policies, drive divisions into communities, choose presidents and prime ministers.

The Invisible Clock has many names. Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more. Do you have it in you to disconnect and refuse to be influenced? A simple first step may be to simply turn off notifications on your phone.

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