Hypothesis: Do this for long enough and eventually you will start feeling noticeably more awake before finishing the count.
The difficulty in this is, of course, ensuring that one actually does get up after finishing the count. In my experience, these kinds of cheap hacks work up until the point where some other impulse just gets too strong (maybe you’re really exhausted), after which the illusion is dispelled because now the “subconscious” knows that you’re trying to “trick it”, and won’t play along in the future.
Disclaimer: Scare quotes used because of loaded terms that I don’t necessarily endorse fully.
It stops working because the trick depends on the credibility of your resolutions; if they lose their credibility they stop working. Breakdown of Will explains why your resolutions need credibility, but in short, at the moment the countdown finishes, your reversed preferences mean that staying in bed seems to carry a higher payoff than getting up, but sticking to the resolution still seems to have a higher payoff than abandoning it because of all the future mornings it will work for. If the resolution doesn’t have credibility, you can’t believe in those future mornings.
Hypothesis: Do this for long enough and eventually you will start feeling noticeably more awake before finishing the count.
The difficulty in this is, of course, ensuring that one actually does get up after finishing the count. In my experience, these kinds of cheap hacks work up until the point where some other impulse just gets too strong (maybe you’re really exhausted), after which the illusion is dispelled because now the “subconscious” knows that you’re trying to “trick it”, and won’t play along in the future.
Disclaimer: Scare quotes used because of loaded terms that I don’t necessarily endorse fully.
It stops working because the trick depends on the credibility of your resolutions; if they lose their credibility they stop working. Breakdown of Will explains why your resolutions need credibility, but in short, at the moment the countdown finishes, your reversed preferences mean that staying in bed seems to carry a higher payoff than getting up, but sticking to the resolution still seems to have a higher payoff than abandoning it because of all the future mornings it will work for. If the resolution doesn’t have credibility, you can’t believe in those future mornings.