My sense is that the core issue with people who actually think this way is that they lack empathy. They assume that their context is shared by everyone. So if one simple trick worked for them, it surely must work for everyone else.
When someone tells me they can't do something the problem isn't usually that they can't, but that they don't want to. In particular I like to apply it to acts for reducing one's environmental footprint:
- Want to become a vegetarian? Just stop eating meat.
- Want to switch to a more environmentally friendly mode of transportation? Just stop using your car. Or just stop putting gas in it so you won't even be able to use it.
- Want to reduce your consumption? Just stop buying useless stuff.
And whenever I say things like that, I agree it looks like I'm lacking empathy, because they focus on the action. But the real challenge is the "want to" part. Because once you want to, you can often just do it. And if willpower is lacking, that just means you don't want to enough.
Of course you can then take my logic and apply to everywhere it doesn't, like telling me that won't help a blind person to see again. That's beside the point.
But I guess if trying to sleep helped someone get to sleep… awesome!
It's underrated.
That's all the author had to do to keep this post from being a complete eyesore. But frankly, an eyesore is wishful thinking when you consider that some could actually end up trying this for weeks, failing, and getting epicly discouraged.
Though in all likelihood it won't matter either way as the two kinds of people in today's Internet are those that trust everything they read, and those who fall out of the gene pool.