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homunq comments on Ureshiku Naritai - Less Wrong
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Yes, exactly.
Another way this can work is for the external situation to get bad enough that changing one's habits, however unpleasant, still feels like an improvement over the status quo. I'm told recovering addicts call this "hitting bottom."
In my own case, this happened a couple of years ago when I suffered a stroke... the status quo was no longer remotely tolerable; I had to change my habits (both mental and physical... they aren't cleanly separable).
The end result was a much better baseline mood than I had before the stroke, which still seems an implausible win.
Still, on balance, I suspect that your approach was way better. :-)
I like this way of talking about "hitting bottom"... as if it's just reality doing the priority-setting work for you, but if you were a little smarter, you would have done it for yourself. I have found that thinking of "hitting bottom" as a prerequisite to getting better is SPECTACULARLY counterproductive; but until you said that, I didn't have a compact alternative (besides just not thinking that way, which works about as well as not thinking of bears).