I don't think this technique is at its best for something where doing it once is a disaster, like gay sex for Baptist ministers.

I'm saying that your "dooming myself to a life of laziness forever" is an artificially created disaster, where none would have existed otherwise. The closeted gay thing was just giving an example of how (as I said), "For certain personality types, creating this sort of bargain is dangerous."

IOW, using your "doom" model, if a person swears not to eat cookies for a month, and then fails to do so, they will now consider themselves doomed forever. That's the kind of failure mode I'm talking about.